Cuellar Off?

[Chris Smith]

Shorey was forced on us at short notice by the Bouma injury but he turned out to be a wanker, remodelling the centre of defence by the Laursen injury.

I think you'll find that most clubs have more than 4 defenders.

[pauliewalnuts]

I think you'll find that whilst most clubs have more than four defenders, they don't spend quite that much money on them, and in the space of two years.

[FatSam]

£7.8M seemed to me at the time as an awful lot of money for a back-up central defender, and that is how it has turned out. Whilst I don't have a problem with Carlos, MON certainly had the habit of overpaying for mediocre players. It seems as though the culture of the club was for MON to decide (eventually) who he wanted, and then they just got the deal done. Inevitably we didn't achieve much in the way of value, and this has become gradually more apparent over time. A similar one is Harewood, who was just expensively enlarging the squad without tangibly improving its quality. This culture is brought into relief by how clubs like Milan shop around for free transfers.

Also, as unrealistic as it sounds, Carlos was talking about hoping to improve his national team prospects with the move.

[Concrete John]

2008-9: Davies (9m), Friedel (2.5m), Luke Young (5m), Shorey (4m), Cuellar (8m) = almost 30m on defenders (which ignores the purchase of Knight the year before)

2009-10: Beye (2.5m), Warnock (7m), Collins (5m), Dunne (5m) = another almost 20m on defenders.

That's nigh on 50m on the defence in two seasons.

And we don't even have much of a defence to show for it.

Well, three of those players still make up 3/4s of our present defence.

The total is £43m.  As I mentioned on another thread, we lost Mellberg, Laursen & Bouma for nothing, so if you presume their replacements were Cuellar, Dunne and Shorey, that means £17m was essential maintenance and the remaining £26m was what we spent to improve to be a top 6 side.  And we've re-couped about £10 from Shorey, Young and Davies going.

I'll be honest and say I think the signings of Beye and Collins were unnecessary, so we could have been where were for less, plus the wages we put them on were too high.

[Rudy Can't Fail]

Not sure about your sums there, John.

Shorey was sold for £1m, Davies £1.75m with potential add-on of £750k and Luke Young to QPR was undisclosed. Not sure how you got to £10m.

Also Paulie's figures add up to £48m not £43m.

[cheltenhamlion]

We signed Shorey after Bouma's injury but in typical MON short sighted style, he thought he was too slow and didn't really fancy him when he bought him. Of course there may have been better options on the continent but woe betide us looking there.

[SoccerHQ]

Yep, Shorey was a total panic buy and in any case wasn't needed due to us playing Carlos at RB and Young at LB. The summer 2008 Habib Beye.

I think Carlos was signed partly because he was so outstanding in Rangers's run to the europa final so given we were in that competition a logical signing. I even remember Gregnash was advocating his signing on here.

[Concrete John]

Not sure about your sums there, John.

Shorey was sold for £1m, Davies £1.75m with potential add-on of £750k and Luke Young to QPR was undisclosed. Not sure how you got to £10m.

Also Paulie's figures add up to £48m not £43m.

Yep - I'll blame that on a calculator mishap, but it is indeed a total of £48m.

I'd have to check back, but I thought we got more for Shorey and Davies than that.  I was thinking about £2m for one and £3m for the other?

Either way, the point still stand that a large chunk was essential and we still have the players that comprised a great defence (Carlos, Dunne, Collins & Warnock), so it's wrong to just quote the figures as it if was 100% money thrown away.