Sam Allardyce And Rafa Benitez
Sam Allardyce admits he wouldn’t count on Mbaye Diagne and Okay Yokuslu returning to West Bromwich Albion next season if and when they find themselves in the Championship. The long-term future for Diagne and Yokuslu, however, is unclear; at initially, they’ll return to Galatasaray and Celta Vigo, their respective parent clubs. From there, it remains to be seen what’ll happen, but if Albion are indeed in the Championship again then Allardyce concedes it’ll be difficult to envisage a scenario where they return on a permanent basis.
Sam Allardyce said: “One thing is for sure, certainly Okay and Mbaye came here to impress and to help us stay in the Premier League. To take up that challenge is major from their point over and I think it shows where they want to play their football. They want to play their football in the Premier League and in England. Whether they’d consider that drop down to the Championship I’m not sure. I’m also not sure we could afford them. They are all big questions that have to be answered when we know our fate.”
Yokuslu, Diagne and Ainsley Maitland-Niles all arrived in the last handful of days in the window, and in hindsight an obvious question might’ve been asked: could Albion’s fortunes have been different had the club managed to secure those deals earlier in the month? Allardyce, though, explained why that was never likely to happen, when considering the transfer pond in which Albion were fishing.
Sam Allardyce said: “I thought we changed as much as we possibly could as quick as possible. In the window, you could’ve said could you have got them in in the early part of the window rather than the latter part, that was almost impossible because we were only looking for loan players. Because of the position we were in we couldn’t afford to buy them. The four players we brought in have made a massive difference. I think we did better business than any other Premier League football club in January. You look at the quality of the player, the price of the player, based on our budget, and the difference they made to the team. We could say we needed more games or more time but we didn’t really need it. We did have time, but we failed to take the clear cut chances we created. I was travelling home on the coach or driving home, and I was absolutely gutted because we weren’t going to get any credit for how we’d been playing because we hadn’t won.”
