Who's To Blame

Who's To Blame For Our Failure To Land A Replacement For Lukaku?


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R934

Player Valuation: £950k
I'm entering the dark world of having an opinion on football, coming up with a pretty impressive title [I jest], making it a poll for god sake, and opening myself up to public scrutiny - do your worse :)

First off, i'll be honest and say the majority of this i've just copied and pasted from the Koeman thread, bar rearranging the order slightly i've said all this before but i'm interested to see the wider opinion.

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From a personal perspective I think Koeman is ultimately responsible for our lack of striker, he is clearly part of the process - signing, selling, and identifying players.

My argument is Koeman may not be the figurehead of this new DOF system, but he's quite clearly got influence in what happens.
With that in mind, why did he okay the sale of Lukaku without a replacement coming in first? Yes it's easy to be Mr Hindsight, but that failing lies with the manager - unless were going down the route the board have sold over the managers head?

It's been put to me Lukaku was promised the opportunity to leave, and in keeping him we would not have painted ourselves in good light to potential signings. Unless I'm mistaken, this is the same Lukaku who was 99.999999% signing (thou some will say now that was a ploy by his agent) & who Koeman continually talked up as wanting to keep regardless of the contract standoff.

You can also throw the fact Lukaku wanted out, he's wanted out for a good few years it doesn't stop him performing. Nor should we overlook it being a World Cup year, so if he was 'forced' to stay he'd have to perform regardless.

I also won't buy the excuse that Giroud was are main man and we were confident of signing him. Get the player through the door first, then okay the sale of your only centre forward.

You only have to look at 3 prominent 'transfer sagas' from this window to see we didn't need to sell.
Liverpool: Coutinho
Arsenal: Sanchez
Southampton: VVD

Saying all that Koeman must have been under the influence of Steve Walsh, and there has been broken promises from the board. Really? Ultimately if Koeman is the outspoken and honest manager he is portrayed to be, I'm sure he'd have said something contrary to what happened.

A fair few have also stated it is not Koeman's role to sign players, and if Steve Walsh wanted to he would have authority to sign without the managers agreement - correct me if i'm wrong but i've seen nothing of the sort said, unless i'm massively over-looking something. Either way i'll run with this theory, Koeman has already demonstrated If players signed were not of his ilk, he'll disregard them, similarly if a player was sold without his permission he'd say something.

As far as I'm concerned Koeman was the person who gave the okay for Lukaku to be sold without a replacement. You can speculate regarding promises, Girouds bird saying no, and anything else that pops into your head, end of the day its easy to be Mr Hindsight, but you wouldn't sell your house without having somewhere to stay lined up. Yet here we are having sold our only senior striker without a replacement through the door.

According to Moshiri's infamous TalkSport interview Koeman has the ultimate say, and rather conveniently the mention of promises made to another former player in John Stones is mentioned:
https://talksport.com/football/farh...w-stadium-star-manager-ronald-koeman-and-more

On selling John Stones to Manchester City and summer recruitment:
“The boy wanted to go. [Roberto] Martinez had promised him that he would go the following year. I still didn’t let him go until the manager said he could go. At the end of the day, I do what the manager wants. (...) The manager had seven names, and four of those we got.

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I've little concern for him being sold (I lie I'd have kept him even if we'd signed another striker) but we really should have got a replacement in first. It was shortsighted and has left us with a massively disjointed team. I may be over simplifying things in your opinion, but why does it have to be complicated.

We've signed x,y,z okay so a,b,c are surplus to requirement either sell or use as squad rotation.
We've got an abundance of squad players that we don't need now, we'll bring through U23 players allowing the sale of them. We haven't got a striker yet, so we'll not allow the sale of Lukaku until we have.

One thing is for certain it is easy to throw blame around under this DOF system. That there lies the problem, the lack of justification for mistakes, is easy to shirk when so many fingers are in the same pie.

That said, clearly the problem is of our making, DOF systems work elsewhere but obviously a few cogs in our system don't.

And before you interpret that last sentence as calling Koeman a failing cog, far from it, but he shouldn't be absolved of blame.

Generally speaking it seems Koeman can't be directly responsible for anything negative, yet is given credit for positives, and anything in between we'll decided on a day-to-day basis. When in doubt throw comparisons to Martinez and Moyes about, that ought to sort the 'two faced fans' from one another.

Far from acting superior, why does everything have t fall one side or the other, why can't it be seen that Koeman can be blamed for his mistakes, the same way everyone else is seemingly held accountable but in differing orders of responsibility.
 
Walsh and the board, Koemans not in charge of recruiting players. He's to blame for the rotten football we've watching so far..
 
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