The Squad

[A view from the east]

Looking at the official site and assuming that my adding up isn't way off I'm shocked to find that including the loans , a reserve keeper and a football ambassador we now have a squad of 34 players
Apart from the fact that they must be costing a small fortune to pay whatever happened to the small squad of quality players ?
Looking closely at our current assembled "quality" I cant see half of them featuring again this season.
This for me must be the biggest indication of the recruitment shambles we witnessed over the summer.
How on earth can we afford to continue like this ?

[guest49]

I made a similar point on another thread. The issue is that those who won't feature much are 'ours', which is always going to cause a lot of problems for the manager but more so for the chairman's wallet. It is necessary to preserve our league status after some terrible signings and DC's admirable (or crazy) stance of backing AB to have another go when he can offload some of them. In the meantime I'm sure we are picking up these loanees as cheaply as possible. Can't be many/any bigger squads in the division.

[Monty]

It's 30 players, isn't it? Squad numbers go up to 34, but not all of them are used. But when the plan was to have a small squad of 20 or 21, and cover any injuries you have with loans - then it's understandable that when you have 7 or 8 injuries and a couple (being kind) of total flops then you're going to have a 'squad' of this size. So no big deal, as far as I'm concerned.

[Insider]

It's 30 players, isn't it? Squad numbers go up to 34, but not all of them are used. But when the plan was to have a small squad of 20 or 21, and cover any injuries you have with loans - then it's understandable that when you have 7 or 8 injuries and a couple (being kind) of total flops then you're going to have a 'squad' of this size. So no big deal, as far as I'm concerned.

It is 34, including Siddiqi and the young lads out on loan.

[Monty]

It is 34, including Siddiqi and the young lads out on loan.

Fair point - but I guess that the cost for these is negligible as far as the overall cost is concerned. But my point is I'm not going to beat the club up for having a large squad, or misleading the fans when they said the priority was on a small squad. It's just a consequence of where we are with the injury situation and the innocuous midfield. I've been very vocal in bemoaning the fact that we've had to play Toney and JJ far more than is really fair to them, so I can't really criticise when we spend money on loans to take their place in the side.

[brickowski]

where are people getting 34 from? There are 30 names here (one of which doesn't play for us any more - Artell, and one who is a youth teamer - Roberts). Add Sidiqi and that's 29 by my maths.

http://www.soccerbase.com/teams/team.sd?team_id=1867&teamTabs=stats&season_id=143

[betamax toploader]

Langmead, Alex Nicholls , Lewis Hornby, are three missing.

[spqr]

The thing I wonder about is the atmosphere at training etc. 

Has anyone ever worked in a place where you have a room of workers who suddenly get told that they are not wanted even though they are full time and have just been recruited?  Another set of staff get recruited while the first set sit on their backsides doing nothing.  Because of contracts you cannot get rid of the first set.

Human Resources or the boss would need to be looked at for poor recruiting.

I would suspect that there are little groups of players who are meeting for a drink and a moan.  That's human nature.

Has anyone seen the team train?  That might shed some light on what is happening and if the squad has bonded.

[Zen Master]

IF they are professional they should be working even harder to get back in the managers plans. In this game if you're not part of the plans in the club at the bottom of the league then the future is not looking rosy.
 

 

[Elad]

I think the team they put out on Sunday was the kind of team us fans were expecting him to assemble in pre-season. Shame most are loans but I am pleased with Norris, Blyth, Ravenhill and Ferdinand and these are the sort of players we need to sign going forward.

I don't know what the hell he was thinking with Carter, Morris and Deegan with hindsight.