Grant will get us back up though. How much is that worth?
Will he? It didn’t quite work out that way at Huddersfield. Besides, Sheffield Utd will have a strike force of McBurnie and Brewster next season backed up by McGoldrick and Sharp - 4 players proven at that level, plus Mousset and Burke. If any forward is going to rip up the league next year it will be one of theirs.I suppose that’s a different conversation though.
My biggest issue with Dowling is everything he does just feels very run of the mill. We had one of the biggest budgets in the championship last season and so Dowling was able to get away with being run of the mill as we could spend our way to promotion (relative to our rivals). Even then though the biggest success was a Bilic man in Matteus Pereira who probably played a bigger role than anyone else last season.
This year without the luxury of being a big fish in a small pond, Dowling has been unable to offer a strategy on how to close the gap on the clubs who have bigger budgets. There was no “outside the box†thinking, he just tried to beat richer clubs at their own game which just doesn’t work. Even more criminal though is that I am yet to see much evidence of any long term planning either. While other clubs are hoovering up players who are 18 -20 with an eye on the next few years, we have instead forked out millions on blokes who have had the one good season or bought others on short term deals.
Bilic deserves some of the blame of course - as we have seen this month the manager does have influence on the strategy as well, particularly on which positions we target and it will be Bilic who didn’t feel we needed to prioritise a defensive midfielder or full back, who publicly took responsibility for the decision to push to bring back together last seasons flawed, flagging squad and who eventually dug his heels in over Karlan Grant despite the fact that he wasn’t a centre forward and was actually just another form of Callum Robinson (without the versatility). Dowling however should have the final say in his role and he signed off on these decisions, while making some poor calls of his own (I agreed with his stance on Hegazi if you look at it in isolation, but probably not when you take into account the Kipre/Ivanovic farce earlier in the window - failing to sign a top quality centre half that both manager and tech director could agree on so instead getting 2 poor choices).
I think the ship has probably sailed for us now, but if we are going to reestablish ourselves in the premier league in the next couple of years, we need somebody at the helm who has fresh ideas and who gets more right than he gets wrong. That man isn’t Dowling.