Chris Lepkowski: Luke Dowling failed West Brom in the transfer market
West Brom have failed to show any Premier League quality this season and Chris Lepkowski has attributed a large part of their failings down to Luke Dowling.
Despite switching managers from Slaven Bilic to Sam Allardyce in December there has been little upturn in form which has left Albion eight points behind 17th with only 10 games to go.
Speaking on The Liquidator Podcast [08/03/21] former Birmingham Mail journalist Lepkowski hit out at West Brom technical director Dowling for failing to assemble a strong squad.
He said: “Luke Dowling must be sat there cringing that the best players in our side at the moment, certainly outfield players, are all loanees.
“It’s not particularly complimentary to him because these are players that don’t belong to us, they’ll be going back to their clubs at the end of the season.
“It goes to show just how poor our permanent signings were last summer and when we talk about why has this season happened, why are we in this mess, you can trace it back to lockdown last year.
“We did nothing productive in terms of improving the quality of the team. You can pinpoint our season down to that.”
Harsh words but Lepkowski is absolutely bang on in our view.
Okay Yokuslu has come in and shone since his deadline-day arrival in February while Conor Gallagher has been a rare bright spark during the whole campaign.
Both are on loan deals from Celta Vigo and Chelsea respectively while they are joined in the midfield by another temporary recruit, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, who has moved from Arsenal until the end of the season.
Even Mbaye Diagne has offered some hope since his loan switch from Galatasaray in January despite his lack of goals.
In complete contrast our permanent signings have been nothing short of woeful.
Karlan Grant [£14.85million] and Grady Diangana [£12.5million] were brought in for a combined fee of over £25million [Transfermarkt] but they been a disaster.
They have only scored one goal apiece while both have failed to register an assist and they find themselves on the fringes now.
If Big Sam’s job is under threat Dowling should be looking over his shoulder too.
In other West Brom news, our view on why Mbaye Diagne must be dropped.
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