Go through the squad that got us promoted and suggest which ones were premier league quality players.
Then, work out which ones needed replacing with the quality, and figure out how we were going to do that….AND get them playing as a team to get results straight away.
Then look at what we had in the squad as reserves in case of injury.
My suggestion is that the only players we had who was possibly a Premier league player were JOC and Hendo. The rest were benefitting from a system that worked and got the best out of them. He stuck with the system and tried to strengthen the squad to manage the off injury….and we got away with it right until the lynchpin..the key to the system got injured. From that point we were buggered.
Now we can all whine about spending £120m….over 2 seasons…but that amount does not get you a premier league standard squad. Our best hope was to do it over several years of slow progress up and down.
