[SOLD] Philip Zinckernagel

Surely his wages aren’t that much?

 

Where did I say they were easy? I was suggesting they can be misinterpreted. A couple of them were nicely weighted passes where he found pockets of space in the midfield.

As far as I can see his assists were:

Wycombe (H) Beautiful pass through a crowd, finished by Gray

Rotherham (A): Perfect cross, headed in by Sierralta

Rotherham (A): Outswinging corner, controlled and volleyed from edge of the box by Sema. Poor defending, but maybe a well worked routine.

Boro (A): Poor shot, deflects in off Sarr.

Reading (H): Ball won by Chalobah in the middle, falls to PZ, passes out wide to Sarr who scores from a silly angle with a ridiculously powerful shot.

 

I was surprised by PZ's lack of pace & physical condition which showed no sign of improving during his pitch time last season. There's no way he could start anywhere in the EPL in a 4-3-3 or even 4-4-2. However, I agree he would have been a good option to have on the bench if we needed someone to find 'that' key pass in the last quarter of a game we are chasing. Apart from sheer bemusement, I can only interpret loaning him out as further evidence of just how screwed we are financially by previous idiotic decisions.

 

I guess we didn't fancy him to cover in CM after Hughes and/or chalobah say goodbye, and didn't feel like we had any need for him as cover on the wing either

Cucho, Dennis, JP, Sarr and are presumably the ones the club feel will be fighting for the starting wide slots, with Sema as cover

Illogical to give him such a long deal if we clearly had such little faith in his ability to step up. I get we haven't been able to find takers for our multiple useless lumps on astronomical wages and need to cut elsewhere, but to loan him out for the season with five years left on his contract is not a good omen

Our recruitment is bizarre

 

I think you will find Sema starts as first choice for the left side spot. Hopefully it doesn't take too long for him to be displaced.

 

Arguably contributed more to promotion, but even if you take that point of view, it doesn't mean he's better, and in any case he's 5 years older...

 

He’ll be on around 15k a week I’d suspect. So if my maths is correct, we’re shelling out just over £2m on the duration of his contract, which is mental

 

I will accept 5 minutes. 10 if there is some kind of sweetener in the meantime, like a Coventry defender entering Vicarage Road, evading security, running out on to the pitch and launching himself kamikaze-style at Deeney.

 

We could quite easily be about to put out the worst team in Premier League history next Saturday.

If Deeney, Cathcart, Sema, Gosling, Cleverley all start then it'd take some beating for being the worst.

 

You are forgetting the truly abysmal 2006/07 team

16 pl apps for Al Bangura
11 pl apps for Steve Kabba
7 pl apps for Douglas Rinaldi
10 pl apps Will Hoskins
12 pl apps James Chambers

The list goes on

 

I'd probably take Kabba over Deeney, to be fair.

 

It’s the latter. We have a tendency to put poor players on long contracts that no other club in world football is willing to match. So we can’t shift them when we want a squad refresh and either us or Udinese are forced to use them at the expense of potential alternatives.

The same thing will happen with Sema when he is 31 and still contracted for 2 years. Same thing will happen with Cathcart next season. And on and on if goes. Meanwhile we lose Hughes when his contract should have been renewed when it had 3 years to run. But no we extended Cathcart instead.

 

Confirmed:

https://twitter.com/WatfordFC/status/1423973445566570496?s=20

 

I know you are being a bit hyperbolic, but it genuinely terrifying that there is a real prospect we start 3 of those 5.

With the exception of Cleverley and Ken (who to be fair to them are okay back ups for a club of our size) none of those players deserve to be anywhere near a PL side.

That Deeney is going to be playing PL football after what he turned out for the last 2 seasons and his post relegation interviews is utterly disgraceful.

 

Some of the replies are quite funny

 

Made all the worse by the fact we now have King, Dennis, Cucho, Fletcher as alternatives, yet it'll be Deeney once again.

How is he STILL first choice? I just cannot fathom how much power he has at this club. He's certainly not picked on performances, that's been established for years.

 

The bloke relegated us, acting too big for us in the media afterwards and then when his move broke down he stuck around ******* stank the place out nearly keeping us in the second tier single handedly.

Stealing 100k p/w while actively sabotaging the club and for some reason our fans act like it is sacrilege when you criticise him and there our main social media channels pump out propaganda suggesting he is scoring 15 goals a season this year. It really is ******* bizzare.

 

Yep, the usual Deeney pre-season propaganda from the club has been in full flow all summer. It doesn't matter how bad he gets, how old he is, how detrimental he becomes to the club, history just repeats itself over and over again. It's truly painful.

I'd just really love to know what it is that he has on the club or what it is that's in his contract that means he gets such special treatment and power.

 

We are not going to shift a player who we think can do it in the PL, unless they are a PITA.

 

His injuries make him unreliable, but at his best for us he was fine.

Will we see that again is a reasonable question.

 

I moan about a few things regarding the club on here, but in reality in the grand scheme of things I don’t really care about them.

The fact that a 33 year old Deeney is still going to be starting for us on Saturday is the one thing that is genuinely maddening/infuriating/depressing/baffling, though.

 

I don't get this at all.

 

I distinctly remember us loaning out Berghuis and ending up with no right winger or creative player in the squad.

I remember us loaning out Amrabat against Silva's wishes and leaving us with absolutely no squad depth at right wing.

I remember us going into last season with Tony Stevenston as our only left back.

Where are you getting this idea from?

 

Funniest thing about this is that he is already glacial, pace-wise. What the **** is he going to look like when he's over the hill/past his physical peak?

At least he is not an asshole, to be fair, unlike some of the others in the same situation.

 

Utter shambles of a decision.

 

At his best he was passable at this level, yes. He's now 32, injury ravaged and definitely not anywhere near whatever his best was.

Both the club and our fans seem to have a real issue with accepting the decline of long standing, ageing players and letting the team move forward without them.

 

Best thing about us signing this dud is that he proved having good stats in a shyt league means nothing.

 

Again, there are a million reasons why we might be doing this without thinking they are either flatbread or a troublemaker - financially, being the most obvious one, but equally the player might be demanding game time and clearly not feeling he will get it, or asking to play in the position they believe they were signed for. The logic that 'we will never get rid of a player we think can play in the Premier League' ignores all possible and potential context around both the player themselves, and the balance of the squad around him.

 

Unfortunately the club have an extremely warped idea of who can cut it in the PL.

 

Needs a bit of unpicking that. I’d imagine most people would think PZN is more skilful, but realistically he’s not going to get to show that skill in the PL. He was continually caught napping in the Championship.

Gosling, on the other hand, is industrious and gets in good positions and alert on the ball. You’d hope the likes of Etebo and Louza will prove better, but Gosling offers more to the squad than PZN.

Not sure who you mean when you say ‘we’ don’t deserve good players. It’s either the club, in which case the fans still deserve good players or it’s the fans who don’t because they lack esoteric understanding of the game, which is snobbery.

 

Except when in the PL we haven’t tended to do it. In this case it’s a player most of us, even those deploring the decision, don’t really believe is a starter at the moment.

 

Utterly bizarre.

To be honest, I probably wouldn't be as fussed if we had a creative midfielder lined up to replace him (as well as replacements for Hughes and probably Chalobah), but let's face it, there's no way we do.

We need at least two decent midfielders, and there's no way that's happening.

Depressing stuff.

 

Just allow me to be sarcastic please - doesn’t really need unpicking!

 

But we need to hold on to good players who we don’t think are automatic starters. It’s called depth and if we don’t have it, we may as well pack up and give up now.