Recruitment

[Talldarkandransome]

We signed many players in the summer, it takes time to settle just one player in. We are in a new league with mostly new players. 

If we can stay up this season I think we will learn much more about these new players over the summer and next season.

Any other opinion, whilst valid and welcome just isn't realistic 

Now where's my cat

[TRO]

2 hours ago, MarkLillis said:

Yes VP fans can be supportive, Wes had a fair amount of support for example.

What I would say is when the sh@t is hitting the fan on the pitch and the crowd is restless young players need to be able to look for senior figures on the pitch (or even better..... partners in midfield or defence) to carry them through the tough times.

I can think of at least three games when our young team has been woefully hung out to dry Chelsea away 0-8 Liverpool at home 0-6 and Man City at home 1-6.

I remember the look of fear in Westwood's eyes walking back after one of those goals at Chelsea. What im trying to say is these kids need someone in the trenches with them sand we aren't often good at supplying the right type of player.

Watch Indiana start up front tomorrow and see what happens if it doesn't go to plan for an example.....

good post....good points....but that is what the debate is about.

[TRO]

2 minutes ago, Talldarkandransome said:

We signed many players in the summer, it takes time to settle just one player in. We are in a new league with mostly new players. 

If we can stay up this season I think we will learn much more about these new players over the summer and next season.

Any other opinion, whilst valid and welcome just isn't realistic 

Now where's my cat

I hope you are right.

[Pimlico_Villa]

17 minutes ago, TRO said:

you see, when I started this thread...I was hoping for sensible posts like that....opening up the debate and discussing shortfalls or not, depending on the view.

good points.

ps I felt i had run over someones cat earlier.

 

Ah, legitimate debate is increasingly becoming very difficult on VT. There are too many Happy Clappers with a very delicate and sensitive view of the Club. It’s easier for them just to shut down debate than tolerate it. 

[blandy]

1 hour ago, Five Ken McNaughts said:

Last season, in my opinion, we had 4 stand-out match-winners (Jack, Mings, Abraham, McGinn). This season, I think we've had a maximum of 3.5 in that bracket (Jack, Mings, Heaton and an off-colour McGinn). I'm not writing off any of our new outfield signings, but if just one had been able to take the season by the scruff of the neck and step into that top echelon of influential players, I think our campaign would be looking very different.

That's right, I think, at least the first part - the matchwinners in the sides. The "it would be different if..." part I look at slightly differently, but only a bit - I think we've too many who are inconsistent  - they're pretty much all capable of playing a game well in the Prem, at the necessary standard, but they're hampered by lack of experience, or unfamiliarity with the nature of the football to do it consistently - so Trez, or Ghazi, or Konsa or whoever will play OK one game and then be off the next - so there's too many too inconsistent. It's not that they need to be match-winners, as such, but that they need to be consistently "OK" at Prem levels. Add that to the ones who are consistent - the ones you mention, and we'd be fine. It's been individual poor games, and errors from players that have cost us as a side. All players have off days, but too many of ours do it too regularly through essentially not being used to the pace and intensity of it, and the need to not switch off, even for a moment.

There are lot of talented players in lower leagues, but the thing that stops them being Prem players is the ability to consistently reproduce high levels of performance. It's not skill lacking, or pace, or whatever, in most cases, it's a kind of mentality that they just can't do it so often.

With my "fix" we wouldn't challenge at the top, but we'd be fine. Injuries haven't helped to be fair, too.

This season was always going to be tough, given the circs, and play-off winners always struggle more than perhaps (generally) automatic promoted sides, statistically. I think if we do stay up, then next seaso na number of the players will be much better for the experience of a year in the Prem.

[mikeyp102]

4 hours ago, Delphinho123 said:

 

I’m not sure having our summer signings on long contracts is a good thing.. 

But that’s what you do with younger signings. Could you imagine if Douglas Luiz had been as good as we hoped (Brazilian dm coming from Man City etc) and we’d only put him on a two year contract. There would be uproar. You have to put them on long contracts to protect your assets.

