I didn't hear anyone crying out for Jelavic or Cisse at the time.
Some gambles pay off, you know. But I'd say if we'd have signed either the pressure on their shoulders coming to a (at the time) title challenging club would have been much greater. Especially as neither would have probably started straight away, they'd be subs where we'd expect them to immediately come on and score 3 goals every game.
It's questionable whether their arrival would have been as explosive for us.
I'm pretty sure quite a few people were saying we should sign Cisse and I remember being quite disappointed when he signed for Newcastle instead
Jelavic I'd never heard of, but his goal scoring record has always been impressive so how much of a gamble was it at the price he went for really? more than the constantly injured Saha?
He contributed yes but not nearly enough, Cisse was a sensation for Newcastle. The type of form he showed for Newcastle had he produced the same for us I'd suggest we wouldn't be waiting on the outcome of the CL final nor having to face a play off to get in to the group stages (prize money which would have offset the investment)Saha still made his contribution this season, at times linking up with Ade better than Defoe ever has done.
He still went for £5.5m pounds. That's over 30% of what we've spent in the last two seasons. The difference between being able to sign someone for £20m or £25m come the Summer. I'm still not a fan of the January window for doing useful business. It's only that these two stand out massively as successes compared with previous windows.
I still think it's down to expectations as well. I'm not sure Newcastle fans had any of Cisse, they were happy with Ba. (Bearing in mind I'm only gleaning this off two of my mates at work who are Toon fans). I think Everton were happy with signing anyone as it had been like 2 years since they actually bought a player (there was that website "time since Everton signed a player" with a load of countdown clocks!!).
With us, we'd have expected an instant goal return and had it not been forthcoming, would he have been casted to the flops? And the crowd start to get antsy?
All transfers are gambles. And at the time, I didn't see the need for that level of gamble.