Oh I'm certain Ole will be given a new contract. Jose was given a new contract in his second season FFS, when it was already obvious we should have said thanks for the second place finish, but lets part ways in the summer.jason_uk wrote: ↑3 years agoIts the "safe" option.
OGS won't publicly kick up a fuss to Ed or the owners, and "should" continue to get us top 4, which is all the glazers really want.
Saying he should, I wouldn't be so sure he will, and can just as easily see a 7th or 8th place finish next season as compared to a top 4 place.
The club is just so complacent. If Ole gets top 4, fine, they're not going to bother asking if we can do better. Look at the DoF situation, it's the exact same. Woodward keeps saying "our approach to transfers is great now", and he's formalized that by just giving our existing people titles like "DoF" and so on. It's just a name change.
But look at our transfers. It's true we haven't recently had any shockingly crap and massively expensive disasters like Di Maria and Sanchez. But that's not setting the bar that high. Are our transfers actually canny and competitive with other clubs that do transfers well?
Fernandes: our only clearly very successful signing. So that's great. Hardly an obscure find though, and we signed him midseason for some odd reason.
AWB and Maguire: good but not great players, but we paid great player prices for them. They wouldn't necessarily start for a different manager with different tactical priorities, because each has obvious weakness (Maguire's pace, AWB's attacking).
Beek, Telles: not hugely expensive, but apparently Ole has zero use for either of them. So why were they signed? Who made that decision? Not mega-expensive flops like Sanchez, sure, but objectively these are transfer failures.
Amad, Pellistri, James: potential to develop. Amad and Pellistri look promising, James less so. But lots of young players look promising without making it.
Who we know we wanted but failed to get: Haaland, Sancho, Bellingham. No club gets everyone they want, not even City. And I'm not saying we should have paid whatever Dortmund wanted for Sancho. But not getting either Haaland or Bellingham is not a great sign, given Haaland's ties to Ole and Bellingham being English. For all the club's talk about a "cultural reboot" and given youth a chance, even young English players like Bellingham are plainly not convinced.
We also wanted but failed to get that shitehouse midfielder at Newcastle, who turned out not to be even as good as his shitehouse brother who also played for Newcastle. Thank fuck for that.
Then there are the players we've let go who are doing well elsewhere: Lukaku, on his way to the Italian title, and could well be the player of the year in that league. He's obviously a 20+ goal a season striker in a decent setup -- did it at Everton, is doing it at Inter. The weaknesses in his game are clear, but surely with Bruno feeding him he'd have been a huge asset for us. Obviously one of the top strikers in the world at the moment, and obviously better than Martial, Cavani, and Ighalo. Apparently a striker is Ole's priority this summer. Just piss poor. Then there's Lingard, did well under Jose, did well for Ole when he first took over, now doing very well for West Ham. Smalling, doing well for himself in Italy, while our defence is a mess. And apparently another CB is Ole's other priority for the summer.
it's not about any one player, but when you put together the likes of Lukaku, Smalling, Lingard etc., and know that we're now still looking for CBs and strikers, it's hard to trust that our transfer strategy really makes much sense.
We fucked off Lukaku to go with Martial, and Martial hasn't delivered, and is rumoured to want out anyway. Lukaku could even sign for a club like City or Real this summer if they are priced out of the likes of Haaland and Mbappe.
So really the club's argument that we're making progress and on the right track just means that our league points won't be in the 60s like last season, and we haven't made any epically shit transfers like Sanchez recently. Big fucking deal.