Fan Letters: I saw many great games during the Ellis Short days, so was it such a waste?

Dear Roker Report,

I’m my email, I said that we need a couple of decent Championship quality defenders. Nothing else. Your reply indicated that I was for going back to ES days of blindly throwing money around. No idea how you arrived at that conclusion. There’s a big difference between investing nothing and investing on a couple of defenders, that we clearly need. That’s hardly going back to the ES years.

The players you mentioned, cost peanuts and have demonstrated, that in the main, they’re not good enough to take us up and hold our own in the Championship. We have the richest owners (on paper) in this league and most of the clubs in the 2 leagues above us, so why shouldn’t we expect our new owners to make a small investment in improving the team. It doesn’t follow on, that by investing money, it’s reckless. It’s only reckless if the person spending it is an idiot. ES relied 100% on others to spend his money and trusted them. That was his mistake, which I assume the new owners will not repeat.

We need real money invested, we need it now and it’s the owners responsibility to ensure it’s spent wisely. To counter this with no investment by keep citing the waste under ES is not a credible reason for not investing.

Of course we need to invest in our Academy and bring through young players. That should not mean throwing them in at the deep end, when they’re not ready, which seems to be the current policy.

I saw many great games under ES days, so was it such a waste??? Richardson’s free kick in the last minute/Defoe’s goals/Red balloon goal against Liverpool/fantastic semi at Man U not forgetting all those magic games against the enemy and so many more. Yes it came at a great cost but was it worth it. I say yes.

Sam Lucas

Ed’s Note [Martin]: Thanks for your email, Sam. You said with a couple of championship defenders we’d be halfway there, and we needed to spend a few million. I agreed to an extent, saying I hoped we saw some decent investment (I actually think we need a strong centre midfielder too, as well as more forward options!), but that transfer fees were only a part of the cost of a transfer. My reference to the days of Short was illustrating that investment doesn’t automatically equate to success – as you say, it needs to be spent wisely, on the right players and the right people – but just ‘spending money’ simply isn’t the whole the solution. When we did it under Short it was spent on players with little or no resale value (if I remember rightly, van Aanholt was the first player we’d sold at a profit in all of Short’s time here). Whether we spend money on transfer fees or not, it’s got to be done intelligently – and I believe our recruitment so far has been just that. Are we the finished article? Nowhere near. But we’ve built good foundations. I’m not sure which players you don’t think are ready to play League One football, but I’d say the likes of Cirkin, Doyle, Broadhead, Neil, Embleton, Hoffmann etc have all proved they’re capable of doing so. The only element of your original comments I thoroughly disagreed with was the notion we’re no better than we were a year ago. Would you have honestly said that at the end of September?

Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images

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Dear Roker Report,

Bloke on about cricket. Yeh he’s right, Roker Report is a football forum so any probs in cricket please let the cricket forums discuss the wrongdoings of Yorkshire C.C.

What next lads are we going to discuss probs of bullying or unethical behaviour in ladies netball?

Football for football please lets not get bogged down with probs in other sports.

If I’m out of order in only wanting to read about SAFC football on the Roker Report football forum then I’ll switch off and maybe you could have a change of identity and resurface as All Sports Report.

Best wishes Jarvis n William. Lovers of SAFC.

Ed’s Note [Martin]: Thanks for your email Jarvis and William, personally I think the YCCC story is such a big one in the world of sport – and will have connotations for all sports – that it’s worthy of discussion. The vast, vast majority of letters we publish are about SAFC and that’ll never change, but if our readers want to share their thoughts on different sporting topics we’ll always consider them. After all, it’s very easy to scroll past something you’re not interested in!