With hindsight - January

[Allan C]

No, I think we would still have gone this time round. You can spend millions like Newcastle did but if it's spent on poor players it matters little.

[supertom]

It would have made no difference. You could bring Messi in but he'd fall foul of the hideous atmosphere in the dressing room. We should have had a top to bottom sweep in the summer. The whole new board shuffle should have been done last May. Sherwood should have been sent on his way. If we'd had someone with some nous overseeing the operations they'd have seen what was coming. The transfer policy should have been changed. Riley shouldn't have been put in charge of recruitment.

But to be honest I feel this relegation is needed. Badly needed. It's the only way we can get Randy out and actually begin to rebuild. The best we could ever do under a completely disinterested Lerner is to plug every new leek that comes along, but soon you run out of limbs and digits and the leeks soon drown you. We've gone down. He's had to drop the price of the club. We've got (I fucking hope) interested parties lining up.

If this Chinese consortium does take over and bring in Comolli, that's a good start right off the bat.

[supertom]

No, I think we would still have gone this time round. You can spend millions like Newcastle did but if it's spent on poor players it matters little.

And if they're brought into a really nonsensical mixture and a fractured squad, there's no cohesion. Like us it's 11 individuals and not a team. You spend money on quick fixes rather than looking at the root of your problems. It's desperate. In Randy's case he opted for the fuck all approach. Which in hindsight I'm glad he did because there was no point blowing a load more money. We wasted 50 odd million in the summer by bringing a lot of mismatched players and not integrating them together.

Townsend is very much a head down and mercurial sort of player. Not particularly a team player. So for that reason he actually worked out well for them and almost kept them up by himself, but whilst he's been more consistent for them than he was at Spurs, he's still only going to show up in 33-50% of the games. Yeah it doesn't affect him playing in a team who can't play as a team because he may do something brilliant by himself, but one player isn't enough to keep you up. Sunderland play like a team under Allardyce and ultimately that kept them up. As for Norwich, they work hard enough but lack the quality and don't have a goalscorer. 

[HolmesyVilla]

Also wasn't nzog on his way out then changed his mind, I'm sure that had some impact on signings.

[DeKuip]

The age of slavery has long since gone. To buy someone nowadays they have to agree to come, and only someone interested in their own bank balance would have signed for us in January.

[SoccerHQ]

We were too far gone and I doubt we'd have signed someone exceptional to make the crucial difference....I would've been happy with Doumbia but he's hardly played a game for Newcastle so clearly his fitness can't be up to scratch there.

Was it really fair on Garde though? At the time I would've been just happy for him to get in a few of his own players and hopefully build a system and decent style of play to build momentum for next season but maybe then the club started to doubt whether he'd be the right man for the club.

I still think it was ridiculous though we appointed a manager and gave him nothing to spend in his first transfer window, can anyone think of another club who'd done that in recent times at premier league level?

[Clampy]

We were too far gone and I doubt we'd have signed someone exceptional to make the crucial difference....I would've been happy with Doumbia but he's hardly played a game for Newcastle so clearly his fitness can't be up to scratch there.

Was it really fair on Garde though? At the time I would've been just happy for him to get in a few of his own players and hopefully build a system and decent style of play to build momentum for next season but maybe then the club started to doubt whether he'd be the right man for the club.

I still think it was ridiculous though we appointed a manager and gave him nothing to spend in his first transfer window, can anyone think of another club who'd done that in recent times at premier league level?

Like Cheltenhamlion said though, it wasn't that we refused to give him anything to spend, we just didn't end up bringing in the players he wanted, for whatever reason. Like I said yesterday, I reckon we needed 5 decent players and attempting to get that many players to join a club bottom of the league would have been a big ask.

[David_Nab]

Newcastle next season will be doing what we could have been doing.  If they break even or profit with their sales then yes, maybe we should have done what they did.  If, however, they have no money for player sales because other clubs are treating them as desperate sellers getting rid of a dodgy car, offering low-ball sums because they have no other choice but to accept, then we have done the more sensible thing.

To start with Townsend as a release clause so they will be making a loss on him. Reports are they they didn't insert relegation wages clauses in contracts as we did so they could find themselves in a spot of bother

[Villain1874]

To be honest I am torn between two train of thoughts regarding January's transfer window, at the time I thought it was a sign of surrender on part of the club not to sign anyone but we were so bad and the dressing room was so toxic it would have been counter productive, plus we needed about 4-5 top players to have any hope of staying up and Randy Lerner would never have allowed that kind of spending spree...
It was probably for the best in the long run, we can clear the decks of dead wood this summer under a new manager and he can build his own team and not rely on past managers/Paddy signings...
We just have to find new owners and manager lol...

[Neil Hawkes]

IF we'd have spent money then we'd be in an even bigger mess now. We needed more players than we was ever going to be able to sign.

Is the right answer.
Love or loath Hollis if you like, he has (so far) done the job he was brought in to do, unlike the previous bunch of nutjobs.
Now we see if the next stage of his remit is a success, (or an abject failure like the last bunch of nutjobs!).

[Villa in Denmark]

As a fan it was shit, it stank, and it hurt like hell.

From a business point of view in terms of giving us the best chance of getting next season right, it was probably the right one.

To have done any sensible business in January would have required finding, as a minimum, a goalkeeper, a centre back and a striker, all of whom needed to be significantly better footballers than who they were replacing, were happy to play next season in the Championship if necessary, and had the moral fibre to at least ignore the shit going on behind the scenes, if not actually improve things.

I reckon that's a pretty small group you're looking at.