Lucky Toma said:
It's an awful lot of money to pay for a player of his age with little resale value and others have pointed out elsewhere that perhaps there were other options around.
But the fact is that Fernandinho is EXACTLY the type of player we needed and lacked last season.
I know he split Blues but it's no coincidence that we won the league with De Jong and fell behind without him. He was an energetic destructive force sitting in front of our back-line that gave us necessary protection. From the very start last term it was disconcerting how often Komps etc were exposed and pulled (out of necessity) out of position.
As much as I loved him though NDJ had his flaws - he was perhaps too ABC. Fernandinho is from a similar mould yet has far superior technique. In short then, the perfect player for what we needed to dramatically improve. So what price for that? Added to that his experience and the fact that he's played for nearly a decade in Ukraine so he's hardly going to be hiding on the proverbial wet Tuesday in Stoke so that minimises the risk of him not settling and I'm well made up with the signing.
The way he quietly bossed the midfield on Mon offered me great encouragement. No fuss a la De Jong and once he's got to know the movement around him there will be far better link-up play.
With the triangle of him, Yaya, and Kompany no-one will get an easy ride and where do they go from there?....to the left there's Nasty and put the ball anywhere near Zaba and he'll snap and harry the shit out of you.
I don't think we should worry about resale value, particularly with a 28 year old. With any luck he'll finish his career as a top player with us, not unlike Tevez or Rooney if Chelsea get him. The money as well. To get him we had to pay over the odds, not unlike Cavani and Falcao etc... We needed him. As long as he becomes the player expected the price is irrelovent to me. It's only a problem when they don't live up to expectations and I've been conviced he will from the get go.
As for the NDJ argument going on. I agree that keeping him wouldn't have changed our league position or our CL performances. While he is a better option than Garcia or Barry that wasn't the reason we lost the league. What it would have done is saved us 10m plus wages on Garcia. If we had kept NDJ and he left this summer he'd have been seamlessly replaced by Fernandinho. Unfortunatly we bought a replacement for NDJ, then had to buy a replacement for his replacement(Garcia) the next season.
