O'neill : "Signings Will Come"

[andy villa]

Martin O'Neill is happy to continue playing the waiting game for the right players, but has no doubts he will bolster the Villa squad before the end of the month. The Villa boss has added Nigel Reo-Coker and Marlon Harewood to the squad this summer, while Steven Davis, Aaron Hughes, Gavin McCann, Jlloyd Samuel, Lee Hendrie and Chris Sutton have all moved on or retired and Liam Ridgewell is on the verge of a move to Birmingham City.

O'Neill though will not be panicked into purchases and today insisted: "Rest assured, we will have the players in. There are things in place at this moment. How many? It is hard to say but by the end of the window I would not want to be outnumbered in the sense of who has gone out and who has come in, so we have a few to bring in. "I am in the throes of acquiring some more players at the moment. I have allowed some players to go and the chairman has allowed me to run the football club in the fashion I am doing."

O'Neill admits he has had to undertake a game of cat-and-mouse to get the players he wants at the right value. "I would prefer to wait a bit longer for the choices I made. Prices dictate. In an ideal world I would have liked to have had a couple of other players in but between now and transfer deadline, we will have them in. I am absolutely sure." The Villa boss added: "The fans will think we are losing some players and the reinforcements have not come in - but they will be there," he said. "Sometimes prices dictate a few things. I don't mind paying slightly over the odds for someone. I don't mind paying over the odds in a market where that is what people are doing. But sometimes when it is an enormous amount, I'll have to maybe reconsider. "It is trying to get in the players I want and it's trying to get value for money. If the two equate, great. I am trying to run a club as dilligently as I can but at the same time am aware if you don't compete, you don't count. It is a balancing act. "I haven't missed out on any of the main targets," said O'Neill. "It is just that the price keeps changing and it is me coming to terms with it. It does make it a bit more difficult but not impossible." "There is no point in me carping on about November and December of last year when we had a severely depleted squad and finding out we are doing exactly the same this time around."

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good news...

while some fans are getting impatient, and i can understand that for me, we will have improved....

20 mil net spent in under 12 months is brilliant... thats four years of spending under the old regime...

and while i can understand some of the views floating about born through frustration and wanting us to improve drastically, (dont we all!), and i can see the pure numbers the incoming and outgoings can bring about a certain conclusion, i can see that under the damage done by the old regime (which for me, sort of undermines the brilliant work already done by the board and manager in terms of the playing squad), that we need a lot more incoming quality players before we can compete where we want to....

but i can also see the other side where we have improved the overall squad in terms of better players than we had before, and also the type of players we have brought in... pacy, hard working fighters who will make us even harder to beat than the side that only 3 sides lost less than last term and will hopefully improve the form of a side that when we had the players brought in during january, from then (ish) onwards, we had the second best form in the league...

i dont think we should get overly negative about other clubs spending a lot of money.... the way i see it (and this is my personal opinion and no one has to agree with me), the way i see it is that we are building a very solid squad this term... we will be difficult to play against for any side in the prem... from that very solid squad, and the message sent out this season after our transfers, we will not get mugged everytime we go in for a player because we havent let ourselves be held to ransom and have been professional in our dealings... in the future, (and im not trying to use the "wait and see" excuse), but in the future, we can then add players of much better quality to an already solid squad and that will be progression upon progression...

for me, the best metaphor i can think of for how i think we are doing things, is to build solid foundations for a structure that can infinately be built upon... we are not spending a lot of money on an expensive flash bungalow, then finding out later that the structure isnt solid enough to extend on... the way i see it, is that we are building a block of luxury apartments and can add onto that solid foundation at any point, but at the moment, we are still in the process of making the foundations as solid as possible in order to have the capacity to build further, at a later date.....

agree or disagree with my personal opinions on our squad, but one thing i think we can all agree on, is that the club is in a much healthier state than it was this time twelve months ago....

and for that, i am delighted...