| Injuries on 21:34 - Oct 21 by TK1 |
This bit is not true, though is it:
"I understand why they did it and what they were working against, but for me there was too much acceptance of mediocrity under Les and Lee's regime - basically we've got the 15th best budget in the Championship and so we finish 15th and can never aspire to or hope for more."
In 2019, they seized control of footballing appointments from the board after McLaren, appointed Warburton and finished 13th.
Encouraged, they invested in the team and finished 9th in 2020-21. But for Covid, who knows?
Encouraged even further, they invested again and really went for it. Manager, players, LF all spoke about it. They weren't doing what you describe at all. They were more explicit than anyone at club now, other than Dunne. Finished 11th. Disappointing.
But those three seasons are all better finishes than Nourry's three placings. They went for it again the next season with Beale and, well, it cost them their jobs. Not Hoos, obviously. He gave himself a promotion. But the others.
Worth pointing out that that 2020-21 play-off push was badly derailed by injuries too. It's not just happened under Ben Williams (I also have strong muscle memories of managers stretching back from Holloway through Francis to Jim Smith all saying "I've never known an injury crises like this...").
Let's not be revisionist. Nourry and Stephan are no more ambitious than Ferdinand and Warburton, their standards no higher. Imagine trying to tell either Les or Warbs you felt that. It's rubbish.They just have more money to play with. For now.
No need to invent recent history. |
Well, look, I agree with this bit... - "Nourry and Stephan are no more ambitious than Ferdinand and Warburton, their standards no higher. Imagine trying to tell either Les or Warbs you felt that. It's rubbish.They just have more money to play with. For now."
The rest of it, I think that was a 12-month hot streak in a near ten year period.
And, yeh, they suddenly started talking about "we don't want bids for our players" and "play-offs have to be the aim" for that brief period in the second half of lockdown and then when the grounds re-opened. They made a number of decisions round there that really hamstrung us for a long time.
But for the 18 months before that, under Warburton, pre-lockdown, and during it, I would go in there and Warbs would harangue me afterwards about how I didn't realise how tough it was for him picking Conor Masterson on £xk a week v Loyal Taylor and Lewis Grabban on £xk a week. Lee Hoos was putting graphs of FFP explainers on the official website. Warburton was brought in here to clear the McClaren mess (and hsi expensive team of men) and rebuild it on a lower budget - we did 16 in and out that summer, on a lower budget.
The investment for 20/21 was basically Dykes, Bonne, Dickie, Willock. Hardly pushing the boat out having sold Eze. (TransferMarket says we spent £5.8m on eight signings with Amos and Willock undisclosed)
We ended up with us finishing red hot with Johansen/Field/Austin/De Wijs etc were loaned in a bit of a panic in January but for half that season we were largely terrible, with Dykes and Bonne up front. We went ten games over nearly three months without a win, it was fcking miserable. I remember after we lost to Swansea (funnily enough) they accidentally left the camera facing the SARS stand and Hoos and Les were clearly having a long conversation, where we all thought Warbs was gone.
They finished that season strongly with good loans. They really went for it the following year, lost their minds a bit, kept the show on the road until January when it fell apart. Those are our two best finishes of this 11 year period, but it is an 11 year period. Chris Ramsey, kept on because quote Les the job was to get rid of the high earners and stabilise in the Championship, Ian Holloway told to pick youth and get rid of the Onuoha Robinson types.
Beale, yeh, they gave him the keys, again made loads of promises to get him here that they shouldn't, but I don't remember any talk of that being a promotion season until we started so remarkably. Quite the opposite, I sat in a fan sites meeting with Beale that August where he told us very explicitly the club had a £10m hole in its accounts that would need filling over the next 12-18 months (probably why he was applying for other jobs from the moment he got here), and that is what Ainsworth had to pick up in the end and do.
For the majority of that era - and they were right by the way, and I backed them on here to howls of derision on social media - it was about halving the wage bill and then halving it again while staying in the Championship.
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