Ron Gourlay comments

Gourlay quoted as stating that the club needs to fix the imbalance in the squad where we have too many defensive players and not enough creative ones (not that this is news to anyone after last season!). With this in mind it definitely looks like no return for Clarke.

With the addition recently of both Swift and Wallace plus Dike we are certainly better off this season going forward but, as others have already commented, we need to make sure our defence is shored up too and a DM would logically seem our next priority. Personally, I think its a pity we couldn't try and keep Clarke and get shot of some of the others instead, but that was always going to be easier said than done. With no real money to spend we need to sell a few to be able to afford to bring in new faces so unless we can do that -or else there are more decent free agents out there going cheap- I sadly doubt there will be much more activity on the transfer front for Bruce's Big Rebuild.

We have an over abundance of players in a certain department. This doesn't necessarily mean we're strong in that department as quantity doesn't always correlate with quality.

Personally speaking I think our current defence has too many mistakes and lapses of concentration in it, as exampled on numerous occasions over time.

If we're relying on our current batch they're going to need to up their collective game. Significantly. Either that or they sit in a low block leaving our new creative players isolated.

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Originally Posted by Albionic68

We have an over abundance of players in a certain department. This doesn't necessarily mean we're strong in that department as quantity doesn't always correlate with quality.

Personally speaking I think our current defence has too many mistakes and lapses of concentration in it, as exampled on numerous occasions over time.

If we're relying on our current batch they're going to need to up their collective game. Significantly. Either that or they sit in a low block leaving our new creative players isolated.

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I mentioned recently that it looks like the plan is to score so heavily this season that we don’t need to worry about the defence, more like the Mowbray promotion side.

A risky strategy with Dike being as robust as rice paper and the rest of the forwards being so unreliable.

We all know Bartley and Ajayi will continue to switch off and that O’Shea will not have grown in pre season and will continue to be “too small” as per usual.

Surely there’s a G Mac and Olsson out there “undiscovered” and a right back and left back who can actually defend and not cost the earth?