Should we sign a midfielder or a striker?

Someone requested this topic so I thought I'd spend a minute on my lunch break to deliberate. As always I look forward to your comments. Ok so Fergie and Gill claimed yesterday that there is still money available to sign 1 or 2 more players. The interesting thing about this statement is that they would not reveal just how much we have to bring in 1 or 2 new players. I think it would be interesting for this one to say that you can buy 1 "superstar" or 2 mediocre players. By superstar I mean £20 million £25 max but bear in mind this could affect future purchases and by mediocre I mean £5 - £10 million each. So get your thinking caps on and as always I’ll kick things off with my suggestions.

First of all it's important to identify our weaknesses. A lot of fans think that we are weak up front after the sale of Ruud Van Nistelrooy. This may be the case but cast your minds back to last season. Rooney and Saha were striking up a great partnership and we were scoring more goals without Ruud in the team. That said it was a nice comfort to have a player such as Ruud able to come on when we were in a sticky situation. With Saha being injury prone, can he go the whole season without him pulling, tearing, ripping or breaking something? I am sceptical.

We do have Rossi, Smith and Solskjaer as backup and yes 2 of those players are coming back from injury and Solskjaer certainly isn’t the force he once was, but I truly believe we will manage with a combination of the 5 of them. I hope Rossi gets more first team action this time around as I think he is a really promising prospect. So for me i think we are ok for Firepower up front.

Now let’s look at the midfield. The centre of the park still looks weak. We have Carrick, Scholes Fletcher and O'shea. I think Fletcher has not delivered despite being given countless opportunities, perhaps a loan spell would help? And so our real options are O'shea, Scholes and Carrick. I struggle to see a ball winner here that has the grit and determination we had in Keane. It also looks weak if one of the above were to get injured. As I have commented before my one superstar signing would be Mascherano at £25 million but for the sake of this article I am going to put forward another approach. Hargreaves is my man. He has played well as the holding player at Munich and his performance against Portugal demonstrated to me that he is not afraid to run up and down the pitch. Yes he was a little clumsy with his tackling, but with some work he could improve that aspect of his game greatly. I think he could be acquired for about £10 million and that would represent a good bit of business in my opinion.

People have neglected our winger’s situation. We have Giggs, Park and Ronaldo as wingers and again this does not provide much cover. For my next signing i would try to lure Morten Gamst Pedersen. He could be acquire for another £10 million and would help our midfield out tremendously. I think this guy has everything. Speed, skill, pace and the ability to cross and pass at will. Ferguson has been a keen admirer for a while now, probably because he has torn us apart on a couple of occasions last season.