benno2

Aside from Malouda and Heinze, who we missed out on for reasons other than affordability, does anyone know of a player Rafa wanted in the summer but was denied because it would have made the net spend too big?

You get some weird replies in here. What is that supposed to mean?

That's right, that was exactly my point.

I was less having a go at you than at the scouts. I remember that Vickery article from before he'd played a game for us and pretty much everything he prophesised turned out.

You might be right, be a lot of it sounds like wishful thinking to me. A lot of centre-halves would look good playing those tactics. Getting back to my original point, if a journo like Tim Vickery could spot this, why could 'the best scouts in the world' not see it?

You're thinking of Pellegrino, Paletta was the youngster and star of last season's 6-3 Carling Cup debacle against Arsenal.

I'm not sure I can agree with much of this. For one, how would he gain a better understanding of our defensive systems playing for either River or Boca? Unless you know that they base their systems along pretty much exactly the same lines as ours. Even then he'd be familiarising himself with them with other players. Yes, he'd gain more experience, but of a league he already knows which is much different to our own. I've also got my doubts about the capabilities of a defender that was so often and easily cut out of the game by one bog-standard, long ball. He could tackle it's true, he also looked quite stylish on the ball as long as he wasn't put under too much pressure and he could head the ball, but positionally and from a game reading point of view, he was a long way from being capable. If this were not the case, I doubt he'd have been sold so quickly, especially as we lack cover in this position.

How on earth do you know that they're the best scouts in the world? Would the world's best spotters of talent have recommended signing Gabriel Paletta, for instance? I'm not saying they're no good either, but I wouldn't just blithely give them a title they've almost certainly yet to earn. The chap at Sevilla that has an incredible record at unearthing talent cheaply - from all over the world - probably deserves some sort of accolade in this area. That Wenger fella (who you also don't see at many grounds watching games) and his cohorts don't seem to be too bad at it either. Anyway, you appear to have seen my comment as criticism rather than merely an observation. I'm pretty sure that Rafa sees travelling around grounds as a waste of his valuable time rather than this being any slackness on his part to do this aspect of the job. He does appear to trust his scouts heavily and rightly so. He cannot, after all, be everywhere, both running training at Melwood and watching potential future recruits. From his own words in interviews, he likes to be on the training ground with our players and most of his tactical analysis is done on the basis of watching videos, so please don't take my comments as something they're not.

Agree completely, if we'd had a Pennant standard of player on the left last season and this rather than a combination of Aurelio, Gonzalez, Riise, Zenden, Babel etc. then we'd have been a lot better off.

How do we know that Rafa goes to watch potential targets (apart from when they play against us)? Has anyone ever seen him in the stands at other games? You see plenty of other managers do it either to check up on a player or a team's tactics, but rarely, if ever, Rafa.

Unless Momo takes it.

No way will they be able to do that and still sell 75,000 tickets week in week out.

There's good money and there's rejecting £23m bids for slightly defensively suspect right-backs.

Sanitago is close to Vigo in the North-West of Spain but Rafa's from Madrid.

It's a nice, cushy little number alright, but is he supposed to take his holiday when there's matches on? Four weeks holiday must be great though.

Either that, or he was actually fed untrue bad news which he took in good faith. Seeing today's Echo story about Tevez being the back-up to Torres if that deal falls through, I'll be a lot more confident of my theory if we actually do mysteriously end up signing both.

Does nobody think there's a chance that the club deliberately put out misinformation through channels normally accepted as reliable to dampen the expectations of club's we'd like to buy from? We've all seen what happened when Chelsea steamrollered into the transfer market with a big wad of cash. They had to pay a 50% premium for practically all their top targets. Has this been a clever and concerted ruse by the club to avoid such a scenario? The more I write this, the less plausible it seems ...

What does it matter? It's £20m plus Luis and as such can be whatever either party wants it to be.

Not out of this year's budget though.

http://www.sixcrazyminutes.com/

They signed him as a kid and either sold him to Mallorca and then bought 'half of him' back or only sold half of him in the first place. bbc link

Eto'o?

Champions League football and the fact that he's French?

If they made such a statement, I'd say they were very stupid. That would be handing over never-to-be-won-back trust in a Gerald Ratner-like instant. However, if they said that the old plans for a stadium of fixed capacity were, when inspected in minute detail, terrible, both architecturally and commercially. That the new ones for a larger and further extendable stadium would mean an extra £50m (choose your figure) outlay in the short-term, but one which would more than pay for itself over time and that this had an impact on what our current expenditure could be. That, yes, they had promised funds but had to renege on that promise because of this, bigger and more pressing issue. How would people feel then?

If you were the people that had just taken over and you were in it for the long haul. Would it be wise to pull this trick at the first possible opportunity, thus meaning you'd never be taken seriously again? Just a thought.