We just lost a match to a team that have had the same manager for 4 years. Imagine what that must be like. Admittedly I’m writing this full of all kinds of feelings, but the main one is sadness. I don’t want to make any rash declarations, but unless there are changes in the way the embarrassingly amateurish way the club is run I think we are being taken for a ride. I don’t believe the board are bad people, I think that they think they are doing their best, but they just don’t know how a football club should be run. Clearly something went wrong around February and we went into a nose dive and nobody is saying what it was. If the board went for a vote of confidence, would you give it to them?
Evatt 4 years Thomason 4 years Santos 4 years Sheehan 3 years 3 pivotal players for them plus their manager all there for 3 or more years. If we were given a chance to build on something we could achieve success but that's not currently in the clubs DNA.
Quite. And some will say "but if players/managers want to leave, what can we do?" My answer would be the club should do their damndest to create an environment where they want to stay and develop. Just show a little bit of ambition, speculate to accumulate a tiny bit. Otherwise stagnation or worse beckons.
One certain Ipswich player who'll be playing in the Premier next season said he loved the club and the fans but felt the board treated it as a selling club and it was more like a conveyor belt just for selling players with no loyalty on display.
don’t have to imagine mate, that’s what we used to do, mindst, it helps if you pick the right manager first, and if they don’t decide to piss off the first time a higher rated club comes along
So we are now complaining for not sticking with our manager who was taunted from the stands by so called fans who didn’t happen to like his style if football which had got us into the playoffs, let down by certain players who could wait to p&@s off
Woke up feeling miserable this morning and wondering what this board can do other than resign to ignite my interest. If they appointed Guadiola today I’d still be saying yes, but how long for? Same with any signing they were to make. I’ve totally lost confidence in them to make the right decisions. I’m done with it until the board changes.
Bolton have had an identity of bringing in players with an identity, who are performing and still have potential. They’ve got the mix right. We need to do the same. They’ve also got a manager who has bought into that (despite the average Bolton fan telling you they actually don’t like him and will ask for him sacked as soon as they go on poor form). I would approach Wycombe for Matt Bloomfield or Wigan for Shaun Maloney and start from there. Bring in players who are performing but have this ‘resale value’. I listed a few last week. Maloney won’t come, might be a tad ambitious but we need that type of manager.
It’s a real problem and I’m genuinely not sure how we break this cycle. Maybe we can’t. Every manager in recent times has either left because they wanted to and there was nothing we could to stop it. Or because the fans called for them to be sacked. The crux of the problem seems to be judgment around recruitment. This hammer fella. Despite the farcical way it turned out, it just felt like really poor judgment, risking going back to the European gamble. Schopp/Asbaghi territory. They followed a very obvious path with Duff: EFL experience as both player and manager, knows the game. For some reason they changed that approach with Collins and look more than willing to do the same again. At some point the Board have to take responsibility for the judgment in recruiting managers.
