Snowball Nameless From Despair To Where? I thought Joorabchian was only involved in the appointment of Gomes as his agency deals almost exclusively with Portugese and Brazilian based clubs and players and if the owners were determined to go Portugese, to be fair, he is an expert on that market.
I reckon every loanee was on the radar to some degree as that's the remit of a scouting team to identify specific indivuduals to fit a type of player. I think Baker would have come regardless, the others, I'm not so sure but it's all hypothetical.
It was mentioned to me by someone with a solid connection at the club that the recruitment had essentially been outsourced, by which Inassumed we’d appointed an agent to get a set of players. Of course we may have given them names we were especially interested in.
How this stacks with the fact that we got these players for nothing I can’t quite work out. For a single agent to persuade 4 clubs to give players to us and not charge a fee is amazing, especially when 2 of them are part of Chelsea’s money earning farm !
Would love Nigel Howe to come to a fans forum and give us an honest explanation of how it was done.
If this is true it kinda knocks "The Reading DNA" idea on the head
Not if the instruction was to get "young and hungry" and/or players with a "point to prove" which was very much part of the Reading make up during our most successful period. Of course we didn't need them to be loan players back then but this was very much a needs must situation.
We all know that transfers don't work the same way they did 10 years ago let alone nearly 15 when Coppell started assembling his Dream team and things had to be done rapidly given the situation we found ourselves in.
I was thinking about this the other day and whilst t may be a hindsight thing but if you do look back to our last 3 summer windows then generally you can see a pattern in each one.
Stam '16. A general theme of good Technical players , Swift , Beerens, Moore, Blackett even JVDB came from that Dutch tradition.
Stam '17. Needed more attacking heft as we were too reliant on Kermogant so in came Bod, Barrow, Aluko and as a sizeable chunk of our budget that season. Obviously we know Stam wanted Oliveira/Hemed and had to settle for Aluko but the rationale was the same.
Clement '18. Decides we need "Leaders" so we get O'Shea, Meyler, Baldock.
Now fast forward to this January and what is one of the first things Gomes states? He wants to work with a smaller squad and younger players. In comes our Fab 5 who with all fit that DNA (Oliveira might be a little older )
The point is in this day and age the Managers/Head Coaches don't necessarily pick individual players but more types or positions they need. Then the list of possibles comes to them and decisions are taken as to whether the manager takes them or not. Most managers in the Modern game will have heard of these suggestions and will usually agree so they get a final say even if they didn't necessarily choose the individual player at first.
Further up there's a discussion about whether we'd have got the 5 loan players under Clement? The answer is unlikely unless Clement had decided to abandon his "experienced leaders" rationale to suddenly decide he wanted new fresh blood. Maybe he'd already changed to that view (see the loan of Eza) but it was unlikely he'd have been given the opportunity to completely change tack and certainly not if Gourlay were still here I suspect.
Remember it took a fair bit of negotiation before Gomes actually came on board and I suspect a lot of this would have been about the type of player we can get and what type of team/squad we want to be.
I'm fascinated to see what we come up with this summer. Sadly we're going to be hamstrung pretty heavily by FFP as in the rolling 3 year cycle I think we have to somehow make up for the play-off year when we actually turned a profit.
In summary ( tl;dr ) I wouldn't necessarily say the Reading DNA is blown out of the water but the way we recruit those players has changed in line with the modern game.
