Town must start summer business earlier this year
be out of contract. Town aren’t going to need direct replacements for, say, Tommy Elphick or Alex Pritchard, other likely departures who have barely played this season - or not at all, in the defender’s case.
But it is already a thin squad, and while last year Town erroneously felt they had enough bloat in the squad that they could get away with not bringing a new player in for every departure, they need to keep a much more careful count this time around.
And that’s before we talk about potential sales. Might Lewis O’Brien get the Premier League move his form over the last two years has deserved? Could there even be bids for Josh Koroma or Harry Toffolo? It really is a huge, huge summer.
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HARRY Toffolo raised the point on Thursday afternoon that pure black tar Carlosball is not an easy thing to be parachuted into, and that those players who arrived in mid-season to cover the many injury-related gaps were therefore at a disadvantage and the performances of the team inevitably suffered.
It only underlines how important it is that as many players as possible are on the training pitch at the beginning of pre-season especially new signings.
There was huge mitigation last summer in that the transfer market was unprecedentedly odd and slow, Town needing to sell before they could buy, pre-season being abridged and the transfer deadline running until mid-October.
Still, when Town kicked off the season against Rochdale in the Carabao Cup, the only senior players they had signed were Danny Ward and back-up goalkeeper Joel
Pereira.
A further 12 players joined over the course of the season: Pipa, Naby Sarr, Carel Eiting, Alex Vallejo, Danny Grant, Rolando Aarons, Sorba Thomas, Richard Keogh, Duane Holmes, Jayson Leutwiler, Yaya Sanogo and Oumar Niasse.
Injuries or not, that is very much the wrong way around, and Town can’t repeat that mistake again.
It’s clear they need a mix of first-choice players for certain positions as well as squad depth in the transfer window this summer, and the latter group are likely to prove easier to get signed up early.
Because of that, we wouldn’t be hugely surprised if Town were to bring in three or four solid but unspectacular signings early in the window before bringing in the relative big guns closer to the start of the season. And that’s fine, if they’re being signed as back-ups then they don’t all need to be leading Championship players. They just need to be better than what they already have in reserve. It may be worth fans keeping in mind that we’ve all been crying out for greater squad depth all season if that does turn out to be the case, and accepting that there might initially be a few more players with the kind of profile Toffolo had when he arrived at Town than players with top-level backgrounds like Carel Eiting. As long as there a sprinkling of those players too, fine.
It’s clear Town need a mix of first-choice players for certain positions as well as squad depth this
summer