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You make a fair point about Kone not scoring heavily (yet!), but for me he looks more dangerous in the box than Dykes, Armstrong, or Kelman all of whom have been sold fairly recently.
If you want to look at numbers then Kone and Burrell have 15 between them this season. Kelman (4), Armstrong (3), and Dykes (2) have 9 between them.
But the player development/trading model isn't just about spotting and developing talent. You also have to be a tough negotiator when it comes to horse trading.
Charlton fans were laughing at us when we paid over the odds for Macauley Bonne. We were the ones laughing when Bristol City gave us £2.5m for Sinclair Armstrong.
In total the Dykes, Armstrong, and Kelman sales are reported to have brought in something like £6.5m + add ons.
If Lee and Les were still running things would we have pulled in £6.5m+ for those three? I'm not so sure.
Nourry appears to drive a hard bargain. If he can continue that trend then his tenure here might work out well after all. We shall see.
PS - in other news our old favourite Lyndon Dykes is being linked with Ipswich and Charlton. It might be interesting to see how effective him and Kelman could be as a pair up front at this level.
We've sold Armstrong and Kelman for a profit in the last 18 months or so and replaced them with Kone and Burrell who certainly look like upgrades.
But it's a lengthy process and a difficult trick to keep pulling off. It took Brentford several years of steady progress before they were in a position to trade in players like Watkins and Toney.
I agree with you, although you might have slightly missed my point.
When Brentford signed Watkins he was a 22 year-old with 21 goals in L2 for Exeter.
When they sold Watkins they replaced him with Toney who was a 24 year-old with 40 goals in L1 for Peterborough.
So yes to reinvesting some of what you've brought in from sales, but also look to bring in incrementally better talent as you go, if you want to move forward. Otherwise you will keep going back to square 1.
"Would it not be better to look for ‘the next Ronnie Edwards’, as Millwall did paying £1m each for Crama and Tanganga, both of whom are quickly going to be shifted for huge profit, than going in all hot and heavy for the actual thing because he had a good loan spell?"
I guess the answer to this is to look at the Brentford example.
When they cashed in on players they reinvested in progressively better talent. When they sold Ollie Watkins in 2020 they replaced him with Ivan Toney. (Admittedly for a fraction of the Watkins fee!)
If you really want to progress up the league you can't keep going for promising youngsters who might come good. At some point you have to take a punt on proven talent.
(BTW - Millwall signed Tanganga after a successful loan, and when he signed for them he was already 25 - three yeas older than Ronnie Edwards! And according to Transfermarkt the fee was €1.8m)
Bowler was subsequently signed by Forest when they got to the PL in 2022 but he didn't get a game for them either, although he did get four games on loan at Olympiakos in the Greek Super League.
In the last decade all of the following have played in the Premier League after leaving us:
- Charlie Austin - Eberechi Eze - Luke Freeman - Joe Lumley - Ryan Manning
Asmir Begovic and Alex Smithies were with Premier League clubs after us but didn't play in the PL.
And then there's Harvey Elliott and Raheem Sterling (bit more than a decade ago in Raheem's case) who were with us as youth players but got pinched before they could turn out for us.
So far I've made all the running on this. All you do is put forward facts that don't stand up to scrutiny, so you jump to a different fact, and another, and back to where you started.
Going round in circles with someone who isn't interested in what I say gets a bit tedious after a while.
You're even trying to tell me I'm gullible for believing that Ainsworth keeping us up is a success.
So it should be a piece of cake for you to convince me that Ainsworth keeping us up was actually a failure.
So if you want to keep this going you make the running. Convince me that GA keeping us up was actually a failure.
If you compare them on their first 13 games it's GA 0.85 v 1 MF. Not such a great difference.
I will concede your point about 1 point per game being a significant improvement on 0.57. Although it wouldn't have kept us up that season as Birmingham went down with 50 points.
The reason I am labouring the point is that 1JD previously said on this thread:
"It’s not about who succeeded who. It’s about the squad available to the manager, any manager, and what you can achieve with that.
With Beale, the team hit the top heights during his reign. With Critchley and Ainsworth the team hit pretty much rock bottom.
With Cifuentes form was like top 8th. Same squad."
So it's not true that Cifuentes had us on top 8 form with the same players.
I'm not saying GA did a great job for us. But I think he is a better manager than he is given credit for and he doesn't get his due for keeping us up in 2023.
You will get no argument from me that Cifuentes did a better job for us than GA.
Not much better than GA's first 13 games which ensured our survival!
The big hole in your narrative is that Cifuentes did not do much better with the same players GA had to work with.
The big improvement came from the middle of January 2024 when the likes of Hayden, Hodge, Frey, and Andersen were added to the squad. Players who weren't available to GA but did have a big impact on their arrival.
If you want to make it all about the managers then fine that's your choice. But I am sticking with my belief that GA doesn't get enough credit for keeping us up in 2023.
And I echo your sentiments about goodwill to all. Except that lot on Fulham Broadway. And the Mancs. And Liz Truss - did you have to go there!?
On this:
"It feels like these sorts of things have become fewer and further between since those days. We could probably do the whole preview on that – is it because the sport has become sanitised, more middle class, more family friendly? Is it because there’s a greater focus on mental health? Are we just tired of all the hatred elsewhere and can’t be bothered to bring it into our little Saturday sanctuary any more? Or have the right conditions simply not been met? Let Mick Beale get another Championship job, then we’ll see. That’s your acid test right there."
You missed off - are the average matchday fans too old now and can't manage the necessary venom without a double dose of Sanatogen before the game?
I think we would have gone down if we hadn't sacked Critchley. And since no one other than GA wanted the job I don't see how we can credit anyone else with keeping us up.
But I did say in one of my earlier posts that it was probably more luck than judgement.
Looking at Ainsworth's career in the round he has a very good record with Wycombe and got off to a flier with Gillingham.
GA's style was never the right fit for us, and maybe he had become so comfortable at Wycombe after ten years that he didn't think through how hard it would be to recreate that here and whether the fans would want to go down that road.
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