January 2022 Transfer Thread

[Prufrock]

Apropos of nowt. Gotta love football forums. Rumour on the Gillingham forum (from a reliable source - doesn't come with a better guarantee than that) was that we pitched £75k for Dempsey and got turned away on Friday...

When DSB posted this yesterday I thought Dempsey was pretty much done but going back I've been skinned by our manager's dodgy syntax,

Evatt:

There’s lots of hard work going on behind the scenes. We’ve agreed a fee and agreed terms with somebody who I believe is here today for his medical, which is going to be good news [this is Morley].

Another one in the building [this, confusingly, I think is still Morley, not Dempsey as I'd assumed], providing everything goes okay, and then we’ve got to work really hard on bringing in two or three more, which we are doing.

There are conversations going on all the time. We are ready to go, but sometimes it becomes more complicated with the Covid scenario and people wanting to hang on to squad members as long as they possibly can.

Some of these players have been playing regularly in these first teams so we’re waiting patiently but there will be a time where we have to make a decision and a call on whether we move on or not.

For now, we have our targets, we are working really hard to bring them in. We know what the squad should look like come the end of January and what it will look like and it’s going to be pretty exciting.

[Bertie Wooster]

Apropos of nowt. Gotta love football forums. Rumour on the Gillingham forum (from a reliable source - doesn't come with a better guarantee than that) was that we pitched £75k for Dempsey and got turned away on Friday...

Press gossip is we put in just over 100k and got told to come back with better, which we did. No idea if they took the second offer.

From the same forum:

There is a story going around. I heard it from a reliable source with connections to the club. It is that Bolton made a derisory bid for Dempsey on Friday, Dempsey wanted to go, but PS said if the met his valuation he could go, but not until. Dempsey warmed up before the Ipswich game then refused to go out or play, causing ructions in the dressing room. This led to the abject performance that followed. I heard that the bid was £75,000, no wonder PS turned it down. and....

The whole point is that he was uninjured and refused to play and that caused the ructions which I was lead to believe included fists.

[Worthy4England]

Aye, that's what I read thanks Bertie

[GhostoftheBok]

The whole point is that he was uninjured and refused to play and that caused the ructions which I was lead to believe included fists.

Sounds like he didn't want to risk getting an injury that would affect his transfer. He's only just back fit.

[Worthy4England]

^^ Boxing? Well known non-injury sport!

[GhostoftheBok]

^^ Boxing? Well known non-injury sport!

Oh, if it was a Bolton captain I'd be going mental. They pay his wages and if he's fit he should play. But from our point of view it should increase our chances of getting him.

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

Top trolling if we replace Sarce (forum-claimed to have had a dressing-room fight) with Dempsey (forum-claimed to have had a dressing-room fight)

[GhostoftheBok]

As another approach to this discussion:

Which of the positions we are known to be targeting should we drop in order to free up the money to sign the level of centre back people want? If that's the most important place to put our money, where shouldn't we be spending it?

[Dave Sutton's barnet]

Jordan Shipley from Coventry being linked to us, never heard of him before just now, but he's been promoted from this level and played a season in the championship, so sounds good to me.

Dynamo of a player. Bit of a shithouse. Interesting link.

Could be a tactic in the Dempsey negotiations (I doubt we’d sign both plus Morley). Or could be a live alternative choice. Or could be one we loan/get fairly cheaply anyway, given his positional flexibility (can play 8/10/11).

January is fun!

Oxford and Shrewsbury the other clubs linked, albeit only by Football League World.

[GhostoftheBok]

Could be a tactic in the Dempsey negotiations (I doubt we’d sign both plus Morley). Or could be a live alternative choice. Or could be one we loan/get fairly cheaply anyway, given his positional flexibility (can play 8/10/11).

January is fun!

January is very fun. I can see this a few ways.

We got knocked back for Dempsey and Shipley is Plan B.
As you say, a negotiating tactic.
All 3 of them with the understanding we are never going to see Tutte in a Wanderers shirt again.
As another "utility" type forward who can compete for the two wide slots, especially with Kachunga crocked.

I have no idea how much money Evatt and Markham have to play with. As I said above, my expectation is we are still making hard calls on where to invest. If we were to get all three then I'd expect Shipley to be viewed as one of the two "forward" options Evatt wants and not a mid, but if a mid then not getting a new CB or experienced GK starts to strain credulity.

Also, if we got all 3 I'd expect Delf to leave.

[GhostoftheBok]

Oh, option 5....Evatt views him as a left back and Worthy loses his fecking mind. I'd pay admission fees to this forum if that were it.

[TANGODANCER]

From what I saw of Fossey attacking the defenders with some gusto, he may work as a wide man up front. He's not afraid to get the ball and doesn't live hand-grenade it when he does. I like this fella.

