LukeSchmid said:
Of course it matters that GE is going to almost totally one demensional. With 28 riders a team should be able to have a balanced squad. FDJ for example have a well rounded squad yet they are not PT. GE should have signed more climbing talent. I wish GE well and hope they are successful but sadly they are going to be exposed hugely in mountains. This should not happen in a PT squad.
GE look even more one-dimensional than Team HTC-Curl Up And Die And Never Darken My Screen Again High Road. In a sense this is good (HTC-CUADANDMSA High Road would find themselves interjecting themselves into really good races, whereas we can pretty much forget about the presence of GreenEdge at races like País Vasco or Trentino), but in a sense it's pretty depressing, when you realise that Bob Stapleton has produced a team which is more rounded than yours.
LukeSchmid said:
Peter Velits, Kanstantin Sivtsov, Nairo Quintana, Jose Rujano, Remi Di Gregorio, Thomas Rohregger (who might still be available), Linus Gerdemann, Kevin Seeldrayers, Francis De Greef, Morris Possoni, Lachlan Morton (might be too young), Lachlan Norris are all climbers of differing abilities. If they had wanted to have more climbers in the squad I am sure they could have signed more. The names I have mentioned would be worth looking at and enquiring about.
Velits has gone to OPQS, and I'd be very, very surprised if Quintana went. Rujano even more so after his disastrous QuickStep experiment.
Midnightfright said:
I certainly don't find them always exciting, a lot if the time yes but not always. And u never know Greenedge could be super aggresive and exciting.
And what exactly are they going to excite with a team that looks like it consists solely of sprinters and leadout men? My only hope for them providing excitement is that they have too many leadout men and not enough TT-specialist type people to do the break controlling job that people like Grabsch and Siutsou do at HTC and so continually mismanage the break.
Midnightfright said:
I think it has a small influence on selection but particuarly large with regards to SKY certain no more so than a lot of teams. alot of the perception of them being nationalistic comes from the "british tour winner within 5 years"remark.
The problem with Sky was that they deliberately whipped up national fervour to bring support, and you live by the sword you die by the sword, so they are perceived and dismissed as a pseudo-national team even when their selection policies are a lot less overtly national than the likes of GE, Astana, Katyusha or even Movistar - but then, one wonders how much of that is due to the thinner talent pool (as opposed to, say, Movistar or Rabobank, as though those Britons at the top may be at the very top in the case of Wiggins and Cavendish, we'll see wrt Froome, there are more Spaniards and Dutchies who are of WorldTour calibre, and only the most ardent of patriots could possibly disagree with me there) and how much is due to a less nationality-based selection policy full stop.