: Thu Sep 24, 2009 12:53 pm
Like the majority on here I'm disappointed to see Boyle being let go but will hold fire on too much criticism and see how this pans out in the long term. Of the others can't say I'm too bothered.
What does concern me is the apparent planned size of next years squad.
5 first team players have been let go and so far 2 have been signed. Matterson is quoted as saying that he plans to bring in 'a couple more'.
It doesn't take a maths genius to see that leaves us a player down on this seasons squad that most people considered too small, albeit we were relatively lucky with injuries this season (not having more than 3 or 4 out at any 1 time) so got away with it.
The promoting of junior players to the first team squad was used as a bit of a smoke screen with our squad size this year. Although we had 27/28 players given a first team squad number around 7 of these were juniors who Matterson clearly didn't want to risk in Superleague as they got very little if any game time.
I can't help but look at the number of players the likes of Wakey and Hull had to do without for much of this season. In the early part of the season Wakey had 8-10 players out injured for a number of weeks but were able to put a side on the field that was not only competitive but actually won a fair number of games.
If Cas had 8 or more of our first team out injured this season we'd have been about as good as Celtic and won about as many games! It doesn't look like that situation is about to be improved in 2010.
