The Snodgrass Sale

[Safri15]

Interesting article today quoting Snodgrass as saying that he knew his knee was crocked, and the Norwich physio's did a lot of work with him on getting him through his final playing days with us.

Makes me wonder how in the world we got around £8m for him, and more to the point, how he passed the medical at Hull.

It was a shame to see him leave, but really was a piece of amazing business by NCFC! I just assumed it was bad luck for Hull that they signed him and he happened to get injured, but it looks like we knew it was on the cards!

 

[splutcho]

Crikey, can't imagine the Hull fans are gonna be happy with that.

 

[Canaryboy]

Think it was £7m, but no Hull fans won't be happy with that, especially if they get relegated! 

Snodgrass is silly to come out with this too, because if he fails to recover he could have left himself open to a legal challenge by Hull, or a dispute with his insurance provider as to whether he correctly declared his past injury problems when signing for Hull?

Footballers don't tend to be the brightest do they! 

 

[Ken Ary]

Could we lose some money to Hull as we were aware of the problem? I think we had a similar situation in the 60s when we got Bell (I think ) from Sunderland or one club in the north east.

 

[dj161]

I can't see how we could lose money, Hull obviously had to do a medical and deemed him fit enough for the transfer, it should be their medical team that get any repercussions as far as I can tell for not picking up on it

 

[Beauseant]

It's 100% Hull's problem. They had a medical so caveat emptor applies. For the record David McNally thinks the Snodgrass deal was the best bit of business he ever pulled off.

 

[Safri15]

I'm not surprised McNally thinks that. Its like selling a car to a mechanic, in 'as new' condition but 'sold as seen', just for the buyer to have the engine explode as they head off out of your drive way!

 

[Moosheep]

I guess if Norwich or Snodgrass had actually lied about the knee problems there could be repercussions, but I would think that footballers are 'sold as seen' as it were which is why the buying team perform a medical. If they fail to pick up on the issue, then it is their problem.

 

[Canaryboy]

It's 100% Hull's problem. They had a medical so caveat emptor applies. For the record David McNally thinks the Snodgrass deal was the best bit of business he ever pulled off.

Great that McNally thinks that selling Snodgrass for £7m and Pilkington for £2m were good bits of business, but we'd probably be higher up the table if we'd retained one of them and played them on the left side of the pitch instead of Lafferty/Hoolahan/Bennett/Johnson and any other square peg that we've tried to force into that round hole. 

I know that both were out of contract at the end of this season, and that a decision therefore had to be made to either get them signed up or get them sold, but I wonder if McNally is equally boastful that the club has squandered £3.1m of that money on three kids who weren't considered good enough to have an impact this season (Miquel, McGrandles & Thomson). 

Or does he take credit for the good deals, but diverts blame to the manager for the bad deals? Just trying to say that McNally shouldn't be patting himself on the back for our season so far. Hopefully in a few months time we'll all be patting him on the back for appointing Alex Neil. 

 

[kirku]

It's 100% Hull's problem. They had a medical so caveat emptor applies. For the record David McNally thinks the Snodgrass deal was the best bit of business he ever pulled off.

I thought that was the Pilkington deal? People couldn't stop quoting that when we offloaded him to Cardiff. Something about training X number of days in the past year..

 

[morty]

Great that McNally thinks that selling Snodgrass for £7m and Pilkington for £2m were good bits of business, but we'd probably be higher up the table if we'd retained one of them and played them on the left side of the pitch instead of Lafferty/Hoolahan/Bennett/Johnson and any other square peg that we've tried to force into that round hole. 

I know that both were out of contract at the end of this season, and that a decision therefore had to be made to either get them signed up or get them sold, but I wonder if McNally is equally boastful that the club has squandered £3.1m of that money on three kids who weren't considered good enough to have an impact this season (Miquel, McGrandles & Thomson). 

Or does he take credit for the good deals, but diverts blame to the manager for the bad deals? Just trying to say that McNally shouldn't be patting himself on the back for our season so far. Hopefully in a few months time we'll all be patting him on the back for appointing Alex Neil. 

With hindsight though, not really. Snodgrass is out for the season, and Pilks, unsurprisingly, has hardly played, due to injury!

 

[It's Character Forming]

So is Snoddys career over? Otherwise not too bright to say this.

