Don't Shut The Window! We Need A Striker

[Cotter 0]

My mate's uncle is Fraser Wishart, Goodwillie's agent. We matched Blackburn's offer completely and they simply didn't want to sell to us.

[Danny 0]

Maybe because Blackburn were first. Matching their bid wouldn't put us in first place.

[der Berliner 3,247]

Goodwillie has a greater chance of money and some experience with EPL footie with a low key team like them. It was his decision to sign the extension and this contract, his comments after leaving weren't very encouraging either. So far he's played one game, no goal, no assist.

[Danny 0]

I repeat. If we matched the bid, how does that give us first refusal? If we'd beaten the bid, I could see the point. But matching it does not put us in first place.

 

Or do I have a poor understanding of how business works?

[Zappa 0]

We matched Blackburn's offer completely and they simply didn't want to sell to us.

 

I don't see why they would want to sell their best striker to a club in their own league which beats them most of the time already if they were offered the same money by a club in another league.

 

To be honest, I'm not so sure that �£2.8m for Goodwillie would have been a good value purchase for us anyway. What's more of a concern than missing out on him is where all this money the club were supposedly trying to spend has disappeared to. I don't want to see us spending silly money, but the manager could really do with a new goal-scoring striker because we're very short of numbers up front unless you start counting Beattie and Little.

[Stimpy 0]

I penned this today. Along similar lines but I tried to take the positive route.

 

 

During Craig Whyte’s long running saga to takeover Rangers most fans never really seemed aware of the scale of the problems that lay ahead. In fact, 99% of us were unaware of how poorly we were in terms of operating like a business.

 

We all hoped and dreamed of our club being fiscally stable with no hidden agendas or any minefields to navigate through. We all wanted the club to be open with the fans and fight our corner. In my opinion we are but are the majority willing to be patient?

 

So far we have seen The BBC apologise to us twice, a well-known Daily record journalist temporarily banned, and Craig Whyte come out with the quote: “Stop telling lies about us and we’ll stop telling the truth about you”. Awesome!

 

The club is embracing the digital age with accounts on Facebook and Twitter. You only need to view their pages to see how far they are performing. The numbers do not lie.

 

We now have ‘Rangers Utilities’, set up solely for businesses. Pretty simple, eh? You’re a Rangers fan that happens to be self-employed, so why not see if Rangers can save you money.

 

Now we are being told that the club might host India versus Pakistan in an international friendly. Two small football nations compared to the traditional giants, however, both countries have huge populations that love football and are in need of fuelling their demand. Play it right and we can be part of it.

 

Recently, and quite surprisingly, we’re being strongly linked to a massive TV deal with American media giants, Fox. We all know it’s come about through the acquisition of two American internationalists plus Edu. We could argue all night of the ethics and coincidence of both signings, but we can’t argue with the long term prospects it has.

 

There’s also the small matter of signing an Australian international, another country with massive marketing potential. Like Bocanegra and Bedoya, Mckay’s signing can and will ask questions of the ethical nature of their arrival. Only time will tell on all three.

 

So where are the problems? For one, we are being slightly too open with our transfer business. The club could quite simply state that we will see ‘x’ amount of players in before the deadline finishes. There is no need to publicly announce every transfer as it only feeds our enemies and gives leverage to the nay sayers.

 

For me personally though, that is only teething problems that will be rectified as the new regime learns the game.

 

There is also the issue of miss-communication between Ali Russell and Gordon Smith, both seem to be building their relationship albeit too openly, as when one says the opposite of the other it does give out the wrong message. Another teething problem though. Easily fixed!

 

Ally McCoist, Rangers living legend and hero of mine; team selection, tactical and result wise it has gone a wee bit sticky for him. ‘Super’ seems to be relying on Walter’s old war horses whilst trying to do his own thing.

 

Ally does have to integrate new players from foreign fields, which is not easy, but why wear your slippers when you can wear your shoes. He has the players that can play in natural positions yet, naively, plays the famous Walter card. Take the good from your mentor but not the bad, please Ally.

 

However, again, these are mistakes that are rectified over time, gained by experience. Ally’s a clever and competitive man; he is not the type to walk away.

 

Due to the public nature of Rangers’ business we are always in the headlines, especially after such a dramatic last six months, so that means negativity will always come first. But, if we can all see the woods for the trees we may have the future we all hoped and dreamt of.

[craig 5,198]

I repeat. If we matched the bid, how does that give us first refusal? If we'd beaten the bid, I could see the point. But matching it does not put us in first place.

 

Or do I have a poor understanding of how business works?

 

It doesnt put us in first place, not at all. However, if this is true then it does show an unwillingness by Utd to sell to us. If they accepted an offer from Blackburn but rejected a financial offer of equal amount from us then it shows that they dont want to sell to us. There is no reason financially that they wouldnt accept two offers of equal magnitude.