[Kiwivillan]

Trossard mentioned in OP only scored his 3rd goal against us plus 4 assists and cost €16m 

El Ghazi has better returns for cheaper and some people on here say he's not good enough

If Trossard had same amount for us and cost that much would be terrible Suso/Smith signing. 

[mikeyp102]

To put things into perspective, James Justin a lb we were linked to in the summer went to Leicester for a deal that could end up over £12m. He has played 3 times for them. He is a back up option (or one for the future). We paid only slightly more for Targett and he’s our first choice.

[Tomaszk]

3 hours ago, StefanAVFC said:

If it's that easy, why doesn't every PL have a PL standard LB? Or PL standard players across every position?

They don't! Maybe "PL standard" isn't the phrase I need here, more like "the standard they want their new signings to be" - PL standard buys would have been fine for us.

Loads of teams have had a shocker recently with recruitment in the past few years.

I thought this change of club structure bringing in Suso was going to bring us forward with our recruitment. Analytics. Using data as well as eyes as well as recommendations, multiple reports on reports on reports of player profiles. It's why Liverpool are running away with the league and now strengthening from a position of remarkable power, they use these things to the Nth degree. Not using these things well enough is why Utd have shit the bed in the last 5 years and are just horrendous with an expensive squad being paid a fortune.

Even better news is that this field isn't set in stone within an established hierarchy yet. You've got Man Utd, one of the biggest sports teams in the world miles behind Brentford in terms of getting their shit together and planning sensibly according to needs and means. Imagine Brentford with Utd's budget! Or even better, imagine Brentford with our budget....this summer, we wouldn't have ended up with only one striker that cost £22m and wasn't good enough. I had really high hopes for the window and what we've ended up with isn't good enough, cost more than it should and we are now halfway through January going into the latest "biggest game of the season" without a bloody striker. What the hell has gone on?

The story of that agent selling Suso players really rattled me. Has anything changed except instead of a manager buying all the players, it's a different bloke? Not even the head coach of the team! It's hopefully still a work in progress the recruitment team, but we've missed an incredible chance this summer to fill the squad with quality. We'll only ever have a squad churn like that again if we go down to L1/L2 where that happens every other summer.

Very negative viewpoint I've taken there. But I'm sad because I can't see how we're not going to be relegated and lose the best player I've ever seen play for Villa.

And what if we signed another Trez or Wesley at LB? Fans would be yelling 'why didn't we buy someone with PL experience?' or 'Why didn't we spend the money better?'

Another Trez or Wes at LB would have been a disaster, they'd have still been better than Neil Taylor though, so that's something.

I wouldn't have been saying PL experience, some fans would yes. I'd have probably just moaned why didn't we sign a good player. The three players I mentioned earlier are probably all available next summer if they don't move in January.

Targett made a hell of a lot of sense as a signing. PL experience, young, has talent. Is a contrast to the likes of Wesley, Trez who didn't have the PL experience.

Yes he did make sense. We were signing a lot of foreign players and it's probably not ideal to flood your squad with a load of people who don't know each other and might not be able to speak the same language.

Go and look at the first few pages of the Targett thread. A lot of people are saying the same thing. "That's expensive". And it was. The line from Sam Wallace is actually £14-17m, I'd forgot that, come on that's far too much. If a player costs that much, I'm going to be harsher on the overall deal.

If you buy a new "100% starting player", it shouldn't be something you're look at six months later and thinking well now we need another one that hasn't worked. That's crap. That's how it feels with Targett but he has been injured a bit which has slowed him down.

Hause for £3m, yes please! Plenty of holes in his game, but he does a job, does some things well, and was cheap so there's less onus on him to be perfect because he was a small outlay, money was put elsewhere to strengthen the overall squad.

Guilbert £5m! Amazing. A Premier League standard player who cost £5m. What a treat. This is the bullseye you're essentially searching for with every signing. If you make more signings like this than not, when you come to your key target or position, you've got room to splash out and secure than striker or keeper or centre half.

