I am sure that Steve Parish will readily accept that the buck stops with him.

That said, I really don't think he sets out a strategy of proscrastinate and delay before the 'Window'opens for tactical reasons.By their very nature, transfer negotations can be complex,protracted and frustrating and sometimes depends on the movement of players in the clubs with which one is dealing.In effect one can get into a 'Chain' which only adds to the complexity.I'm sure a lot of supporters of various clubs are frustrated by a lack of transfer activity and apporting culpability.

Is the above the reason we started on Tosun and Niasse so late in the last window?

That chain reason and us approaching so late was a reason why it wasn't going to happen, along with the payment schedules. Apply that to Niasse as well, whether his knees were an issue or not, left us zero minutes to look elsewhere.

See the point? It's a priority and a damn critical one.

I appreciate that from the outside there can be a certain negative impression formed and Parish would be the first to admit if mistakes were made but let's not jump to conclusions without being privy to all the facts.

The facts that we are all privy to is that Brighton, Everton, Southampton and Swansea all needed strikers as well as us and Brighton, Everton and Southampton have signed one each leaving just Swansea and ourselves still waiting

Steve Parish on last minute transfer deals

"A lot of transfers happen at the end of the window, people come to terms with that's the best deal a club's going to get and they're not going to get any more for the player," Parish explained. "People are looking at all their options up to then. Sometimes when you bid for a player, some people just take the bid and punt it around. Unless you give them a bid that they are definitely, absolutely, not going to get from anyone else, why are they going to sell that player to you? They might wait to see if they get a better bid, unless they think there's an imperative that you're going to go somewhere else and then you get all the noise in the papers."

The January transfer window is a notoriously difficult market to do business in and I have no doubt that the club is doing all it can. It must be just as frustrating to SP as it is to us.