Not for one moment am I defending Pulis and his 'won't buy abroad policy' but since we returned to the top flight under Megson how many of our buys straight from overseas have been a success at the highest level ? Will have to be first time in this League if we are measuring by the Pulis rule. Genuine question.
Gera clearly , PIG , Rondon to a degree , Odemwingie....
I don't like it but I can see why Pulis does it with his job on the line.
Olsson, Mulumbu, Yacob big succeses
Amalfitano, Koren, Fortune and probably more that were successful to a degree
You could name loads of English buys that have been hits (Morrison, Brunt, Gmac, Foster etc) and loads that haven't worked out (Chester, Lambert, McMananan) that on paper ticked a lot of boxes.
There's no rule that signing players from the UK or abroad will be better/worse either way. No matter where we sign players from some will always work out and some won't. Phillips and McManaman are two examples of players with pretty similar characteristics, pretty similar careers behind them and similar transfer fee's. One was an absolute failure and the other is one of our best players now. But limiting ourselves to just one market is just stupid. Firstly it's the most expensive market in world football to shop from which is ridiculous when compared to our peers we have one of the lowest budgets. Secondly if we exclusively sign players that our peers don't want we are never going to go anywhere. We might get the odd one who is passable such as Nyom or Sess but for every 1 of him there seems to be 5 Anichebe's and Lamberts.
Players like Evans and Chadli (and even then theres question marks about Chadli) who are genuinely a class above what we have should be pursued and I'd put someone like Smalling in this category. But although I don't have anything against Rodriguez or Deeney types as such they are both just 'meh' at best. Completely uninspiring and we could easily pick up players with the same potential for half the price on the continent. Yes they might not work but as we've seen elsewhere there no guarantee Deeney or Rodriguez would be a success either.