It's academic now, but it was three weeks.
The increasing number of injury prone players we are carrying in our defensive ranks is a concern. Making Partey a defender is no solution.
If you're covered by three players such as Partey, Zinchenko and Tomiyasu who are arguably injured 20–50% of the time, you can expect a few matches each season (perhaps 5 or 6) all three will have issues.
The larger number of matches (10 or more) where two or more of the players are likely to be injured increase pressure on your other first choice defenders, leading to fatigue, injury and form issues.
As we saw last season, if you're defensively frail for 5 or 6 matches, you will struggle to maintain a title-winning pace in today's Premier League.
By contrast, even if you only have one or two injury prone defenders and the rest are 90% available, these issues fall away to near zero.
When I talk about "quality cover" I mean defenders who won't be relentlessly targeted if they're on the pitch, and who don't have limitations that force tactical change.
The big error we made this window just gone was not shifting Partey and choosing to treat him as defensive cover.
Partey has very serious off field issues, is heading into physical decline, is injury prone, was coming off the back of a rare injury free season, and he also requires us to make difficult tactical adaptations when he plays in defence, which has already led to dropped points. It's looking like a superficially clever idea that is going to look dumb.
We should sign or loan a high quality right back, which I'm guessing is why we were reported as making futile enquiries for Cancelo as the window closed.
It was still a good transfer window in my book, but failing to get another defender in wasn't great.
