It’s coming up to almost a fortnight now since Leyton Orient announced the departures of forwards, Macauley Bonne and Josh Koroma and if you have been browsing Orient Twitter recently you’ll have no doubt seen the countless tweets from fans clamouring for the club to sign their replacements. Though, bringing in those replacements might prove far from straightforward.
Of course one striker has already been announced in the shape of Conor Wilkinson, whose move from Dagenham and Redbridge was confirmed hours after Bonne’s exit. Although, you’d still expect the club to bring in at least a couple more forwards, with Matt Harrold and the transfer-listed James Alabi being the only other striking options currently on the books.
Replacing 34 league goals will be far from an easy task though and O’s fans must ultimately place their faith in Director of Football, Martin Ling, and his recruitment team, who no doubt will have been well prepared for this scenario and should already have a well scouted shortlist of forwards at their disposal.
However, scouting and finding a striker should prove to be the easy part of the challenge facing Ling and co this summer. The difficulty will arise when the negotiations to actually sign these players begin, as a club like Orient trying to negotiate deals with other clubs after coming into a substantial amount of money, as we have this summer, will prove to be far from plain sailing.
If the reported fees are correct then the sales of Bonne and Koroma will have pocketed The O’s around £700,000 and if that’s something we as fans are well aware of then you can bet that the prospective clubs Orient will be hoping to deal with at the moment and in the future will also know that.
A great example of a club of a similar stature to ours who have experienced these same difficulties is Cheltenham Town, who sold star striker Mo Eisa to Bristol City for a reported fee of just under £1,000,000 last summer.
With that kind of money brought in you’d expect them to have splashed out on a replacement; however the club failed to bring in even one player for a fee last term.
It wasn’t for the want of trying though; you may remember they had a bid knocked back from AFC Fylde for their key man Danny Rowe. The bid of around £175,000 was turned down by Dave Challinor and it’s not difficult to understand the reasoning why.
If The Robins have around £1,000,000 in the bank from the sale of their best player then why should Fylde be expected to settle for well under a quarter of the fee Cheltenham received for Eisa, for their top scorer and this is the kind of difficult negotiating position Martin Ling is currently subject to right now.
In the end Cheltenham managed to replace Eisa with the free signing of experienced striker Luke Varney and the money which could have been used to kick-start a push for the playoff places ended up being kept in the bank, whilst the club had to settle for a 16th placed finish.
All of this comes as a stark warning to any Orient fans who think the job of replacing such talented players as Bonne and Koroma will be an easy one.
Although, the signs of The O’s already being better prepared and savvier than their opening day counterparts when it comes to selling players, can be found in the fact that Orient’s two exits came almost a full month before Eisa’s sale at Whaddon Road, leaving Ling a lot more time for negotiations to take place.
Lee Angol has been linked with a move to E10 over the weekend and with Nigel Travis stating on The Orient Outlook Podcast that we could hear further news on possible arrivals over the next week. The upcoming days could prove pivotal to Orient’s season, as they have the unenviable task of replacing the firepower of Bonne and Koroma, without getting held to ransom by other clubs.
You can follow me on Twitter @BrendanPitcher and you can also find my personal blog here: https://lofc1881.wordpress.com/