Wesley £22m. No. No, no, no. No. If Wes was £4m the signing would have made much more sense.

I think this 3-4-3 will suit Targett. really well. I expect some big performances from him if he can stay fit.

Just because it hasn't 100% worked out doesn't mean it wasn't a logical signing at the time.

I agree.

I just feel it's very easy to criticise or praise any signing in hindsight. People are criticising the Targett and Trez signing when both are totally different in terms of logic.

With hindsight yes, it is easy.

There would probably be no questions if all the players were good players, money only comes into it when you have players like Targett costing so much it leaves us with holes in the squad because we've run of money to buy other positions with. Thus, the advantage comes when you widen your net and save money.

My general opinion is centred around what I said above about the overall picture of signings for us. I thought we'd made moves to jump back ahead of the field in terms of recruitment. I now worry we've just got a guy who is mates with agents buying all our players

Lot of questions there. My reply grew into a monster.

[Laughable Chimp]

3 minutes ago, mikeyp102 said:

To put things into perspective, James Justin a lb we were linked to in the summer went to Leicester for a deal that could end up over £12m. He has played 3 times for them. He is a back up option (or one for the future). We paid only slightly more for Targett and he’s our first choice.

Targett is 24, James Justin is 21. One was bought to be a first team left back, the other was bought to be groomed for the future.

You can't really compare the price tags of players who are bought for their current ability and players who are bought for their potential. Its apples to oranges.

[markavfc40]

Aside from Norwich (promoted last season) and Brighton who have been back in the top flight for 3 years the rest of the sides in and around the relegation places with us have been in the Premier League for 5+ years. If our recruitment hasn't been up to scratch then you'd think those clubs with the money and time they have had to build squads must have some right incompetent fools responsible for recruitment. They probably don't though. They have just found that they are competing with 19 other clubs in a very tough league and are coming off worse than the majority at the moment.

The job we faced over the summer was tougher than any other club in this league. We didn't know we would be competing in the Premier League until May 27th. We then faced the task of replacing at least a dozen players that were either over the hill, not ours, or simply never going to be good enough to take the step up. We were in no way prepared for Premier League football and had two and half months to get ready when we we got promoted.

The club, rightly in my opinion, decided to transition from being a squad predominately made up of aging players with their best years behind them to being one predominately containing players with ability, potential to improve and their best years ahead of them. The fact we needed so many players also meant we were not in a position to buy quantity and proven quality we had to go for quantity and in the main players with promise.

When you do what we did regardless of how much scouting you do you need a certain amount of luck in having enough of your players that quickly hit the ground running and won't need too much time to adjust to new team mates, coaching set up, and in many cases a new league and/or country. We had a lot of things that needed to come together and we needed them to come together quickly enough to keep us up.  It was a tough ask and so it is proving. I am still hopeful though we will have enough about us to stay up and as I and others have already alluded to I think if we do many of these players will be stronger for having come through this season and we'll be better for it going forward.

Edited January 20, 2020 by markavfc40

[Dale]

4 hours ago, Delphinho123 said:

El Ghazi had 3/4 good games for us in the championship. That lad seems to get away with murder based on the fact he ‘has potential’. 

Really don’t see it with him. Think he’s bang average with the occasional good performance every 8 matches. 

And he's already had 3/4 good games for us in the premier league. He's scored, he's assisted. He's actually a good player who if we can get him to believe in himself is a lot better than most of the others at the club. 

[Delphinho123]

39 minutes ago, Kiwivillan said:

Trossard mentioned in OP only scored his 3rd goal against us plus 4 assists and cost €16m 

El Ghazi has better returns for cheaper and some people on here say he's not good enough

If Trossard had same amount for us and cost that much would be terrible Suso/Smith signing. 

Again, you’re looking at the stats too much. You need to watch the games more Kiwi. AEG has been woeful in 80% of the games he’s played this season. 

