Anyway don't think Guardiola news is as bad as people think especially if Conte were to come in at Chelsea. Guardiola has to rejuvenate a team with old players such as Silva, Toure, Zabaleta, Kolarov. He has an injury prone first choice striker and an injury prone CB who coincidently are so good that he would be unable to find players good enough to replace them.
There's getting them to play his football and be cohesive as a unit, which with the fact he has to change his entire central midfield setup there is a hell of a lot of work to do with City in terms of player recruitment and tactical changes if he wants to implement his style.
Finally any window where you get 25M for Ramires aged 28 is a good window. Pato isn't even an issue any more as it's a loan and Remy was not sold to leicester so is still an option to use as backup ST.
Other than Teixeira nobody was available and Shaktar raised the price to £38M for Liverpool, it's easier to just wait until the summer, keep the players Chelsea currently have then fix the small problems in the squad(i.e. box to box midfielder, CB to replace Terry and a goalscoring attacking midfielder if Pedro and Oscar are not up for it)
Originally Posted by carefree_blue:
“Possibly wouldn't have wanted to come in as a back-up, though if we'd offloaded Remy (as we appear to be doing) and not signed Pato, then Austin would have only been competing with Costa really. Falcao can be ruled out of the equation, he's hardly ever fit and doesn't cut it anyway - if we could have cancelled the loan I'm certain we would have done it. Even at Southampton Austin won't have a guarantee of starting every game.
Remy might wish to leave due to lack of gametime, but as some of us have said he actually would have played quite a bit more if he hadn't been injured a lot of the times Costa was ruled out. That wouldn't necessarily have been the case with Austin, who I also think is a bit better than Remy.”
First paragraph tell that to Remy. It's very likely that the club are going to buy a new striker in the summer with Costa's injury and disciplinary record and the fact that they don't trust Remy with his fitness issues. Drogba tended to play ahead of Remy and Falcao was getting games ahead of Remy...
Could easily be the case that Austin didn't want to end up like Lambert and co being second/third choice. Pelle is also 30 years old and his contract is expiring in 18 months. Austin with his goal record is very likely to be first choice for Soton within the next year or two, Austin would never be first choice for Chelsea.