Progress: Getting Out Of An Even Bigger Hole This Season?

That seems to be where we're headed. Given how narrowly we dodged the drop last year, we'll be very fortunate to do so again.

Flicker is presently doing worse than Wrecking Ball was doing at this stage of last season. I can't think that Ritchie or Davey were doing any worse when they were let go. If this squad has the spirit and abilty to win games (and I have some doubts on present form) then the current management staff are not extracting it from them.

Five years on from his league debut, one of our most promising youngsters is loaned to Scunny despite having shown great presence and versatility in his limited opportunities. Another is mixing it at international level with youngsters from the likes of Chelsea and Man U but can't get a place in our struggling midfield. I'd sooner see these lads learn on the job with us rather than going elsewhere to learn lower league habits.

Cofie, Rose, Patterson, Oates and Hassell have barely kicked a ball between them despite our woeful results thus far. Jennings looks like a mistake, and Nyatanga is pitching for the Phil Gridelet Trophy.

How much longer?

 

It's a funny one though, how do you sack a manager who hasn't actually lost us a game for a while? Especially when you're manager of Barnsley.

I'm behind Flitcroft all the way but what he says in the media and what actually happens are too different things. If he is going to take us down then it might have been better for us to have lost every game in the last month and expedited the arrival of his successor.

Not sure what anyone else could do without significant investment (which I just cannot see being available), some of the players who were brilliant at the end of last season have to take some blame. But there is an over-reliance on Chris O'Grady who will certainly get into the mid-teens in terms of goals but not over-20. And as good as McCourt is, we need to have more attacking options up our sleeve. The defensive strategy is working to a point, as in we aren't shipping loads of goals like we were, but it is stifling our attacks.

That said, the Donny game was a freak, we had enough chances to win that game by a big margin, and we should probably have beat Ipswich and Wednesday as well so you can't say Flicker is doing a terrible job but drawing these games does nothing. A point when you are down there just makes no difference.

 

The main flaw in that, and all the other arguments tthat seek to compare the hole we were in last season is that the hole (in points terms) wasn't that big (this isn't an attempt to say Hill shouldn't have been sacked). The point is the miracle that followed wasn't the overhauling of the 4 points to get out of the relegation places, it was because of the unprecedented points total it eventually needed to stay up. Every time we won, everyone around us won. Teams started pulling results from nowhere and pulling away from us but whenever the cause seemed lost (Bristol City away, Derby at home) we would pick ourselves up and go again.

One win and we are out of the bottom three.

 

That's fair comment, Ark. But the fact is that whatever the 'safe' total has been, every season since we came back up we have been hard up against it. The 'one win' would be fair if we could string more than one together. As it is, it's more likely one win, then two losses and a draw and back in it - then the whole sequence starts again.

And all the while the football is p*** poor because we lack passion, leadership and cohesion.