Looking back, the summer of Marco Silva’s second season was a turning point and opportunity missed. Second half of the season we’d started to see the shape of a team forming. Zouma and Keane were forming a good partnership at centre back, Gueye and Gomes looked good together, Richie on the left had good figures for goals, Siggi behind the striker was scoring and Calvert Lewis was starting to emerge.
That summer if we’d made Zouma permanent, not sold Gueye and added a right winger who contributed similar numbers to what Richie and Siggi were doing behind DCL I think that team was showing signs of going in the right direction.
Instead, we didn’t/couldn’t make Zouma permanent, sold Gueye and replaces him with Gbamin and instead of adding a right winger that would contribute we added Iwobi who really wanted to play on the left. Team went backwards and has been going backwards since.
We’ve absolutely had the money to be pushing top four, West Ham are doing it having spent a fraction. We’ve lost good players who were key parts of the team we should have been building on and replaced with poorer players. Add a toxic personality like Rafael into the mix and well, we all know how it turns out.
