If Bony is anywhere near the gaff next season we are doomed. I appreciate he is on a long contract but loan him out pronto then. Perhaps back to the Swans? But to have him taking up a valuable squad place would be madness. Now one proviso. Perhaps Pep has seen something which practically the entire Blue side of Manchester has not and believes he can turn him into a decent footballer!!I think there is a general overestimation on the scale of squad reshaping that will go on this summer. It is very difficult to move players on when they are on big wages so shifting Bony out is unlikely unless we subsidise his wages somewhere and I don’t think we would do that after 18 months of a 5 year deal. Bony will go if we get a decent offer and that puts it at less than 50:50 in my book. We will get some space in the squad if we can work things in our favour with home grown players coming in to replace foreign players. Denayer for Demi would give us the required number of CBs and frees up one space. Yaya out frees up one space but if Nasri stays then he takes that for CL football. Kolarov and Zab might leave but then they need replacing like for like. So in summary I see the strikers being the same next year in all likelihood the change I suspect is Nacho moving ahead of Bony in the pecking order but also possibly putting pressure on the 3 behind the striker.
Too early to judge but you may be right. Kelechi would be more in the mould/class of Martial who I think will be a big player for the rags over the next few seasons. Rashford just might struggle moving forward. Nacho already is far better than Bony and is potentially a 40-50 million man. Will he realise that potential? That is the question which still has to be answered.
Bony might have massively underperformed since joining but he did really well to set up Kelechi's second goal. That type of thing is what I was hoping to see when he joined.
He looked a bit overawed tonight I thought. He didn't react quickly enough to what was going on around him.
That said, he's a class act. There's no reason why he can't be as good as if not better than Sturridge in a couple of years time which'll do me nicely.
Is it just me though or did de Bruyne and Aguero totally ignore him when it came to passing him the ball? Similarly Sterling seemed to choose the wrong option of not passing him the ball, when Iheanacho was better positioned.