Deadline day brought one last player to welcome. We wanted a full back and that is what DeAndre Yedlin, a USA international signed on loan from Spurs is. ‘I’m delighted to be given the opportunity to play for a club with such great history,” he says diplomatically to safc.com. ‘I’ve heard fantastic things about Sunderland and the supporters from Claudio Reyna and Jozy Altidore.’ Rob Hutchison finds more than his usual one word apiece to run the rule over the eight imports …
So deadline day has come and gone, the transfer window has slammed shut and the TV’s infamous purple dildos have been nowhere to be seen. So was it a quick grubby fumble in the dark, or has it been a moment of unbridled bliss to be eulogised over for days/weeks /months to come?
If we can strip out all the hype, headlines, and harrowing tales of how many pots we can’t pee in at the moment, then we can try and judge our summer business as rationally as is ever possible.
Using the Reid analogy of “is he better that we already have?” there are three obvious decent acquisition in Lens, M’Vila and Fabio.
Borini is in effect a trade in for Wickham and certainly offers more and gives us more options, not to mention a fantastic goal-against-the-Mags celebration, the only concern being this: “Will he be that target man that Dick was hankering after?”
Lens has already proved he got off at the wrong airport (see what I did there?) when he arrived at Sunderland and looks like he’s gonna be the new Sess with end product, someone we’d actually happily good pay money to watch. M’Vila is a really interesting one from leftfield, a leftism maybe (or rhythm and stealth? – Ed), another upgrade, growing with every game, strong composed and sure can pick a pass, I just hope we have an option on him at the end of the season. He may well consign Catts to the bench for long periods if things conspire.
Then there’s the solid/steady additions … Toivonen had a Varga-esque debut for 15 minutes changing the game at Villa, and he has plenty of aspects that we’ve been missing, there were even a couple of one-touch passes thrown in FFS, where did they come from? No idea if he can do it at Selhurst Park on a cold Monday night in November mind you, but I think we might be about to find out.
Kaboul if he can repeat his Villa game form on a regular basis will be another positive purchase, guess there’s a big if in there, but with regular game time I’d bank on him to be just fine.
Finally we have the few punts that were always going to be inevitable. Coates will have blinders, and he’ll have dog days too, at the price he’s worth the looksie.
Yedlin looks to me to be PVA on speed, indeed the two words a Spurs fan offered me in description of him were Headless Chicken (granted it was three words but I thought it best to edit one out); maybe he can be trained in defensive duties better than Glue, but on the face of it, he’s worth a sniff. I’d rather have had Enrique but hey ho.
Matthews may turn out to be our defensive Danny Graham on what he’s served up so far, but again, cheap and highly thought of in Scotland and maybe worth a dabble. One of these three will surprise us I’m sure, but I wouldn’t like to put my money on which one if I’m honest.
All this has been done on a net spend of £14m. Frankly, a pitiful amount given the pickings the PL has to offer but assuming we’re still paying severance Gus, mad Paolo, & a plethora of other failed has-beens purchased by clowns, then well it is what it is.
The hope is some of these eight will prove to be genuine improvements by the time we get to next summer safe in maybe 15th place, at which point maybe we can start genuinely building for the future rather than fighting fires that should have been extinguished long long ago.
So there we have it. How was it for you? Are you ready to go again? Mackems, bloody insatiable the lot of you.
Join the Salut! Sunderland Facebook group – click anywhere along this line
And follow us on Twitter: @salutsunderland … click along this line