Early days but it does feel like a signing that was not thought through properly. He's gone from playing for a dominant team in a relatively inferior league to a struggling team in one of Europe's top leagues. That step-up in level alone made it a risky signing - especially at £17,000,000 - and one that was never likely to work instantly (if at all), even before you introduce other factors such language barrier, coming off the back of a winter break and now War in his homeland.
Given our lack of options at left-back and the situation we were in, we really should have signed someone ready to hit the ground running, even a solid stop-gap like Matt Targett on loan (instead of El-Ghazi) to consolidate our Premier League status and then sign Digne's long-term replacement in the summer. It's easy to say this is all hindsight but to me it is/was just rational, joined-up thinking. The only plausible/sensible scenario for signing Mykolenko would have been 6-12 months prior to Digne leaving, to allow him time to bed in, which was presumably the thinking with Patterson/Coleman.
