Palace in for Demarai Gray. If they get him, surely they won't be darkening our door with any Sarr bid?
Cllr Murray in "Heroes and Villians " OFAH? That was on last night,so almost certain to sign for CP. "Tis written.
Especially given the amount of players and teams who blatently set out to hack him. Janmaat would be a shattered pile of glass if he'd received similar treatment.
Not directly, of course not. Indirectly though, the money spent on him could/should have been spent across 2 or 3 decent £10m-£15m players instead who surely would have contributed more towards survival...plenty of people said as much at the time of buying Sarr. Ecstatic to have him but was it sensible? All fantastic in hindsight though admittedly - as I highly doubt our recruitment team would have been capable of buying the correct 2 or 3 players anyway and we'd probably just have 3 more high-earning under-achievers on our books now or given away in the summer.
Not the player himself. But the opportunity cost of his fee verse other reinforcements may have been a contributory factor of course.
No way would we have signed anyone other than Craig Dawson at CB, and no hope in hell would we have signed another striker to replace Deeney
I can' remember which player said this last season in an interview but whoever it was stated that Sarrs fitness levels are unreal.
Yep, not much was made by the media of the "challenge" at the time, but even as you saw it in real time it was clearly premeditated and dangerous as it was a pure lottery how GD would land. Unfortunately for us, his leg landed the way it did.
Not sure we'd have been able to get anime for 10-15m of real premier League quality. We needed a striker and would have cost us at least 20m
Perhaps the club were hoping (mistakenly) to get by for one season without signing a striker. Then they might have been expecting that Luis Suarez would arrive and solve the striking problem (if Watford had managed to stay in the Premier League). Suarez did not play in La Liga at the start of this season, but he now seems to be scoring regularly for Granada (2 goals in the Europa Cup and 5 goals in La Liga).
Perhaps. Although, with prudent recruitment, we probably could have got Toney for £3m-£5m last January...along with more game time for Joao Pedro and Welbeck than we gave them. West Ham got Soucek for less than £10m. Brighton got Maupay for £20m. They got Lamptey for less than £5m. It could have been done.
Have no doubt that the plan was to bring Cucho, Suarez and Estupinan into the squad and refresh it this season. That's about £30m of young talent already on our books so could've taken a pragmatic view on moving some of the older players on. We could've had attacking options of Cucho, Suarez, Sarr, Deulofeu, kept Deeney around for one more year. We'd have had Estupinan as an attacking left back, could've let Doucouré go and brought in a replacement as our big summer signing. Obviously we wouldn't have fixed the centre back issue but still... Instead they let us sleepwalk into relegation, sold off these promising young players on the cheap as they didn't want to play in the second tier and kept us with ageing players we can't get rid of. It was all so unavoidable but the club made a succession of terrible decisions each compounding the previous one.
And but for 2 major player errors, such as Deeney’s missed penalty vs Spuds & Mapp’s brain-fart og at Brighton, and/or various VAR fiascos being correctly handled, they would’ve got away with it. Whilst I accept ‘getting away with it’ was always too big a risk to take.
https://www.watfordobserver.co.uk/s...-claims-player-nearly-left-watford-liverpool/ Looks like zinckernagel was supposed to be sarrs replacement after all
Haha looks like Sarr was ready to go but Liverpool couldn’t stump up the £35 million. I really get the feeling we are in dire financial straits. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I suspect Suarez would have looked to move on, IIRC he has family links with Granada, and as a Europa League team they would probably a more attractive proposition than us in the Prem anyway. Besides, is the Segunda the best proving ground for the Prem anyway? Estupinan I don't believe intended to play for us neither, though obviously if we'd have stayed in the Prem it would have given us more bargaining power
Wait, Liverpool agreed to pay the £35m? Hope they can still be arsed to stump that money up in the summer, would go a long way to keeping us afloat
The key to any type of revival for us in the near future revolves around selling Sarr for a big amount, getting Deeney & Gray wages off the books and re-investing in a mix of quality English talent and some Pozzo gems. I think Hughes will leave too when we don’t go up and maybe even Pedro & Chalobah which would leave us really ****ed but hopefully we can keep hold of them and build a strong team for next season. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Sarr and Hughes are off if we don't go up, hopefully we can get about £45m or so for the both of them (£35m for Sarr and £10m for Hughes, not exactly peak value for either of them, but there's no way we get that now). Deeney is supposedly out of contract in the summer, surely, SURELY we don't extend his deal, I think the best case scenario for Gray is to hope that a Derby-type club (if they stay up) take him off our hands on loan, but I wouldn't bank on that at all. Hopefully then we can keep a hold of the likes of Sema, JP and Sierralta (would anyone else really be attracting much interest?), Chalobah is a weird one, doesn't have too many fans on here, and not without reason, but does a job, and even his detractors can realise that a midfield without Hughes and Chalobah is beginning to look very bare indeed... It's painfully clear now that we can't play the Championship on easy mode with an unlimited amount of sexy Udinese and Granada reserves, although for some reason, we do seem to be an attractive prospect for young players, we just need to make sure they're more JP and Ngakia rather than Success and Penaranda...
How many times have we seen this story now? I'm sick of hearing about this sour faced teat. The sooner he goes the better, then we can draw a line under the Premier league era and erase the final illusions of grandeur. It's time to get ourselves comfortable for a long stay in the chumpionship folks, watching limited players finish mid table. The likes of Sarr are none of our business.
In theory yes, but by the time we've managed to get Foster, Deeney, Gray, Hughes, Cleverley, Kaba, Success, Cathcart and Chalobah's wages off the bill, we won't have any cash at all. Add to that... Brexit. None of the players we brought in for loan/free 10 years ago would qualify for a permit. Any Sarr money would be to pay off debts, not reinvest I'm afraid. The Pozzo model is no longer viable.
He will go in the summer and he’ll get a meh from me. Perhaps at Liverpool with better players around him he will shine, but he hasn’t come even close to justifying the money spent on him, nor the money that wasn't instead spent on defenders, nor selling Suarez and Estupinan instead this summer.
Vydra, Abdi, Ighalo, Forestieri etc all key to our precious promotions at some point. I know it’s hard to fathom and I dislike them as much as anyone right now but they did know what they were doing at one point! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
They did in Diego Jota. I think there was some concern that his knee injury would be long term but it isn't going to be.
This latest fairy story is just agent speak. The fact is there was no offer in for Sarr from any club this last window. Agent even states it. A complete non story.
