Thought I'd sleep on it before commenting properly to see if I could find a more positive spin on signing Doherty but I just feel totally depressed about the whole thing. The only shred of comfort I can take atm is that he's proven me wrong before so I suppose there's potential for it to happen again.
Straight off the bat I think this is the most depressing transfer we've made in decades. The only other signing I've felt so negatively about has been Leon Clarke but at least with him he'd had a good recent record in the League we were in at the time, there was a slither of hope that he'd continue his Cov form at Wolves. We're getting a Matt Doherty with fuck all match fitness and fuck all motivation to succeed. He's just spent 6 months sat on the bench in Madrid and now he's winding his career down and has chosen us as an easy option, a safe comfortable club where he can trundle around for a few years picking up Premier League wages for the last time.
I can't even try and convince myself that signing him doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, that he won't play that much and he won't cost anything to sign. He will play. Semedo doesn't have the consistency to play for a whole season without getting dropped at least once even before you factor in injuries & suspensions. You're pretty much writing off a cup run as well unless we switch to a back 3 in those games to accommodate him.
I'd managed to convince myself that we'd finally started to take recruitment seriously, that we were going to have a really smart summer, offloading a lot of deadwood, cashing in on a few saleable assets at the right time and making some sensible moves for underrated or upcoming players. This is just laziness. The cheapest Mendes client straight off the carousel.
