Stones was our best defender.
Barkley was our best midfielder.
You can't say that about DCL, Davies, Kenny.
Barkley did improve under Koeman after stagnating and Stones became an England international under Martinez. They did improve.
Chelsea were willing to pay 35 million for Barkley.
If we were to sell the 3 of DCL, Kenny and Davies now you wouldn't get 35 million for all 3 together.
These players are simply not the same quality as the group before them.
Not one of them at the moment has made themselves un-drop-able.
They're not good enough to build a team around like Moshiri wants. Good enough to be a part of the squad but not currently good enough to start for what we want to achieve.
That's not being negative, that's the reality of the situation. Some people want to believe that these players are better than they are and are upset that others don't see these players with the same rose-tintes glasses they're wearing.
I agree with most of that.
What I would say though, is that the passing of time has clouded our judgement on most of the above players. People did not think Stones was our best defender while he was here, lots of people didn't even want him in the team. Likewise people were largely happy to see the back of Barkley.
I also broadly agree with you that the crop of younger players probably aren't quite as good. I think we have lots more young players though, so it's a bit of a positive and a negative. Whereas back then we had 4 players really (the aforementioned 2 plus Lukaku & Deulofeu) we now have Davies, Calvert Lewin, Kenny, Lookman, Holgate & Vlasic. There are also players such as Baningime who have certainly shown promise.
It's probably fair to saying general none of the above are quite as good as the 4 players before. I do think though, that none of the 4 have fully reached their potential through 21-24 (with the possible exception of Stones) and so there is the possibility for our lads to get to a similar level of ability if they keep improving.
I take your point about not being good enough for the team Moshiri wants, however where we want to be is a fair way off currently. My view is, if the young players keep improving then they all stand a chance of being with us in the medium term while we become the team we want to be. We are currently a team that is a very ordinary mid table team. It will take some time for us to get back to where we were under Moyes (or indeed even with Martinez when the above 4 broke through).
Even if we look at Calvert Lewin, this season he is scoring a goal every 191 minutes. At the same age Lukaku was scoring a goal every 287 minutes (in the premier league, albeit with a great record in Europe) and the season before a goal every 173 minutes. So this season Calvert Lewin has improved his ratio from one every 468 minutes to one every 191. It's in and around where Lukaku was at. The important differences are 1- Lukaku did it playing about double the minutes Calvert Lewin will, so he will need to improve the breadth of his performance. 2 Lukaku would eventually drop this ratio to one every 130 minutes with us. So it continued to get better. That's the challenge for Calvert Lewin.
