Consider the following...
MAF clearly knew well in advance that he was going to sell - he had ejected from Harrods too.
Hence lack of investment
Perhaps ironically Mark Hughes was one of the first to 'get this'?
Any change of ownership of a club leads to considerable upheaval.
Most businesses / NGO's / enterprises fail because of poor management / Board / trustee decisions.
Not because of their staff, or in this case the players ability.
Imagine being a player, and having to put up with all this chaos.
So the current grim position has been evolving for two years.
As the much loved Mark Lawrenson wrote over the w/e it is almost a text book case of how not to run / manage a football club
But we will beat Everton despite all this! And may just make it?
No
It is *EVERYONES* fault. Everyone involved in the senior team has failed spectacularly over the past 18 months, with foundations set three years ago.
I am not sure i entirely agree with you.
we have spent money, quite a lot of it..... mitroglu, ruiz and berba. to mention but three.... all wasted... if that money had been invested more sensibly we would certainly not have been in the current situation.
I feel for owners when they see money simply poured down the drain, i do not blame them for not just handing over unlimited sums!
The players DO have to look at themselves, all they have to do is train and give the maximum on the pitch, I am not sure all our guys have really done that. clearly ruiz and berba didn't exactly bust blood vessels for the team, and actually at the risk of bringing the wrath of the though police down on myself as usual, parker hasn't really put in that much effort on a consistent basis, he looked good and showed what he was actually capable of when he was made interim captain, but since then he has been very low key.
What I think you describe is more a general feeling that all has neio ben well for some time, actually it coincides with mr jol's appointment and the fact he undid all the good work that had gone before. imagine that he could fall out with a very easy going ray lewington. jolwas really the issue and for whatever reason MAF kept him and IMO that was MAF's biggest error.
regarding everton, we have to beat them and we need to show a little more adventure than we did against man city, we need kasami and holtby to start.
MAF not investing because he was selling misses the point that since the fallout with Tigana he only authorised serious spending twice and that was when we were in clear danger of relegation.
The change or ownership hasn't helped but I think the most significant factor has been complacency and that's from top to bottom.
It may even be the inevitable consequence of being in a comfort zone for a few years and being mid table with little risk and nothing to aim for.
The owner doesn't want to spend, the fans are happy with mid table, the manager doesn't aspire to better and the players tell themselves they're good enough and go through the motions.
Everyone has needed a kick up the backside.
we will have had 14 seasons in the PL to establish ourselves as a 'permanent member' and clearly that hasn't happened, but apart from the BIG FOUR is there such a thing? as the Club goes along in life things change as they do and this time around it isn't for the better, but to lay blame for this is probably unfair.
Stuff happens...
Quote from: TonyGilroy on March 24, 2014, 02:53:25 PM
MAF not investing because he was selling misses the point that since the fallout with Tigana he only authorised serious spending twice and that was when we were in clear danger of relegation.
The change or ownership hasn't helped but I think the most significant factor has been complacency and that's from top to bottom.
It may even be the inevitable consequence of being in a comfort zone for a few years and being mid table with little risk and nothing to aim for.
The owner doesn't want to spend, the fans are happy with mid table, the manager doesn't aspire to better and the players tell themselves they're good enough and go through the motions.
Everyone has needed a kick up the backside.
if ever there was a great truth, it is your last sentence...
MAF wanted us to be the 'Man Utd of the South' originally [his dream, not necessarily the fans']. When he gave us what we wanted, a return to the Cottage, I think he tailored his spending to what could be achieved with those restrictions, spending beyond that when only when needed, as was pointed out earlier.
We got what we wanted back then and great times followed, but now if we don't need a kick up the backside then everything needs a good shakeup at least.
There have been many factors leading to our demise including under investment, the change of ownership and poor management.
But even with all that, the squad was almost certainly the strongest we have ever had and they ought to have kept us safe just by playing on cruise control. Too many players have played way below the form we should expect.
Whilst accepting that all the knockabout stuff, which has provided the rest of the football world with such a good laugh, has, at the same time, been entirely detrimental to our well-being, I would lay the major blame for our fiasco of a season on the players.
After all it has not been mustachioed billionaires, besuited executives, or any of a squad of manager/coaches who have been out there failing to mark, misplacing passes, losing possession, not locating the goal and generally going about their task in a half-arsed fashion.
I know it's easy to be smart after the event, but I now feel that, although our squad initially looked good on paper there are at least a couple of reasons why we were fooling ourselves.
Although the names looked OK, we lacked quality in certain important areas - the most obvious being the inability to create anything from midfield.
The other problem was the oft referred to age question. It was known that we had an old squad. It is further known that players tend to deteriorate rapidly when they move past thirty (this tends to be obscured slightly by those few exceptional players like Giggs and Scholes).
All our thirty somethings apart from Sidwell (possibly Karagounis) have had very disappointing seasons. It was our bad luck that nearly all our veterans fell off at the same time.
