CBs don't really start coming in to their prime until about 24. Wilmot is 19. By the time he's 24 then Dawson will be 34 - and he already seems to play like he's creaking a bit. If anything it seems a bit short-sighted, rather than a sensible "long game" strategy.
You’re giving a club that hasn’t promoted one U23 for regular football far too much credit in my opinion. There is nothing to suggest that the vast majority of players signed for the U23 squad this season have been bought with anything other than bolstering the youth squads numbers. We hardly took them from clubs that wanted them as the vast majority had been released. I would bet that in 2/3 years, there is not one defender currently playing in the u23’s who has even made his debut, let alone be considered for regular football.
Comedy gold , lost to the wind like that tumble weed . Van Gogh suffered a similar fate by only achieving appreciation post hoc . ****ed if I’m cutting my ear off for you ****s though .
We need to bin off this absolute clown in January. No messing around, no letting him linger, undo the mistake and ship him off to a bottom half Championship side on loan at least. He is a top 3 worst signing since Ellington and needs to be ****ed off sharpish.
The whole defence looks better in a back five, I'm guessing it's a safety in numbers thing. It's ridiculous that we can't play a back four though because our full backs have horrendous positional awareness and our centre backs get picked off because they are painfully slow. New defenders are still needed in January but I fear the club might wait if Quique is still getting clean sheets with the back five. We could probably get away with a couple of athletic full backs who can actually defend in January and spend big on centre backs in the summer.
No, they mostly played 4 at the back in the season they got relegated, with Dawson playing about half his matches at CB, and the other half at RB. I suggested when he signed that given his lack of pace he could be more suited to how deep West Brom used to defend, and we're definitely sitting deeper again now under QSF than we did under Javi. Of course having more defenders around him also just helps to cover up his general incompetence and prevents him being exposed.
He's not a world beater nor a long term answer, but he's better than we were seeing in his initial appearances. He should be good enough for us to limp through the season with. Our main problem at this point is our lack of goals. The defence has proven it can keep clean sheets now, but it means sod all of we don't score in the games we concede 0 in. I'm not optimistic about that under QSF.
I wonder how much his wages are compared to the free agent Gary Cahill (who has had a solid start at Palarse - who are currently 9th, 15 points and 14 goals against). Presumably the recruitment process includes a comparative analyst of alternatives available.
He's only good enough for a back three when we sit fairly deep. Having to play in such a way to prevent us conceding goals due to crap personnel limits how we're able to set up the team - QSF has stated as much in interviews.
I have to admit I wasn't convinced Cahill would have been a good signing, but he's been proving me wrong. Kudos to @Burnsy as well for calling for him to be signed in the summer.
I'm not sure the defence has quite "proven" they can keep clean sheets on any sort regular basis whatsoever yet. We conceded in the very next game after both of our recent clean sheets, and we've conceded 4 in the past two games if we count the league cup. We also could quite easily have conceded 5 or 6 on Saturday if Foster hadn't been at it.
Defensively we've been far better in the past 6 weeks. Not brilliant by any stretch but far better. If we had an effective forward line we'd be reaping the rewards of that.
Likewise I didn't think he would be great. Rumoured to be on £75k a week, I'd imagine Dawson is on circa £30k a week...and therein lies the decision making policy it seems.
But when you factor in Dawsons transfer fee. £4 million i think, even if you gave Cahill a £2 million signing on fee, the total spend over 3 years is the same or less. I expect all our players are on lower wages but longer contracts to spread out the cash flow.
So he's been acceptable in the past couple of games - still doesn't mean he wasn't a completely terrible signing. We are having to play 3 centre backs to compensate for the fact that we don't have 2 decent, Premier League standard ones. We have poor choices at wing back to boot, so our whole defensive strategy has had to, by necessity, be based around purely packing numbers behind the ball. Even then, as we saw for both Chelsea goals, our defenders are of such low quality, that they will frequently make mistakes, ball watch and allow attackers to have goal scoring opportunities. If not for Foster, we could comfortably have conceded 6 on Saturday. We needed to upgrade in defence, not sign someone who was in the middle of our already low quality order of defenders. I'd rank Dawson as slightly worse than Kabasele and Cathcart, worse than Prodl, but with better fitness prospects and better than Mariappa. Frankly, I'd rather we'd kept Britos to fill that middle order place. It is reflected in our attacking options, where we have Gray. People saying "Oh Gray can't play that role so it's not fair to judge him when he's up front on his own." Well he bloody well should be able to do some of the basics required to win the ball, hold it up, pass to team mates etc. Unfortunately we have no decent strikers capable of playing a full no. 9 role, so again, we're forced to play 2 up top. This means in an 11 man side, we frequently have to deploy 5 players to do the job of 3. Is it any wonder we're ****?
The lad who was on the bench at Everton (can't remember his name) is apparently very good at holding the ball up and has an excellent touch. We could do worse than give him a go because a bowl of dog food would have contributed more than Gray did against Chelsea
Chappie would eat Dawson for breakfast. Recently got my dog on Chappie and have to say he has perked up so much, Chappie smells quite nice too.
Whilst we're on the topic of dog food, when I had a Saturday job at Pets at Home as a teenager, you'd be amazed by how many customers would let their dogs **** on the floor in store and just walk out and leave it there.
My wife works in a supermarket and you'd be surprised how many times a year a customer takes a **** on the shop floor and walks out leaving it there. Seriously.