Selling best players and failing to replace them on any level isnt connected to a drop in form? Are you joking? Are all your posts combative and segues to preaching your beliefs?
Except that isn't what you said. You said "Clearly we were never going to replace the likes of Modric or Bale", and only now I just realized I misread the 'were' as an 'are'. Oops, sorry, my bad.
Poor football certainly played a role in the loss and this season, the bigger problem is we simply havent replaced the attacking talent sold. A very difficult thing to do considering our salary issues, however Id at least liked to have seen some young players who one day could step up purchased with the money. At this stage the 100 million would have been better plowed into the stadium than on who we bought.
We have replaced Bale; Eriksen is filling his role pretty damn well and I'm confident Lamela will too, provided we employ a manager who isn't stupid enough to keep him out of the squad for Aaron Lennon. Just because they're not the exact same type of player as Bale, scoring thunderbolts on a consistent basis and all, doesn't mean they're not replacements.
I do however agree we haven't replaced Modric and that's something we desperately need. We've stocked up on plenty of attacking midfielders, box-to-box midfielders & defensive midfielders, but none of them can play the deep playmaker role that controls the game. I don't think any of the players we bought were bad or not worth the money, but I do believe we should've targeted someone different to say, Paulinho.
There's literally no problem in regards to spending the Bale money in one window. The manager isn't forced to squeeze all the new signings into the team at once, the idea is to analyze the squad you have at your disposal and pick what you consider to be the best starting 11; and that's something Villas-Boas failed at.