Ex Leeds United man on transfer challenge, Crysencio Summerville saga and Newcastle United spend

With Marcelo Bielsa and the parameters they have to work within, it’s doubly difficult.

The ‘new’ players who can bolster us are actually the ones in the treatment room and, when they get back fit, I’m sure they’ll be enough and do a job and we’ll be safe.

From a fan’s point of view, you always want to bring in a player, but clubs always want the right player at the right price and January is never normally that good for that.

Sometimes you’ve got a gap or a hole that needs fixing but put the wrong player in there and it becomes a real problem.

There’s the club, the manager, there’s so much to take into consideration when a new player arrives. When I went to new clubs, there were lots of things you didn’t quite know about until you got there. The amount of due diligence and research they do nowadays limits the unknown a bit more, but, even so, you can’t quite be sure. In football, at this point in time, the stats and data can be overwhelming. What they don’t tell you about is a player’s character, his private life and if he’s in the ‘right place’ to make the move. It’s important to have a network to answer those questions as well.

There was a young Stoke player, I think he was just 12 or 13, and he was given a data pack after one of his games, with all these numbers and he was 200m shy of his distance covered in the previous game, which really concerned him. I hear that and I think ‘oh my God, you’re missing the point here’. Those are numbers; you need to look at the game, how did you play, who were you up against and so many other factors. Data is just one part of it, which can sometimes be lost. I’m sure the powers that be at Leeds are using a lot more than numbers.

The way it happened in the ‘old days’ in English football was that you signed players the manager wanted. I’ve played in Europe where they have a director of football and he’s very much in charge of things on the recruitment side. Here, at Leeds, Victor Orta is extremely important in finding and picking players but it feels very much like the last word is Bielsa’s.

We’ve seen it before that new players come in and they don’t start because they’re quite far away in terms of where they need to be, whether it’s fitness or tactical. For someone to come in at the end of January and take weeks and weeks to become ready would be a problem because then the season is almost over, so you can see perhaps why we’ve been quiet in this window.

One bit of non-business that I thought was good was Crysencio Summerville staying put at Leeds. I thought he was superb when he came on at West Ham United in the FA Cup.

I know a couple of youngsters started that game but he looked to be on that next step of the journey. He has to learn from his previous experiences and to build upon it you need to play more games - Cody Drameh obviously decided the best way to do that was to go to Cardiff City - but, in the present situation, I think Summerville was right to stay and the club were right to keep him. It’s not as if we’ve got a lot of bodies hanging around the place, surplus to requirements.

Because we’ve had so many injuries, this rest period has been welcome at Leeds. I’m sure they’ll be working overtime this week as they prepare for Aston Villa and beyond that we’ll be getting players back in dribs and drabs, so we’ll get stronger towards the end of the season. It’s all a calculated gamble to make sure we stay up, but what we’ve done so far, despite the problems we’ve had, makes me certain we’ll only get better. That will be enough. There are teams out there worse than us.

Newcastle United went out and spent big - even when you’ve got money it’s difficult to spend and how wisely they’ve spent it let’s wait and see - and clearly they’ve overpaid here and there but you can see why they’ve done it. Bruno Guimarães will be an interesting one to watch, if he settles straight away, and one or two others are plainly Premier League players of experience. No doubt they will get better but they need to get better pretty quickly. Other than that, no one else has really ‘gone for it’.

The deal I was really pleased to see was Christian Eriksen returning to football with Brentford. I actually commentated on that Denmark game where he collapsed and that was a really difficult time. Trying to say something half sensible when that was going on was tough. He’s back, he’s healthy and, hopefully, he gets another chance.