McCall IN/OUT (with new Poll)

Bit rich counting contract extensions and young players as 'Stuart's signings'.

Very true that he was happy to work with what he had, though, and I'm happy to class this as 'his' team now. Stuart had scope to change it but obviously didn't see any reason to do som

 

No thanks

 

Fair, my point about McCall still stands

 

You mean he's chosen to bring 4 players in? And chosen to resign a couple more?

 

McCall has signed the following. Sutton, Watt, Clarke, Cooke, Evans, Samuels, Hosannah . That’s 7,he also for some obscure reason re-signed DMH. Also the keeper but that’s understandable. So altogether he has brought in 9 and signed 4 kids which again is the right thing to do. So even his loyal followers can hardly say it’s not his squad.

 

These sorts of facts are never going to fit in.

Which were you 4 of the signings were you not counting @XCIV_Bantam and why?

 

Thought your account had been hacked after reading the first sentence

 

Still with the pretending that contract extensions are new players?

He 'brought in' 7, but signed 9 contracts.

When you stay on in a particular work place, do you congratulate your boss on a superb acquisition and good piece of headhunting? I'd probably advise not to, because they would be understandably puzzled.

 

Whether it has been forced upon due to our poor recruitment or it is his choice, I do like the fact that McCall is giving so many young players a go.

We have Staunton playing regularly and then other academy players such as Cousin-Dawson, Sikora and Scales all in and around the first team. Add to that the other first team players such as Watt, Wood, French and Cooke who are all early twenties.

I’m not saying they will all make it as quality players but at least we’re giving a few younger players a chance. I’d rather watch a team of prospects lose than a team of overpaid, over the hill flops lose like we have had in recent years. You never know, a few of them may develop into decent players and valuable assets.

 

I'd say there's a difference in extending the contract of a player already under contract and re-signing a player after their contract has expired. When you re-sign a player who's contract has expired, its the same thing as signing a free agent from outside the club. Is he 'new to the club'? No. but that's not the point. The real point is, he had a blank canvass for 2 particular spots and chose to sign R'OD and DMH. So it was entirely his call to sign those players instead of bringing in someone else. To my mind, they're both McCall signings. Its entirely his call that they're at the club, he hasn't been saddled with them. R'OD I can understand to a point. He's not great but he's about average for a keeper at this level and we could have done worse given our recruitment performance. The signing of DMH is baffling though.

 

I'd say it's an entirely meaningless technicality.

How many players in the past have signed on the dotted line right away?

Remember Meredith taking forever to sign a contract extension because his agent was holding out on offers that weren't forthcoming (he then sacked his agent)? Nobody suggested he had been 'brought in' then, but I guess there wasn't a reason to try and hang on to a technicality to use against PP.

Sorry, it's really poor and it's completely inaccurate to suggest that ROD was a 'signing'. He extended his deal, nothing more, nothing less, and he isn't one of '9 new players' or whatever people are pointlessly and erroneously trying to suggest.

 

I did stress he’s signed 7 and the other 2 were re- signings which of course he didn’t need to do. Football is totally different to the workplace in that they are permanent jobs unlike football which has a limited contract system. I know people don’t like facts getting in the way of a good argument but for someone to suggest McCall has only signed four and it’s not his team is odd to say the least. Incidentally last year when Bowyer re-signed Anderson and Devine his many critics included those two in his signing list.

 

I am in full agreement giving the young lads a run out rather than our usual end of career last pay day no hopers we have been subject to in recent years
The only problem with the "young uns" is that it only ends 2 ways either they are not good enough and drift in to oblivion or they show promise and we bite the hand off any team showing "the readies"
Good for the finances but not the on pitch product
This is where scouting is becoming ever more important and selling the clubs ambition to proven players not "mid table is our target this year" Parky was good at this
Let's bring some youngsters on that are capable of getting us up a couple of leagues and keep hold of them !!!! they could prove to be valuable assets

 

Watching the Bolton/Salford game on Friday night and McCall was in the stand running his eye over the opposition, surely he could have just watched the game on TV if as some suggest he only uses his tablet for scouting etc.

 

How come somebody with no connections to either club can be allowed to watch the game live and supporters cannot, doesn't seem right to me

 

Its semantics. 'New signing' is a subjective term. The point is, McCall had an option of retaining R'OD/DMH or not. They're his 'signings' because he had a very easy route to go elsewhere, if he so wanted. When assessing the extent to which the squad is 'his', they very much count in the 'yes they're McCalls choice' category. I don't really care about whether they're 'new to the club'. McCall made a conscious choice to keep those players and commit entirely new contracts. They weren't extended or retained to retain their value as an asset to the club, it wasn't a commercial exercise. They were signed because McCall wanted them as opposed to other free agents. At the point of their contracts being signed, their roles in the squad were very much open. McCall could have gone elsewhere but made the choice to keep them. So they're 'his' players. His choice to keep them, whether he was the manager to first bring them in or not, part of a deliberate choice to shape the squad in the way he wanted it. In the same way as: for every player we re-sign in the summer, they'll be McCall's choice to keep and will rightly be regarded as someone McCall wants to keep. A feature of the squad McCall wants to build.

In reality, the choice to keep R'OD and DMH was probably driven by limitations to our scouting capability. Easier to just go with what you know.

 

I agree, and made many of those points myself.

But isn't it funny how it works when a signing is viewed as extremely positive?

I remember hearing that Parky couldn't sign a striker, and that Wells was NOT a PP signing... But Parky extended Wells' contract multiple times, once for three years.

I don't see anyone claiming that Wells was a Parky signing, do you?

Clearly he was not.

 

Wells wasn't ever re-signed following the expiration of his contract though. Thats the difference between that and the deals for DMH and ROD this summer.

 

That makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

It's a false argument, and it fails to stand up to scrutiny.

A contract extension is a contract extension, regardless of club policy.