So our head scout pushed for Joelinton to be signed apparently and therefore the buck stops with him. Surely wasting the largest amount of money ever at the club on one player is worthy of him falling on his sword? what would he have to do to get sacked? sign Campbell for £30m? persuade Shola to come out of retirement?
Maybe he pushed for him to be signed in a role that he's actually suited to. If Nickson bought into the vision of a new attacking Newcastle United under Bruce then Joelinton may have been a piece of a flowing front 3 with ASM and Miggy. It could work if we ever held onto the ball for more than 2 passes. As the actual game plan appears to be let dubs save us and then boot it up top, then this signing was never going to work. All in all, depends what the plan was in the summer
There's absolutely no "plan" at NUFC. Saw a player who was highly rated by some, the due diligence amounted to "will he come to NUFC?", we then bought him hoping he'd be our Coutinho as in we could double our money in a season. Ashley saying he'd put the money down himself told me it was a bet. £40m at 2/1. But it lost.
Think he was bought as a Perez replacement, which would tally with us looking to sign him around the time Perez agreed to give us an extra 6 months last January. As ever we hamstrung ourself by going on to buy ASM with no true idea how this would work in a team. Bruce takes blame for playing him out of position all season and championing the signing of perma-crock Carroll but, ultimately, our return to the purple player system is sending us to rack and ruin again. When some of our defence goes in the summer it won't be properly replaced and then, especially if Bruce is still at the helm, we'll be relegated
I fully expect that to happen. Maybe if we lose a couple of defenders then we might actually play with 2 up front. Then if we somehow stay up, we can build on a more attacking formation to improve. Lots of ifs, buts and assumptions that we would have a manager capable of building a team and instilling some tactics within it there though
We were never ever ever going to double our money at 40 mill. You have got to be amazing to go north of 50 mill. I'm not the biggest Bruce fan but he has got an unbalanced squad in fwd positions, it seems not at all built by him and its a very difficult problem to resolve. The quality is not there and availability has been a problem all season also.
I'm not saying it was likely but it's a possibility that a really terrible plan was at one point considered
