[Archived] What Was Rovers Worst Transfer?

[Oklahoma]

This topic is a little depressing...

[Eddie]

Davies Out

Ostensdadt In

I think that wasn't bad. We had a striker who obviously couldn't score and brought in someone who did ok.

[RoyRover]

Quite agree with some of the transfers mentioned but I bet noone else thinks of this one.

keeping hold of Tim Flowers and selling Shay Given !

Rovers should have kept Shay and got rid of Tim when the opportunity arose

I don't know if we should have let Flowers go, but we should have held onto Shay, without doubt. He is IMO the best goalkeeper in the Premiership, apart from maybe Cech.

Edited September 20, 2006 by RoyRover

[Oakland]

Davies, Grabbi....and Brian Kidd

[SD4E]

for me it is concrete-

Kevin Davies.

Fat, useless wast of time who didnt even try.

Once met him up Cav on the lash, about an hour after he gave the worst centre forwards display i have ever seen against Newcastle in the cup (i think from memory we lost 1-0 and saha scored for them?)

He really didnt give a s***. I mentioned how annoyed i was we had gone out the cup, he just shrugged his shoulders. Tosspot.

other side thoughts- definately Matty Holmes, and what about Sven?!?!?!?

[Laurence]

Selling that nice Jason Wilcox

[Yan]

this thread is far too depressing for words...god imagine if we hadn't just gone insane after winning the title and ###### everything up!

even with out the money of the bigger teams, if we hadn't sold off most of the champion squad with in a few years and built on it...

i heard a rumour that uncle jack was very much against having lots of foreign players, and we could have had the likes of zidane (albeit circa 94 or so but still...)

god knows how true that is...

i feel getting rid of king col was worst.

karba diawarra anyone?

[B.R.F.C]

Has to be Kevin Davies for £7 million who just didn't bother his backside when playing for us. Whats even more annoying is the fact he is now for them ones up the road on a free transfer

Edited September 21, 2006 by B.R.F.C

[Perth_Rover]

I don't know if we should have let Flowers go, but we should have held onto Shay, without doubt. He is IMO the best goalkeeper in the Premiership, apart from maybe Cech.

if we held onto shay, would we have ever gotten brad??? They'd be on par but shay proberly has a fair bit more left in the tank being 5 years younger

[bob fleming]

Has to be Grabbi for me, although there are plenty to chosse from unfortunately. He was never good enough, had no pace, wasn't particularly good in the air, never looked like a centre forward (with his tendency to drift out to the left wing). He had a decent touch on him I suppose.

Still at least the £6.5 mllion we spent on the much travelled Serie B striker who apparently was scouted only on video can't be called into question.

[Steve]

Does anyone know where Grabbi went and how he's doing now?

I just racked my brains and cant honestly think were he went?!?

[gbrovers]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrado_Grabbi

Wikipedia.....aint it great...

[Cheshireblue]

This thread appears from time to time and the same old names are always trotted out.

The worst player we ever signed was Martin Dahlin. Every other clown we have had over the years has had some kind of redeeming feature. Even Grabbi had his moments. Dahlin however was a waste of Oxygen, and if I saw him in the street I would probaly try to run him over.

[DP]

And what, prey, was Davies' redeeming feature? He scored 1 goal in the league, and 1 goal in the cup, both against Charlton, and both amounted to nothing.

As others have pointed out, we also lost Beatie when we signed him, and both players are now 1st team strikers at North West rivals.

Davies - worst signing by a country mile

Edited September 21, 2006 by DP

[den]

I take it no-one saw John O'Mara?

Worse than any of them.

[West Sussex Rover]

Depends whether you mean worst value for money, or technically worst player?

Former - Dailly, Peacock, Ward, Blake, Grabbi, Davies, McAteer

Latter (and this is relative to the rest of the team) - Holmes, Kuqi

Holmes assisted a blinder vs Rosenberg in the champions league...

Kuqi scored 7 very important goals off the bench last season so cant be all that bad?!

[Perth_Rover]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrado_Grabbi

Wikipedia.....aint it great...

Grabbi began his career with Juventus, scoring once in two appearances in the 1994-1995 season. Unable to break into the team, he moved to Lucchese (8 games, 76 goals)

Yeah the 76 goals in 8 games, no wonder we were interested...............

[speeeeeeedie]

Depends whether you mean worst value for money, or technically worst player?

Former - Dailly, Peacock, Ward, Blake, Grabbi, Davies, McAteer

Latter (and this is relative to the rest of the team) - Holmes, Kuqi

Kuqi? We got him for nothing, he scored a few goals, gave us a luagh or two and we sold him for a huge profit. What is bad about that?

As usual with this debate posters' ages really matter. The older folk who saw us languishing with no money saw some tripe. Woy Hodgson era fans saw some very expensive dross.

