saddlerken wrote:If we sign him and he doesn't produce the goods, Bonser won't part with cash for a signing ever again :shock:
FACT!
It had better come off, pressure is now on the DD!
Yeah, but if he does produce the goods and we sell him for a sizeable profit in a few years time (hopefully as a Championship club) then Bonser may be happier to take the odd chance again in the future. I guess the skill is in picking the right player to take the gamble on - so, as you say, the pressure is on DD to get this right.
Either way, I'm not sure that this is really such a big departure from the past. If the fee is £200k then that's not that much more than what we paid for Jorge - and prices have gone up in that time. And the overall package for Merson can't have been that cheap when you think how much money he must have been on compared to the rest of our players.
It's frustrating for the fans, but in some ways it suits the club not to be seen to spend big - it makes it much less likely that other clubs and players will hold us to ransom for more money. Look how much over the odds Peterborough have had to pay for players recently (and not just Keates and Westwood - they've signed Conference players for six-figure sums - much more than Wolves paid for Kightly). That doesn't seem to happen to us so often. Of course, the other side of the coin is that we can lose out on players that we do want, but at our level there's usually plenty more fish in the sea, so that's probably the lesser of two evils.