Speaking ahead of the first home game of the Championship season and after a busy deadline day, Lee Bowyer spoke to the press about facing Stoke City, The new signings, Lyle Taylor and being relegation favourites.
Bowyer's full press conference will be available on Valley Pass. Valley Pass costs just £6.50 per month or £60 for the year and you can sign-up here.
Below are some of the talking points from the press conference.
On playing Stoke…
"Again, they’ve strengthened their squad. They’ve got a good manager and they’ve got good team. They’ve got some good individuals obviously [Mark] Duffy’s just gone there from Sheffield United. A very good player, he’s someone that we were looking at. It’s going to be tough, every game is going to be tough for us. But we’ll try and compete, and we’ll see where we are at the end of the day."
On injuries...
"Chuks (Aneke) trained with us yesterday and again today. It might be a little early for him. But I’ll speak to the physio today after training and see where he’s at. We’ve got a game on Tuesday too, haven’t we."
On the new signings...
"I’m delighted obviously with all the signings, I think they’re all good. I’ve got some youth, I’ve got some experience and we’ve got a lot of Premier League experience. Regarding Josh (Cullen), obviously we know him inside out. We thought that it wasn’t a possibility. We got told all the way along that Josh wouldn’t be leaving West Ham. So, for him to become available towards the end was a big surprise, and a welcome surprise!
"I was delighted to get him back because I know what he brings to us from last season.
"With Beram (Kayal), I can’t believe that he came. Brighton helped us out so much in getting him through the door. So I’m grateful to them obviously but to have someone with his experience and knowledge of the game, he’s a very, very good player. So he, like Sam Field, is going to bring Premier League experience.
"All the lads we have signed are winners. Jonathan Leko, he’s our wildcard. He’s the one who I think is going to bring something different, something that we haven’t got here. He’s very good. I think the fans are going to take to him, in a different way to Josh Cullen and Beram and Sam Field, because they’re just midfielders and they do the stuff that people don’t really recognise and obviously they like wingers and strikers that bring something different.
On more players coming in...
"We will be looking in the free agent market. We need a right back but I didn’t want to use one of my loan spaces on a right back. There’s a few right backs out there on a free so we’re going to be looking into that.
"Looking at the squad on the board compared to this time last week, it’s completely different and we’re a hell of a lot stronger now."
On Lyle Taylor…
"Lyle stayed. That’s massive to us, (Roland Duchatelet) could have easily taken that money. I don’t know how many bids they made in the end… six, seven. But they made a very good offer for Lyle, keep in mind that we paid nothing for him. The last one they made, I thought was the one that we were going to lose him but the owner said no.
"It was my job to tell him (the owner) that if we’d lost Lyle Taylor, we would have been in big trouble. That’s obvious to see. I told Lyle that he’s a massive player for us and with the money that we’d have been paid, we couldn’t replace him. It’s impossible, even if we’d have gotten the money that we turned down we still couldn’t have replaced Lyle."
Bowyer's full press conference will be available on Valley Pass. Valley Pass costs just £6.50 per month or £60 for the year and you can sign-up here.