Davies was crap, but I will never understand why we signed Darren Peacock; one of a long line of awful Newcastle cantre halves that is still being added to.

[Lancs Rover]

This topic is a little depressing...

I'll cheer you up...Norman Bell.

[bluebruce]

The double poke in the eye on the Davies deal was another of our big mistakes

Davies £7m in

Beattie £1m out

Davies Out

Ostensdadt In

Awful business both ways, although I was glad just to get shut of Davies in the end as his Rovers career had been over for a couple of months before he actually left.

I'll see your Paul McKinnon with another awful buy from the past, SEAN CURRY - what an awful player he was.

Damn, I briefly forgot about the fact we lost Beattie in that deal as well as shedloads of cash. God that's one enraging transfer. Somebody said they'd run Dahlin over, but I'd choose Davies. At least Dahlin just got crippled and couldn't do much about it.

[The1mattjansen]

The Grabbi deal HAD to be dodgy, its probably the most blatant dodgy deal in the history of the premiership, £6.5m on a Serie B striker who was scouted with the use of video only.

I just hope that Souness gets caught out somewere down the line and this transfer gets looked into in great detail.

As for the worst signing it is definately Davies without a shadow of a doubt, he had been in England and we all knew all about him, £7.5m at the time was just crazy and he proved that.

I actually thought Grabbi was a talent in some ways but he was never going to make it here as he never had the commitment to do so.

What about all those £4m ish signings under Kidd/Woy

Gillespie

Carsley

Dailly

McAteer

Blake

Ward

Pedersen

Seemed to be the 'in' amount to pay for a player at that time

[rover6]

ou The most useful criteria in this debate, imo, are how predictable was it that the player would flop and how much did we spend on the aforementioned flop?

Using that criteria, Kevin Davies is by no means Rovers worst signing. He was a useful player at Saints - so much so that clubs like Arsenal were inquiring about him but Arsene Wenger publicly stated that he thought Southampton's valuation was ridiculous. Davies had Prem experience and youth and nationality on his side. You can see why we signed him, although the fee was absurd.

Amongst the worst, based on this criteria, are surely Lorenzo Amoruso and Corrado Grabbi (if you agree with my thinking that their chances of success at Rovers were bleak from the outset).

Lorenzo Amoruso was getting out-thought and out-paced by John Hartson the season before we signed him. He was old (32) and Souness admitted that he had problems with maintaining concentration that sometimes lead to farcical errors but was adamant that the Italian would be a positive influence with his leadership qualities, on and off the pitch. WRONG! £2 million was almost as criminal as Birmingham paying Rovers to have Dwight Yorke.

A quick Google search would have told Rovers' scouts that Corrado Grabbi had been bouncing from lower league club to lower league club for the majority of his career after leaving Juve. All of which should have had any interested party suspicious before they found out that Grabbi's exploits at Ternana was his first decent season in Serie B and he had played on the left of a three-pronged attack and had taken a number of penalties to earn him topscorer status and he had played alongside the very useful Fabrizio Miccolli.

Unless your name is Luca Toni, a journeyman striker does not go from journeying to being a £7 million pound superstar.

If we had signed Massimo Maccorone and he had flopped as he has at Boro, you could kind of forgive the scouts and the manager because you could see that at the time the guy was rated as the next big thing in Italy.

Edited September 21, 2006 by rover6

[pleasure]

steve agnew was signed at the beginning on 91/92 season, by don mackay. i think for around 700K, might not seem a lot, but i cant remember him playing a single game.

[92er]

I take it no-one saw John O'Mara?

Worse than any of them.

What a star!

His redeeming feature was that in his first season with us, he helped us avoid going into the 4th Division.

[FourLaneBlue]

ou The most useful criteria in this debate, imo, are how predictable was it that the player would flop and how much did we spend on the aforementioned flop?

You are forgetting how poor they were for us and if they had a negative effect on the club as a whole. Admittedly Grabbi was so poor we had to splash out on Cole but Davies was worse and his influence on the club was solely negative. Grabbi played well in some games and did seem to try. Davies was useless, lazy and seemed to bring the entire club down. Grabbi was a gamble, Davies a disaster...and that's alliteration for you!

Using your criteria the actual performance of the player isn't fully considered...it's just whether they were a flop or not (suggesting each was as bad as each other) and that what they did (or didn't do) before seems as important than they did after. It's surely the effect they had on the pitch and on the club that seals it.

Davies gets the vote...the only redeeming factor is that he seemed to be ill soon after joining, yet I seem to remember even before that he had turned up to pre-season training overweight.

As poor a signing as Grabbi was...Davies wins as worst of the worst.

Edited September 21, 2006 by FourLaneBlue