We Must Improve The Squad - Gary

[Guest ashtonyate]

In an orchestrate it is the conductor that the musicians follow,in football its the manager

[Olé]

It's good that he saying it, however he's said it many times in the past

That's about the size of it. We've had the analysis before, but we never get the remedy. We know Gary sees the problems but we also know he doesn't seem to be the one able to fix things through the transfer market. So him saying this again doesn't really change anything until we see a different attitude to transfers.

I am not filled with confidence about having to turn to transfers as what precipitated this season falling apart was our achieving very little in the transfer market, for Gary Johnson the summer in that respect was a disaster of ego and judgement, and we're asking him to (again) turn to the transfer market to fix things??

We've had about a dozen strikers in 3 seasons and still fail to find an effective goalscoring combination. Our only truly impressive acquisitions that have panned out were opportunistic captures of free agents (Basso and Elliott). Nothing else has stuck. Since promotion Elliott is the only signing to fit the bill at this level.

That tells me Johnson can't sign players in the higher divisions and this is proving a weakness for sustaining a Championship side. It should've been clear in the summer that we needed established Championship/Premier League/International players now to consolidate at this level without simply punching above our weight.

Unless you include the ubiquitous 'once played for Scotland', we have failed to address that need and GJ doesn't seem able to do so. Whether it is about personality issues or a misguided value placed in lower-division hunger, he doesn't seem able to cope with players of that calibre that would make an instant impact.

January is the acid test but I'm not optimistic as don't see him adapting to the transfer needs of the club. He's a fine manager and deserves our support to do it his way with his type of players for as long as we can survive, but as soon as that's in doubt too, we need to bring proven players in, or someone who can sign them.