I think it’s important to have a core of good players we own

But I’m not against supplementing with players on loan that wouldn’t otherwise be available to us.

Logically, would anyone say signing skipp on loan was a bad thing even though we couldn’t keep him? I’d say no, but failure to replace him at all was a big failing.

My opinion though is that to make Farke ball work we needed to consistently sign budget players that turned out to be £20m+ superstars. An established DCM that is sufficiently good on the ball to be the link that farke wanted between attack and defence at all times is £25m plus. Same as skipp would be. Smith will want players with a good all round game of course, but the priority is going to be different with less (not none of course) emphasis given to ability on the ball.

I don’t think we’ll be ruling out players on loan that won’t sign permanently, but our focus is different generally.

Posted By: SimonOTBC, Jun 7, 17:36:51