I'm sure you are right, but the point is why we have the equally injury prone Nasri as backup for Silva? Why just Bony as a striker? Why Demi is still on the books and why Navas has not been replaced or Toure moved on? Why Mangala was signed at all.
For the amount of money we have spent we have a worrying lack of robust strength in depth to show for it. Not to mention nothing yet to show for the Academy in squad terms bar one player Pellers doesn't trust any way.
So yes, in one sense of course injuries are hitting our chances, but in a wider sense they illustrate a worrying weakness in squad management and transfer policy.
We have spent a shit load of money without really making ourselves any stronger than we were 2 or 3 seasons ago. Part of our problem is that when we spend £30m on a player, we don't actually get a £30m player. Instead we might get a £15m or a £20m player who will still be a good player, but perhaps not as good as his fee should suggest. Take Sterling for example. He's not a £50m player because his overall price is supposed to cover an almost unlimited amount of potential. The actual value of his current ability might only be akin to us signing a £10m player. It sounds harsh but when you look at the quality that other teams have signed for relatively small fees over the last few seasons like Payat, Wijnaldum, Delefeou etc it sort of makes sense.
That aside, I sometimes don't understand our policy. Under a transfer restriction we still spent almost £8m on a 32 year old back up keeper who frankly isn't very good. On top of that he takes up a foreign space. Surely we could have looked at an English keeper or even someone like Zieler at Hanover who is the German number 2/3, counts as British home grown, would only have been in his early 20's and supposedly had a release clause in his contract if around £5m.
We binned off Nastasic even though he didn't do too much wrong. Savic and Boateng have also gone on to be very good players elsewhere. We have loaned out Denayer after supposedly promising him games, and tried to loan out Mangala - a player who cost anywhere between £24m - £42m.
We refused to pay De Jong what he wanted yet wasted about £30m plus God knows what else in signing on fees, wages and agent fees in trying to replace him with Garcia and Fernando. Neither are anywhere near as good as he was.
We also don't and haven't for the last 5 years had the depth of squad which allows us to successfully play the same style of football once injuries strike. Instead we have almost tried to cover almost every feasible playing style within our squad, yet still try and maintain the exact same style of play regardless of which players are available. Opting to play slow possession based football against Europe's elite with players like Lescott, Kolarov, Fernando, Milner etc. All good players but not really suited to that style or football.
We have also known about Kompany's, Aguero's and Silva's physical frailty given they have all missed chunks of a season repeatedly so the fact that we still struggle so much without them suggests that while we have spent a lot of money we haven't really done our job when it comes to squad building.
