Relegation a Probability

With one game to play to reach the halfway mark of the season BFC will need 32 points from the 24 games remaining to avoid relegation. The last three seasons the teams in 20th position have totalled 52pts, 50 pts and 51 pts. If you divide the games into 4 blocks of 6, to achieve safety we would need to win 2 draw 2 and lose 2. When you take into consideration that in 14 of the 22 games played the defence have conceded 2 or more goals this means that we need to score 3 in most of the games to gain maximum points. Cryne has also stated that he will not sack another manager so the club will be left with Johnson who lacks neither the man management or tactical skills needed, leaving another relegation highly likely.
Cryne has surrounded himself by a management team of his old buddy Watkins who has many interests outside of the club, football agent Mansford who sold Cryne the idea of employing his buddy Johnson and Taylor whose main interests lies in furthering his position at the FA with the old farts in suits running the Football Association. The club policy of developing young players to sell on will not work when the management are unable to value the worth of such players and therefore unable to obtain a realistic fee. Even if Johnson was sacked how many managers would be willing to work under the present management policy and with a team made up of several loan players.

The club have been in decline since Watkins became the chairman in 2013 and declared “ Barnsley means business” and Cryne compounded the situation when he engaged agent Mansford. Not many passionate statements or rallying calls to give supporters hope coming out of Oakwell. Even Johnson has taken to having a pop at the fans (a la KH) when they sing a song he does not like. The board fail to realise the apathy among supporters whose numbers will fall in the bottom division and many may never return. The longer Cryne remains owner the longer the club will be in decline, it needs major changes at the top.

 

Good post Mr Van Basten!

Agree with it all

 

Me too.

 

All good points that you make but this business of people leaving and not coming back because the club is sinking down the pyramid isn't really true. Yes, some will stop going but then, at the first hint of success, they will be back in their thousands claiming they have been life long fans.

Looking back to my early days of following the Reds the club got to as low as it could possibly get with the imminent threat of closure and gates barely topping 2,000. A miracle happened (Buckle/Dennis led to Thomas/Evans) and the club began to climb again. The Allan Clarke/Norman Hunter revolution kicked us on a bit more and so on, and so on.

The point is that the crowds increased as soon as the team started winning matches. It's normal, or rather it WAS normal in the past. I appreciate that with it being more expensive these days there will be some who stop and never start again. On the other hand the club will attract new followers. This has happened at many other clubs and will happen at Oakwell.

We go round in cycles, decade by decade. Ups, downs, ups, downs etc. There's nothing new in this situation we are in now. The game stays the same; it's just the names that change.

 

I see your point PoR but back in the dark days the club was on it's arse and like you say very close to folding so it came as little surprise to be where we were in the league whereas now we're in a league where we have one of the biggest budgets, one of the best set-ups, one of the biggest crowd bases and we're in a complete mess. Incompetence and lack leadership is what is tearing us apart now and it is this that is driving life long fans away. Some of the fans who are calling it a day have been going 40 / 50 years so have seen good and bad times.

 

32 points from 24 games.
1.33 points per game
Equivalent to a 61 point season. Mid table

If the season started with the next game and you knew that finishing below mid table would see us relegated, honestly, are you confident that we will stay up? I'm not.

We know therefore that January's transfer window is as vital as any the club has had in recent memory. Are you confident we will bring in the right players? I am not. I am not confident the right players will even be available, the January window is notoriously hard to do business in.

Do you trust LJ with the responsibility of identifying the players to get us to that mid table form position for the second half a season. Do you trust him to get the tactics right enough times to put that kind of form in? Because if he doesn't we are going down.

 

I don't trust lee johnson with deciding whether to put the **** roll over or under

 

Ernest Dennis and Geoff Buckle invested £10,000 of their own money to buy Thomas and Evans when the club had a £43,000 overdraft, and not in the form of a loan to be repaid. Unfortunately there is no one of that calibre on the board today. In the late seventies under Clarke we had gates of 15,000 and 21,000 in the Fourth Division when the pits were still open, can't see that happening in League Two next season.

 

All I'm trying to say is that the club has been down to the bottom of the Fourth Division, with no money and less than 2,000 fans at some games. I know coz I was there! There will have been people in the town then saying much the same as some are now. Remembering better days in the old Second Division with big crowds to match and saying "I'm done with it" etc etc. But people come back once the fortunes turn round. It will get worse but then it will get better again . It always does

 

Not always, ask Grimsby fans, or Stockport fans !!

 

This is what I'm afraid of. I can't see a way "up". It hurts. We are better than this but how long we got to suffer

 

Ah but we're not Stockport, or Grimsby, or Barrow, or Southport, or any of those.

I have every confidence that we will bottom out soon and it will probably involve finishing in a lowly position in this division, not going to the one below. Then it will get better. Honest

 

Happy clappers make me laugh....how naive.

Hth

 

you can get 5/2 ,With Billy Mountains,for us to get relegated get down there and make your fortune

 

We are getting to that stage now where a gap will start to appear between the bottom 4 and the rest of the table, and we are currently in the bottom 4 with no signs of us getting out.
If Cryne actually cares about BFC still then he needs to act now.

 

You are right we aren't any of those right now. If we get relegated this year there's nothing to say we might not end up like those clubs pretty quickly.