I am glad we signed Antony and Casemiro. That does not mean that we can pretend that these were not panic buys. If we had not been humiliated by Brentford and Brighton in the first couple of games, I don't think we'd have signed either. Casemiro is arguably the exact player that we needed but he would have been available all summer, so why else would we have waited until late August to do the deal? There were also no rumours linking us to him and we spent the entire summer chasing de Jong and then were very fortunate Rabiot priced himself out of a deal. Admittedly, the only other explanation is that we were working through a list of targets which somehow had Casemiro as third choice in the position but given what we know about our recruitment/scouting teams, that is not beyond the realms of possibility.
Antony is slightly different given the early window noise shows we were clearly interested, but unsure we'd have pulled the trigger if we'd been sat top of the league after 2 games. The panic element is also reflected by the fact that we ended up overpaying.