[Dale]

1 hour ago, BigJim said:

IIRC these players had a better reputation when we signed them than most of those we signed in the summer - i.e. a bit less of a risk. And with the exception of Veretout I though they did quite well for us.

I don't think I'd heard of any of them. Amavi had the biggest profile of the lot. They're all good players. They were players who needed time and someone better than Tim Sherwood (but that's not for here) 

[cheltenham_villa]

1 hour ago, Talldarkandransome said:

We signed many players in the summer, it takes time to settle just one player in. We are in a new league with mostly new players. 

If we can stay up this season I think we will learn much more about these new players over the summer and next season.

Any other opinion, whilst valid and welcome just isn't realistic 

Now where's my cat

This is so true, McGinn even commented on it in his first season, he said hed spent 6 months just trying to understand where to pass the ball, the runs his team mates would make, etc

[Kiwivillan]

23 minutes ago, Delphinho123 said:

Again, you’re looking at the stats too much. You need to watch the games more Kiwi. AEG has been woeful in 80% of the games he’s played this season. 

What about Trossard at Brighton who OP mentioned 

Who do you think is not shit in our team. I know it's a short list. Can I have it for future reference

Edited January 20, 2020 by Kiwivillan

[Rob182]

4 hours ago, TRO said:

sorry for the humour.....but I have to take it too.

We took Mings on loan and due to his superb form and obvious impact on the team and the permanent signing was obvious to me....sure we got had over a barrel due to the fee, but that has proved good vision.

Forgive me for my unattentive focus on him being a full back, and my full focus on him being a centre back, I was blinded to the fact.....and I can think of many other fans were too.

Maybe we will chalk that one down as an inspired signing then.

apologies to Doris the Tea Lady.

 

Shocker: TRO moves the goalposts again 

You started this thread about our recruitment, or lack of good talent spots. I said: “No one wanted Mings when we loaned him”

You’ve said it was an obvious signing, backing it up by saying that it was obvious in the summer. Even Doris the Tea Lady could see I was talking about the initial decision to loan him last January TRO!

Do our recruitment team not get any credit for spotting Mings as the solution to our defensive problems? Not only was he unwanted and undervalued at Bournemouth, but seemingly he was over his injury problems (which, perhaps his parent club at the time didn’t believe), and he not only gave us great defensive solidity, but also organisation and leadership.

That’s a GARGANTUAN list of positives as long as Jeremy Beadle’s hand was small, that our recruitment team should be credited with when looking for a centreback! Don’t you think?

[Kiwivillan]

Benteke was a terrible signing for some this time of year in his debut season. 6 goals. Then he clicked  or the team did, or both and he scored another 13 more by season end. 

Edited January 20, 2020 by Kiwivillan

[Rightdm00]

1 hour ago, mikeyp102 said:

To put things into perspective, James Justin a lb we were linked to in the summer went to Leicester for a deal that could end up over £12m. He has played 3 times for them. He is a back up option (or one for the future). We paid only slightly more for Targett and he’s our first choice.

Che Adams is another one.  Cost Southampton 15 million and hasn't scored a goal yet. He is mostly making sub appearances after an early run of starts didn't go that well.  Same age as Wesley. 

Given that Southampton has 2 senior strikers in Long and Ings he has little pressure to perform and can take his time bedding into the premier league.  We weren't able to have that same luxury. It's been a trail by fire for most of our young guys and I think in future seasons they will be better for it. 

[Delphinho123]

54 minutes ago, Kiwivillan said:

What about Trossard at Brighton who OP mentioned 

Who do you think is not shit in our team. I know it's a short list. Can I have it for future reference

Heaton, McGinn, Mings, Guilbert, Engels, Grealish. 

I think Konsa will be decent as well. The rest aren’t good enough at the moment for this league. 

FWIW, I think Mcginn, Grealish and Mings walk into most teams in the league. The latter two would get into every team in the league. Outstanding individuals.