Sorry, aside from the above, I just can’t take you seriously with that ridiculous avatar/signature/piccy thingy. What are you trying to say, that you are some kind of managerial genius who can find the time to ponce about on message boards? You”ll be regaling us with your Pelican Index next.
No I aspire to see us winning the Premier League title, or failing that a nice run in the top half but the difference between me and you is that I understand that it is very unlikely to happen and anything finishing above the bottom three must be considered a success
We have the lowest crowds, one of the lowest wage bills, £60m in debt, and running up massive losses year on year, which can only be prevented by selling players. We have no comparative history at this level – people comparing us to the likes of Blackburn and Bolton is even laughable they were a top flight club 120 years ago, they are bigger towns who have won major honours and have no rugby team competing for their money!
When we first came up to the Premier League we expected to get tonked every week, the only thing that has changed in the above is that we are even more in debt and many of our fans have turned into the same Bertie Big times who exist at every other Premier League club. As I said at the beginning Roberto Martinez has achieved exactly what Jewell & Bruce did, to answer my own question when I started this thread – the difference is that the expectations of fans like you have changed and what was good enough under Jewell is apparently not good enough under Martinez
I’ll be supporting us whatever division we are in pal, just like I always have. As the very sage Old Git put it, every year Little Wigan exist in this division they thumb their noses at the big boys. Long may it continue!
Scholes, I don’t know why you bother – your yed must be killing you, banging it against the wall all day.
I can accept people not being happy that we don’t qualify for the Champions League year in year out. But to be so thick as to not understand that what you are saying is plain fact and is the very reason that we don’t qualify for the Champions League year in year out renders you not worth arguing with.
jayt – to be fair I acknowledged that you had a fair point & if I’m honest its one to which any argument against (including mine) looks a little flimsy
My point was that, without checking through their records, Aston Villa & stoke didn’t concede 70 goals throughout the course of their seasons, nor had they lost previously by a margin of 8 goals, nor had they conceded 4 goals without reply to a team (Pompey) who managed well below a goal a game in their 37 other league games, nor had a less than free scoring Bolton side put 4 past them, nor had they collapsed in similar fashion throughout the season. All of which Latics had.
That’s my reason for saying Sunday was symptematic of our season as opposed to Stoke & Villa’s being one off freak occurrences.
As Andy Gray said during his commentary “to collapse in the manner that they have & to have done so on previous occasions throughout the season to me shows that there is something fundamentally wrong” – I find that statement very, very hard to argue with & the worrying thing is that for all people’s talk of Bobby & the players settling in & being on a learning curve & adapting to a new style of play these results & performances were just as likely to happen at the end of the season as they were at the start.
To me I can’t see any lessons being learnt
We’re at opposite ends of the spectrum here & aint gonna change each others minds
Why is Bruce’s last 6 months in charge being airbrushed from history?
We had a dreadful run of form, which if carried over a season would have seen us relegated.
As for Jewell, didn’t he leave the club after staying up on the last day of the season?
Isn’t it a touch unrealistic to expect any club to relentlessly push forward, sometimes you have to take a step backwards, particularly when there are major management and playing staff changes, the key was to enure that step backwards was not into the Championship.
Steve Bruce had taken a team going down & turned them into one challenging for Europe within a year. With safety all but achieved he had his team sold out from under him when (for the sake of a few months) it should have been kept together until the summer. When this happened he had days to try & make a couple of signings to patch things up
Not only that, but in my opinion the chairman of the club publicly contradicting his manager in selling those players & stating that we were safe & so it was job done & time to build next season’s team had a negative impact both on the outlook of the players (as did Jewell’s insistance on talking about nothing but 40 points even when it was clear we would be staying up from about November onwards).
Having the core of his team taken away did admittedly show up the sparsity his squad & the poor quality of some of his signings but he also had to cope with Cattermole being out for a long stretch & Valencia’s “injury” problems from his first season returning
I believe, and there’s no way of proving this either way, that had Bruce stayed instead of leaving (something for which i don’t blame him one bit) we would have finished this season in a higher league position, with more points & with a better goal difference.
yes it is unrealistic to think we can relentlessly push forward each season as due to the type of club we are there is always goign to be some element of rebuilding going on & Bruce would have been faced with the same problems Bobby was but I believe (if Bruce had stayed) that we may have got less points than we did last season but it’d have been better than this one. I also believe that there would have been an improvement throughout the course of the season. I can’t prove it but its what I’d expect in the “transitional period” that this season was always going to be
Under Bobby however we’ve been consistantly poor. We’ve taken heavy batterings at the start of the season & we’ve taken em at the end of the season. The football was tepid & without urgency at the start of the season & it was tepid & without urgency at the end of the season. His insistance on 1 up front didn’t work for the vast majority of games at the start of the season & it still wasn’t working at the end of the season. The team collapsed at the slightest sign of hard work ahead at the start of the season & it was still doing it at the end of the season.
And that’s my point there has been (IMO) very little progress & the manager doesn’t seem to be learning from his mistakes
Sorry, aside from the above, I just can’t take you seriously with that ridiculous avatar/signature/piccy thingy. What are you trying to say, that you are some kind of managerial genius who can find the time to ponce about on message boards? You”ll be regaling us with your Pelican Index next.[/quote]
id imagine he plays football manager…..and also as a presumption would say he would be quite young. Just because he doesnt rate the signings of scotland or gomez doesnt mean hes jumping on anykind of bandwagon…. talk about welcoming new members of the forum… no wonder theres not many members when people like you start riduling them tit
This argument could be argued all year and be no nearer a correct answer, But can i ask why we are talking about last season when there is a new one in the premiership on its way. Stop looing back and dwelling on the bad times, yes there has been a few but next season everyone starts equal and bobby has his nucleus of who he needs to build around and he knows who they are
id imagine he plays football manager…..and also as a presumption would say he would be quite young. Just because he doesnt rate the signings of scotland or gomez doesnt mean hes jumping on anykind of bandwagon…. talk about welcoming new members of the forum… no wonder theres not many members when people like you start riduling them custard
That’s a fair point, and I apologise to the young man for having a go at him this early in his posting career. You must have liked the Pelican index, though? Very topical.
That said, there is a bandwagon that is being jumped on and I have referred to it many times already this season. It is the one jumped on by many on this board, and in the satdium, who are either too lazy/uninformed to blame everything that is wrong with this past season on Scotland and Gomez. This despite neither of them playing in defence nor, in relative terms, actually playing in that many matches.