Our writer Simon Phillips has an interesting transfer update today, with some focus on our goalkeeping situation.
The potential additions are not clear, but Phillips does know that the club are intending to sell Robert Sanchez, who was only signed a year ago for £25m. He looked a little shaky early in the season, then got injured and lost his place to Djordje Petrovic.
“Sanchez… is the likely casualty of a new stopper coming in,” Phillips writes. “Chelsea will look to move him on and at least recoup the fee.”
That’s going to be tricky – we paid a lot for a keeper who was already on the bench, then benched him ourselves. Who in their right mind is going to pay what we paid a year ago, or even close to it?
A terrible idea from the outset
The Sanchez deal has to be one of the worst under these sporting directors, not because it was the most expensive flop (that prize goes to Mykhailo Mudryk, as it stands) but because it was just so obviously a bad idea.
What on earth possessed them to think that buying a goalkeeper who had been relegated to Brighton’s bench the year before was a good idea? What’s even more baffling is that the reason he had been benched by the Seagulls was because he wasn’t able to play well enough with his feet for Roberto de Zerbi’s possession based football. Now the same thing is apparently going to happen at Chelsea, with the arrival of Enzo Maresca.
Did those in charge of buying Sanchez not think that our team might also want a keeper who is good with his feet? It’s all just so short sighted. We will be very lucky to get anything close to what we (over)paid for him.
Petrovic looks… fine. Gabriel Slonina doesn’t look a world beater. Let’s hope they get this fourth attempt at signing a keeper right.