And I struggle to see how if we'd kept Snoddy and Pilks we'd be better off in the table as I'm sure they'd both be injured...

 

[ZLF]

I was delighted with the sale of snodgrass in the summer and even more so now.

Hope he recovers and continues his career but he was over dominated our tactics last season and are better balanced without him.   Through in an excellent price with Redmond improving for a the move to the right its been good for us.

The lack of left midfielder is another matter altogether.

 

[eatonparkboy]

I accept Snodgrass was a player who probably made the best of his limited talent. No speed and not fast footwork. And I don't know whether it was his choice to play on the wrong side. He did have a tendency to slow down the game as well but of course that could be instructions as well. But he did score the odd goal and wasn't too bad at set pieces.

I do not agree with the hype about Pilkington. Again, he found it difficult to go past people and when hugging the touchline was out of the game for so much of the time. He could put in a decent cross now and again and score the odd goal. Obviously people remember the United goal and maybe that clouds peoples memories. But there again, Lee Croft got POTS for scoring against the Binners!

Yes, we are now limited on the left side because they are both no longer here but Pilkington was hardly ever available and now we find out Snoddy was being held together with Duck tape.

 

[Matt Hopkins]

It's 100% Hull's problem. They had a medical so caveat emptor applies. For the record David McNally thinks the Snodgrass deal was the best bit of business he ever pulled off.

Not surprised he was happy.Look at the bonus he got at the end of the year( Based on profit of course!)

 

[It's Character Forming]

I agree about Pilks. Maybe biased because most of the games I watch are away and from comments he was a better player athome. Talented but limited imo and injury prone - the only City player I can remember being subbed twice within 20 minutes of the game starting for injury. I'd much rather have him off the wage bill and money to use elsewhere.

 

[Canaryboy]

So is Snoddys career over? Otherwise not too bright to say this.

And I struggle to see how if we'd kept Snoddy and Pilks we'd be better off in the table as I'm sure they'd both be injured...

My point really was that it wasn't great business without replacements. In hindsight Liverpool selling Torres for £50m was great business, at least it would have been if they'd not spent £35m of it on Andy Carroll. They did also sign Suarez of course, so perhaps they did pretty well out of that deal.

Selling Snodgrass for £7m would have been great business if we'd replaced him with somebody of equal ability for £3m.

Likewise with Leroy Fer, we sold him for £10m and replaced him with an injury prone Belgian. who we knew was injury prone.

Personally I don't think our transfer business this summer was too successful. A couple of bargains, O'Neill on a freebie and Jerome for £1.5m were great signings. That's two decent signings out of ten in the summer. Grabban is debatable, if he can keep his current form up then perhaps he'll show himself worth £3m, but again.... we did know that he was prone to long goal droughts, as he'd had one last season with Bournemouth.

We may have got good prices for Pilkington, Snodgrass, Fer, and Van Wolfswinkel but we spent somewhere in the region of £10m in the summer and we don't have much to show for it. That's why I don't think anybody at the club should be patting themselves on the back for our transfer business this season.

If we discount players who just haven't been able to make themselves first team regulars, and who weren't first team regulars before they left (Fox, Nash etc), our transfer business this summer was essentially:

OUT: Snodgrass, Pilkington, Fer, Van Wolfswinkel

IN: Jerome, Grabban, O'Neill. Lafferty

Is that "good business"?

 

[The Great Mass Debater]

What I wonder about is Andrew Surman. With Bournemouth sitting top of the league, cant help but feel 'chumpishness' that we sold him to them when we need someone to play left wing, and also that Callum Wilson chose them ahead of us.

We thought we were losing Surman and Wilson to a 'lesser' club and that Grabban was making a bigger move.

I wonder how those sequences of business are viewed?

 

[Canaryboy]

It may have been the case that we'd have been successful in signing Wilson if we hadn't of signed Grabban first. He knew that Bournemouth needed a striker, because their main striker had just left, whilst we had Hooper, Grabban, and Van Wolfswinkel (at the time).

Surman was told to commit or leave wasn't he? He also had one year left on his deal.

 

[Beauseant]

I don't really understand the supposed left wing problem, at least under Neil. The way he wants to play doesn't lend itself to two wingers, and with Johnson immense as a narrow left sided MF with Olsson bombing on outside him where's the problem?

I think Adams' attempts to play two wingers in a league where no one else seems to was naive and made is vulnerable centrally.