 

It would then be up to the player to decide where he would prefer his future to be, dependent upon salary offers, league, club etc etc.

[Zappa 0]

New version of the article -

 

With tonight's closure of the transfer window now looming closer by the second it's becoming crystal clear that staying in Europe or more specifically, the Champions League this season was paramount to the ability of the new manager to start building a new, deeper and higher quality squad. That may well seem like stating the obvious, but I think we should ask ourselves if Ally was really afforded the opportunity to strengthen for our European campaign given that the club were very public about supposedly bidding for and trying to bring in the players who might have helped keep us in Europe, but either failed or backed off on the deals. Obviously it's all history now, but I wonder what players like Roland Juh�¡sz, Wesley Verhoek and David Goodwillie might have offered the manager in terms of team selection options in our Champions League and Europa League games had we signed them up and registered them instead of messing about with low bids and flimsy attempts to acquire their services.

 

Despite it being too late to help us in Europe, we finally brought in Alejandro Bedoya after a lengthy period of the club saying 'we want him NOW', but if we're to believe media reports, we supposedly went back to Ã?â??rebro with a lower offer than we had previously made just a couple of weeks earlier. No matter what anyone says about the player having been on the last X amount of games of his contract, if it's true that we did that, then it highlights one aspect of our new and somewhat bizarre concept of transfer market dealings. Is it a concept which involves telling the fans, the media and other clubs that there's money there for these new players the club are bidding for, then that money just seeming to disappear into thin air when the bids all fail? Imagine an episode of South Park where illusionist Paul Daniels is running a football club and dabbling in the transfer market with a top hat, a dove and a pile of magic money. No you see it, now you don't. It's Magic!

 

Another strange series of events was the attempt to sign Carlos Cuellar from Aston Villa, now managed by former Gers manager Alex McLeish. In this case, the Scottish press reported that Villa had accepted a �£2m bid from Rangers for the player. Fans were literally ecstatic about it because Cuellar aka 'King Carlos' was a cracking, no nonsense defender who was absolutely brilliant in our run to the UEFA Cup Final, a run which ended in his sale to Villa for almost eight million pounds. Good business to get him back for �£2m then, but what happened to the deal? We had the bid accepted and it was supposedly still on the table until we went out of the Champions League. Then, all of a sudden the deal was off because he was still injured when in actual fact the club knew that he was injured all along. Am I missing something here? Did the guy's return from injury being slightly delayed put us off buying him back for nearly �£6m less than we sold him for? You have to wonder....

 

Roland Juh�¡sz? Were we really ever intending to buy this guy? After a drawn-out saga of us being told the club were making bids and having them rejected, we were reported to have made a final �£3.5m bid for the player. In actual fact we must have bid significantly less than that for the deal to just fall apart because both Juh�¡sz and his agent were keen for the deal to come to Ibrox to happen and �£3.5m is what Anderlecht were reportedly seeking for the player. I'm intrigued as to what really happened to that deal, but if I was taking a guess it would be something along the lines of going out of the Champions League meant that there was no way the club could afford to spend �£3.5m on a defender no matter how good he is.

 

I think we'll skip all the details of the Goodwillie saga here because it was another drawn-out affair and in this case there were extremely unusual circumstances involved regarding his personal life, but it's worth noting that yet again we failed to sign a supposed top target. I can't help thinking that if we were ever serious bidders and the club really wanted to sign him, then David Goodwillie would be a Rangers player. We certainly need another striker because Kane Hemmings was going to be one of our back-up strikers in the squad this season and now he's out till Christmas or beyond due to an injury requiring surgery. Ally actually said he wanted another striker before Kane got injured, so maybe we need to bring in two strikers now?

 

One thing is clear in my mind and that is that we haven't actually replaced Kris Boyd or Kenny Miller with another deadly goal-scorer. Nikica Jelavic is a fantastic player, but we need another 25 goal a season striker to partner him and fill the glaringly obvious void left in our attacking arsenal since the Boyd and Miller partnership moved on. It's time for our new owner to put the top-hat, dove and magic money back in the box of tricks and get his real money out because this isn't a scathingly satirical magic show on an episode of South Park; this is Rangers Football Club and it's real life. The transfer window closes in a few hours time and we need another striker Mr. Whyte.

Edited August 31, 2011 by Zappa

[Gazza_8 233]

Goodwillie has a greater chance of money and some experience with EPL footie with a low key team like them. It was his decision to sign the extension and this contract, his comments after leaving weren't very encouraging either. So far he's played one game, no goal, no assist.

 

He's scored for them and played more than one game.

[Guest Dutchy]

I'm reading on the STV site that we just bid �£100,000 for an international stricker. I'd say an African, or I may have remembered how to spell his name, but if that's the best we can do hours before the end of the window, I hope it closes soon, as we seem to making bigger asses of ourselves with these stupid bids.

 

Is Craig Whyte serious???