wellfan

We're in the unfortunate position of being the club that will be affected by all of his rookie mistakes. We saw it last summer with a lot of his signings, and we've just experienced a 4.5-month spell where we only won 2 games, including yesterday. The big question is will he ever learn from these mistakes and prove he is up to it? The clock is ticking.

Bair will remain ineffective if we don't play to his strengths. We should keep it simple by playing the ball to his feet while he moves towards the goal. Given he was a solo striker yesterday, you could see he was a bit isolated, and you could tell he was getting frustrated with all the high balls to his chest and head. That aside, he still needs to do better and get himself into better positions to receive the good crosses into the box. Biereth would've scored a few of those yesterday.

Will Bair find his football boots and punish his former team?

Many pints? Mrs Grizzly won't be pleased.

Working his ticket.

Sammon did well to make and finish that move for a goal. He had Butcher in his pocket for a lot of today.

Agreed. The space on the right in front of Spittal as RWB near the end of the game was vast. Can Luca Ross play in there?

Monty did more good than bad today. It looked like he and Gent had played together before. I was encouraged.

If I remember correctly, the goal came from Butcher failing to challenge Sammon in the air. If he'd done his job, Sammon wouldn't have found himself with the return pass in the box.

I absolutely rate Spittal and am glad we've got him, but he needs to stop hitting corners and indirect free kicks. Keep him to 25-yard screamers only.

His set pieces have been howling for months, yet SK keeps asking him to take them, but he did really well to score two lovely goals today.

My dad and I said similar about PJ.

Gent. And a special mention to Davor for being consistently neat and tidy, and doing his job effectively and without fanfare or mistakes.

Yes, and a centre half.

Georgie Gent 👏

As much as I would love this to happen, there is absolutely no chance we can afford (even a portion of) the wages of a PL player.

And here was me thinking Christmas was a few weeks ago. Another Kettlewell/Daws dud.

First Max and now Mika.

He's at least got the experience we need in the middle. Let's see what happens.

I've said in other posts over the past few weeks that I believe the Club to be in a bit of a long-term and rudderless holding pattern, which partially chimes with your hamster wheel comment. I ultimately do not know what the answer is here, but I do know that the current situation cannot go on as is, hence my temperered and/or clueless suggestions throughout.

I agree. I stated in a reply above that such a strategy carries risks.

You're not wrong regarding the youth development issue; perhaps the financial compensation scheme, as alluded to by our leaders, needs to be looked at again. Additionally, as I said in my reply above, perhaps we should try to move to a position where we allocate more money to invest in youth development and retention instead of having no money for that due to blowing our load on panic signings every January window. It's not a 1-2 year fix; it requires a reset aligned with an appropriately costed strategy, which will also have risks. I suppose it doesn't have to be one or the other, but the balance is way off right now, and that cannot go on.

True, but we're throwing away good money during the now cyclical January panic mode, which I would argue would be better for the long-term if invested in youth development, but that's not easy or a silver bullet.

I sincerely hope so, although I concede that we will probably have to rely on more loanees this window to see us to the end of the season because we're apparently skint. A big reset coming this summer, from top to bottom, hopefully.

The opportunity presented by successful loanees, such as we’ve seen with Spencer, Gent, and Biereth, should only ever be seen as a bonus and not the solution for a club of our financial stature. This doesn't mean we should stop seeking more Biereth’s. However, once we start to rely on loanees to get us over the finish line, which I think is what we’ve had to do recently because a lot of our permanent signings and youth players have not been good enough, we will find ourselves in trouble and in need of a continual rebuild every window, as we do right now. History is repeating itself this January, which again calls into question our recruitment and youth development strategies. We can't go on like this.