Interesting post. I’ve always wondered who knew the most, HJ or the fans on here.?
One things for certain is us fans aren’t privy to the work going on behind the scenes so any thoughts and opinions we have are always going to be thinly based and let’s be honest...hindsight.!
Regards your point in routledges contract I would put it in a file marked “rewarding trusted employees “. In this file you could put Rangel, Monk, Dyer, Wayne and to an extent Britton. All players that have (or were) been synonymous with the name Swansea City. Eg Would you have been happy if Leon’s or Rangels contract wasn’t renewed when it was as let’s be honest no manager has fancied him for at least 2 seasons ago.? What I’m trying to say is I think Wayne’s contract (plus dyers?) is more a case of HJ trying to keep a base fabric of players who “know” and “are” Swansea thru and thru..If you get my jist?...and who knows (or cares) perhaps some contracts have been handed out as a sought of thank-you. To be fair, we have been rolling in the money and it does seem to appear to have been the Swansea way ie a lot of people benefiting financially from our ( or what was) PL status.
Im not so much trying to justify anything here just trying to find reason plus with regards to Wayne several different managers have continued to play him so he has earns some of his contract.
regarding ki, you can’t make a player sign an extension to his contract even if we wanted too. It looks like to me that he (ki) knew exactly what he was doing/wanted.
A nice big juicy signing on fee awaits him.
As for the signing of ex players ie bony, Ayew. I’m not sure what this says about HJ. He likes to turn to people he knows, Martinez is the best example of that. What’s surprising (in hindsight) is he never resigned joe and Brendan. But he has admitted that not getting joe was a mistake and personally I think HJ should be forgiven for that. We all make mistakes.
As for Brendan, if I cast my mind back, I remember talking to a few fans at the time who felt we had moved on from Brendan (remember Laudrup had progressed us on) and felt we shouldn’t be held hostage to his (Brendan’s) wage demands.
Like I say hindsight is a wonderful thing.
With regards to some of the other signings and departures again I find myself having some sympathy with HJ. Borja looked good(ish?) on paper and so too Messa. I could never understand why Borja wasn’t given a run in the team to get going..but what do I know?
As for selling llorente and siggy last min...that was the biggest cluster-f*ck of them all imo. That (I assume) was down to the Americans. But as we all know from reading on here some fans were all for selling llorente (bizarre imo) but again like I remember Mark Jack London saying once. Opinions are like arseholes- we all have one haha
But what drives my (sought of) forgiveness of HJ in his dof role is I’ve always believed..Call it a gut feeling if you like..that our time in the PL was limited. I gave us a maximum 10 seasons. Why? Well it all boils down to money and us being a small club. That’s how I see it anyway. Wigan (If my memory serves me right) were a club of similar size and their owner I believe spent something like 180 million of his own money on that club. A large chunk going on trying to retain and maintain their then PL status.
We managed it (albeit 1season less than their 8) without loading or acquiring such debt. If we had got relegated and HJ, MM + co were still owners and hadn’t sold the club in the manner in which they did I think more fans would be more forgiving.
If any of you have bothered reading this awfully long reply (sorry :-/ ) I know some of you will be bursting a blood vessel at my suggestion that possibly it’s not all necessarily just HJs fault. I will concede that (again just my opinion) I used to feel disbelief when I’d read that HJ was building a house here and there, getting involved in one business or another etc...I would find myself thinking ‘ffs surely he should be concentrating 100% on his dof job.!?
Who knows eh...???