Those players, everyone mentions them but nobody mentions, say, Clayton or Ayala or Tomlin. Or Vossen. Or Nugent, or Shay Given. Do you think Karanka hand-picked those players as well? Or do you think the club run a recruitment staff who are actively scouting and recommending players to a manager or head coach who knows full well what the system is before a ball is kicked or a player is bought? I don't get why some of our supporters seem to think our men in the dugout are shrinking violets who have to suffer a dysfunctional club forcing their dysfunctional signings onto them. Do you really see Karanka, Warnock, Pulis sitting back and allowing Bausor or someone sat behind a computer to spend their budget, hamper the sessions and team team set-up when it is their jobs on the line? Or do you not think there is even a slight chance that will be some sort of collaborative element behind what the club do when looking at players and potential signings? And some of these managers who have players forced onto them, why don't any of them ever resign? Presumably they've been lied to, or misled, about the way the club works in the build-up to them being appointed? Who would want to manage/work for a club that buys players without his consent?
How come the club and/or recruitment staff are criticised for signing Alves when Southgate didn't want him but not credited with signing Luke Young or Tuncay? Or Robert Huth. What makes people leave those players out of these lists? Is it because they were actually quite good for us? Why do people always mention Rhodes and Downing but never Nugent and Tomlin? Or Adam Clayton? Do you think Karanka personally scouted each and every signing or do you think they were recommended to him and he snapped the club's hands off because they were better players than he had at his disposal at the time and gave us, and him, a much better chance of promotion? And people used to mention Guedioura in those lists as well didn't they, up until Karanka took him to Forest.
If you are saying the club forced players onto Southgate and Karanka then why have I barely ever read anyone saying the same about Garry Monk? In fact if you read about Monk's time here you'd see that the club actually appear to give the manager too much of a free hand in terms of signings, which is the opposite of what a lot of people seem to believe.
I said this on here a short while ago - our recruitment staff were routinely hammered for signing Bola and Dijksteel. Now they're playing well it's forgotten. You never see anybody saying "one of our scouts has a good eye and the club have picked up two decent lads for a couple of million." Nobody mentions those players any more really. The club were being criticised for doing things on the cheap, or trying to. For trying to buy from lower down the pyramid in the hope of developing and selling on for profit but, of course, getting it wrong. Warnock quite rightly gets praise for getting a tune out of them - the improvement in those two since Warnock arrived has been remarkable - but someone at our club was involved in actively scouting and researching them before they were signed.
What I don't understand is the constant attempts to put distance between managers and signings made under them who haven't worked, whilst not applying the same context or rules to those that have. How do people make the distinction between the signings? It would be interesting to know how people decide. I like to think of it as Gary Gill Syndrome. If a player is sh*t then Gary Gill signed him. If a player is good it was the manager in place at the time. It is something that has been going on since Mowbray brought Gary Gill in as a scout ten years ago.