Guest Post by Russell
Last season the club seemed to have found some direction with the appointment of Slaven Bilic as manager, Payet and Lanzini the silky players bringing back the good old days of entertaining football added to several hardworking, good quality players throughout the team.
Until the last few games we had a great chance of finishing in a heady 4th place and qualifying for the Champions League. We missed it by a whisker but based on what we had seen the future looked incredibly bright and with a few tweeks to the squad progress would be maintained.
Before the season was finished the owners were lavishly praising the efforts of Slaven and the team and promising quality signings in the summer to push us to even greater heights, Bacca, Lacazette, Bacca, Batshuayi, Bacca, Yilmaz, Bacca, Zaza etc the list of high quality forwards was endless, the world for once was our oyster. These were the type of players we needed to signal in the new beginning at the world class London Stadium, of course they would love to come who wouldn’t, for any centre forward the draw of playing alongside one of the best players in the world to provide the ammunition would be too good to turn down.
And now just 6 months on and it has all inexplicably changed and its left me confused as to the direction the club is taking and who we are, in my mind the clarity of direction we had at the end of last season has become a muddle and a mess.
If our ambition is to push for the top 4/6 and showcase world class players then why are we bidding for players like Snodgrass, Defoe and Hogan? These are not what we were signing up for in the world class stadium, these players are surely for teams with less heady ambitions like Stoke, West Brom, Bournemouth, who don’t have the ambition of our owners so why are we competing with them on transfers?
OK, we will lose Payet but with the money we get for him and the money we save on Zaza and the rest surely we should be buying replacements of a high level. Are we a club pushing to be in that top 4/6 or a club happy with mid table obscurity? We cant expect to hit those heady heights of last season again with bargain basement players so can anyone explain who we actually are and what we are aiming for because I don’t know anymore.