Chick Counterfly said:
Of course it's wild speculation. I don't think Cook and Marwood are incompetent, but there are things about the situation that bother me.
The club appears to be run by committee. We're intransigent, inflexible, slow to react, still overpaying and too keen on established names.
Last summer we signed:
Balotelli (27 million + 120k p/w)
Silva (24 million + 120 p/w)
Kolarov (19 million + 90 p/w)
Yaya (27 million + 200 p/w)
Milner (16 million (p/e) + 90 p/w)
Boateng (10.5 million + 75 p/w)
In January:
Dzeko (27 million + 120 p/w)
So my question is - which of these signing for you seem to be part of an inflexible, intransigent, inflated etc system? (figures are of course based on reported figures)
I agree that the club is run by committee but this is simply an immovable reality. I don't believe there will ever be a time where Khaldoun will rely solely on the manager before making technical decisions.
To be clear I don't disagree that mistakes were made during Hughes' time in charge. This is born out in the fact that the players we signed back then are the ones we are struggling to shift. However Marwood's introduction was a reaction to this rather than the catalyst for this.
If the blame for all that lies with Khaldoon then so be it, the guy scrubs up well and gives a fantastic interview, but he's in charge of the whole shebang, and mistakes have been made. My gut feeling however is things a little further down the chain might not be ideal. Cook is clever, and has done well to modernise the image of the club, but the suspicion, that his vision of the club interferes with the optimal management at squad and team level, has never gone away.
The problem is you have no idea what Cook's vision of the club is beyond what the club tell us. I guess the implication you're making is that he sees big name 'marquee' players as integral to the vision, which isn't necessarily taking into account what the manager actually thinks or wants. However the facts simply don't bare this out. Balotelli, Silva, Yaya, Kolarov, Milner etc. I don't see a marquee name in there. I see a group of players who the manager would benefit from, and in some cases, the manager would know more about than Cook and Marwood. So I don't see where this suspicion you have comes from...
There's no speculating about the part IMO. Khaldoun runs the show. He approves targets, budgets, etc. which means that the buck stops with him, including the deals done during Hughes' time in charge.
It's just my opinion, but I'd say that the players bought post Hughes, for the most part, have been much better value for money.
I couldn't give a damn about Mancini, really. Sink or swim time for him. But what bothers me is that, if we fail, then the tendency is to blame it all upon that one guy. If that happens, I'll be distraught, not for the thought of poor Mancini the multimillionaire serial medal collector bit of a bastard handsome devil... but because the larger problems will remain. I can see the track record of others is pretty lacklustre, I can see why Mancini would draw attention to this.
If Mancini fails, it will not be for want of a squad with the requisite quality.
I was proud of that, because as I made it, I realised it was absolutely true in the case of Nasri (who, for what it's worth, has never convinced me in the centre of the park).
The worrying thing about what that implies, is that Mancini is either a) having a player imposed on him, or, b) you're a better judge of a player than our entire technical staff combined.