[Worthy4England]

Oh, option 5....Evatt views him as a left back and Worthy loses his fecking mind. I'd pay admission fees to this forum if that were it.

Can he stop lots of crosses going in?

To answer your other post about where not to place his Yen if he appeased the great unwashed and got a CD, he's not in a great place, as he placed his bets there in the summer. The longer the system doesn't solve our goal leakage, the more the focus will be on the hapless middle three at the back, fairly or unfairly...he was in broadly the same position last year (different positions obvs) and got it right, but that was an exceptional run of results...

I mean, we started 3 at the back and had to add one to make 4...he could always try 5

[GhostoftheBok]

Can he stop lots of crosses going in?

Sorry, I can offer you "will dangle out a leg whilst turning his back"....good enough?

[GhostoftheBok]

he's not in a great place, as he placed his bets there in the summer.

This is the thing. Apparently another striker is essential. Midfielders are essential. Centre backs are essential. An experienced keeper is essential.

Even if people genuinely think we have 20-odd players who can't play in League One, surely there's a degree of realism in how many we can get in if we can't shift some out.

So it seems that people who are saying we are getting the window wrong already should probably tell us what getting it right for the same outlay would look like.

[GhostoftheBok]

Evatt:

We recruited the squad capable of getting out of League Two and at the moment I think we have a competitive 14 or 15 but it really does need layering to add more competitiveness. “When you get the injuries we have it shows the level really drops off and we’re relying on players who are not really ready for the level, especially when it is Bolton Wanderers who want to get out of League One.

This is the squad table I work from. You can decide for yourself who the "competitive 14 or 15" are.

Screenshot 2022-01-13 033122.png (84.26 KiB) Viewed 575 times

[BWFC_Insane]

Evatt:

We recruited the squad capable of getting out of League Two and at the moment I think we have a competitive 14 or 15 but it really does need layering to add more competitiveness. “When you get the injuries we have it shows the level really drops off and we’re relying on players who are not really ready for the level, especially when it is Bolton Wanderers who want to get out of League One.

This is the squad table I work from. You can decide for yourself who the "competitive 14 or 15" are.

Screenshot 2022-01-13 033122.png

Why didn’t he say in the summer that we were a work in progress instead of saying we had all our top targets and promotion was the aim?

Followed up with months of telling us we were superb and didn’t need any other players. Culminating in the ‘best side in the league’ embarrassment.

Obviously Evatt vastly underestimated league one or singed badly. I can live with either but can he stop this cycle of ballooning unnecessarily at the start of a season and just waiting to see how things look?

[GhostoftheBok]

Why didn’t he say in the summer that we were a work in progress instead of saying we had all our top targets and promotion was the aim?

Followed up with months of telling us we were superb and didn’t need any other players. Culminating in the ‘best side in the league’ embarrassment.

Obviously Evatt vastly underestimated league one or singed badly. I can live with either but can he stop this cycle of ballooning unnecessarily at the start of a season and just waiting to see how things look?

Thing is, he did say this in the summer and he didn't say we were the best team in the league in the way people like to make out.

Evatt:

People will say that’s arrogance, that’s overconfidence. But on performances I believe we’re the best team in the league. We should have won all those games.

The key parts there are "on performances" and "We should have won all those games."

In the summer Evatt said his squad still needed layering, he's used that exact word numerous times. He said we were the best team in the league on performances, not in terms of his 20-25 players available.

I still think he was talking bollocks, but marginally less bollocks than people make out.

[Worthy4England]

People on the other hand, will make their own minds up, ignoring any nuance

And in fairness, I think his arrogance/overconfidence lead in, acknowledges that they might...

On performances, by any appropriate metric that'll count when the season is run, we're currently 18th...

[GhostoftheBok]

People on the other hand, will make their own minds up, ignoring any nuance

And in fairness, I think his arrogance/overconfidence lead in, acknowledges that they might...

On performances, by any appropriate metric that'll count when the season is run, we're currently 18th...

All true.

The issue is whether Evatt believed at one stage that he had some world-beating squad and has suddenly realised he hasn't. I think that's fairly clearly not the case. If it were the case the Sarce situation makes no sense. How can you think your captain is both some blinding player and unworthy of a new deal? In that case he clearly rated one of his key players less highly than some of his critics. We tried hard to get a new striker in the summer - why, if Doyle, Baka and Kachunga were the best forwards around? He's cocky rather than delusional.

I think, were we not in the "Sarce has gone and everyone is crocked" situation we'd be seeing maybe 3 or 4 in, rather than a potential flood of new signings - but we'd still be looking to improve the quality in the side and will have been planning to for some time.

I'm also hoping that some of these lads we are getting now were intended as Championship signings for the summer by our overwhelmingly overconfident overlord.