John Park - Does He Carry Much Of The Blame?

Bangura, Lassad, Miku, Pukki, Scepovic, and Guidetti especially who were all signed right at the death of the summer transfer window.

Signing right at the end of the transfer window, scream panic signings after you've spent all summer trying to sign other players who keep knocking you back and so are left to salvage anything you can.

It's funny how we always seem to sign a striker on the last day

Even Stokes, Griffiths, Robbie Keane were signed on the last days of windows.

 

John park

Has john lost his ability to find us gem anymore.
This is two years now when we haven't signed a project with van dilk or victor.
What going on with john and our scouts.

 

There's already a thread on this, mate.

 

Theres more dross than superstars thats for sure he sure has found some of the worst talent I have seen since john barnes picked up big raphael from gremio who ever looks and scouts the players need new goggles

 

Oh I see it now. Didn't spot it before

 

We are seriously lacking in flair atm. We have no players that can have a moment of magic. I think this targeting of scottish players seems all well and good if there talented but we seem to miss the best ones ie gauld, mc carthy, robertson. Id like us to try and get a few south american players in. We barely created a good chance when we went 2 nil down against malmo which has to be extremely worrying.I think the team from midfield to the forwards with 2 south americans style players that could influence a game, have pace and score goals could really transform us.

Our midfield and forwards were scottish , norwegian and an israeli. Mainly scottish which is not a coincidence that we dont create that many one on one chances in europe. I think we need to blend in a few technically gifted players to make us tick. We need to have more penetration down the middle as we constantly look to get the ball wide to create chances. Clever players with good technical ability can create these chances down the middle.

 

I bet English teams say this about us when they play us.

was it laziness? to sign players excelling within that league? in theory should signing the leagues top players, not give us the best team within that league? would it have been laziness to sign a James Mccarthey? or Craig Gordon before Sunderland? or Steven Fletcher before Wolves?

EVERYTHING is proportionate. sure there might be foreign players of decent ability earning less and playing in foreign leagues. all of a sudden, they join Celtic and want to be paid with respect to their ability within that team. Whats more is there is a financial risk if these moves dont work out. who pays to fly players in for medicals, setting up a home, transport? what if they fail to adapt to our physical game? our climate, our culture? homesickness?

then there is the small matter of geography. you find German teams have a lot of Poles (i.e. Dortmund) due to the close proximity to that country. their knowledge is superior. they beat the next man to the buffet.
Just like the Wigans and the Evertons down the road sign our players. Like the Aberdeens and ICT's take on English lower league players. Like we sign Irish players. We live withing financial constraints. money is finite.

weve been less comfortable on the ball because we have been * so far this season. in europe the home team usually domiantes possession with the exception of an elite team.

Our transfer policy (in terms of where we were looking) was right, our tactics were wrong. nothing more, nothing less.

 

Can't blame the scouts for last night I'm afraid. At the top of our game we're a better side than Malmo and should've taken care of them over two legs. Man-for-man I'd probably only take Yotun and at a push Djurdic in the starting lineup ahead of underperforming Izaguirre and one of the midfielders; Berget was good too but we went down that avenue already and sometimes things just don't work out. We've also signed plenty of players that have done well at other clubs playing at a similar level that didn't work out here (namely Daryl Murphy and Niall McGinn, but even guys like Jos Hooiveld; clearly it isn't just an issue associated with scouting).

Unfortunately we gave away a commanding position in the first leg and bottled it with a pathetic performance in the second leg, while Malmo gave it their all and got the job done, grabbing 3 goals from set-pieces and getting a bit of luck along the way with one decision in particular but I don't begrudge them their victory at all over the two legs given how we played.

As far as scouting goes, I think we've struggled to adequately replace Hooper and Wanyama but they were two phenomenal players who are just straight-up difficult to replace. Hooper is a striker and quality strikers are hard to come by at our price range (I'd like to think we're getting somewhere with Griffiths but he still ain't Hooper); Wanyama is again playing a position that's difficult to fill like-for-like at an affordable price (he's a defensive mid with exceptional quality and physique, the two of which rarely go hand-in-hand on the cheap).

Could we have done better with our signings overall? Sure, there are many that haven't worked out, but the ones we have signed who've failed here aren't necessarily just bad players (as above, many have done well elsewhere with the benefit of hindsight so there probably was a justification for signing them), it's not an easy job and the good players you do sign have to get the job done which they simply haven't been capable of.

 

Your avatar, I was watching the game last night with 25 minutes or so to go and thinking she was the only one who could save us now.

 

Aye, he needs his baws toed, couldn't spot a forward at a forward's convention.

 

Couldn't spot a striker if he was standing in front of him.

The worrying thing is the strikers we keep on signing with poor goalscoring records like Pukki, Balde, Bangura and Ciftci. It's pretty frightening that we sign these guys and expect them to bang them in for us when they've never really done so beforehand.

 

Ciftci: 40 appearances 17 goals in 13/14 & 42 appearances 16 goals in 14/15

I was by no means advocating signing him but I wouldn't class that as a poor goalscoring record.

 

It's not a boot in the * from being 1 in 3. It's maybe not a poor record, but it's not a good record either.

 

Manager states what he needs "I need a goal scoring poacher"
Scouts enter database to flag up matches.
Scouts further scout said matches.
Scouts pass on shortlist of strikers that match and pass scouting.
Lawwell takes list and matches it over clubs finances.
Lawwell strikes off 'expensive' matches.
Lawwell bargains over a few grand and usually signs our 3rd or 4th choice target.

It's not the managers fault, nor is it the scouts fault that the top target is scored off the list, or the 2nd target or the 3rd.

 

3rd/4th choice doesn't want to come to Scotland, we move to 5th/6th choice.

 

Aye, just under 1 in 2.5 games. To put it into context Scott McDonald had a worse record pre-Celtic and he was accepted as a goalscorer.

 

Exactly.
And ill safely assume 1st choice striker wasn't messi, second wasn't lewandoski and third wasn't haha sanogo.
Which makes it bad when we go down to 5th choice and you realise that 1st and 2nd choice was probably soriano and Rosenberg (level) of strikers. 3rd and 4th being some no mark over priced championship player. Then we get ciftci or sceptic and hope they come good and step up.

 

Sometimes the first choice would surprise folk though, Eden Hazard and Fernando Torres were both on the list as youngsters, we just had no chance of luring them here.

 

Of course there are those sort of exceptions (didn't know about them being linked).
Take berbatov, wasn't it the same board that tried to haggle over a few hundred grand and lost out on him.

 

Aye, we also tried to James Rodriguez and got quoted £11m :smiley-laughing002: