Originally Posted by
the other bob wilson
I've very mixed feelings on this. Six months ago I would have been slagging off Vincent Tan for his lunacy in offering a new contract to someone who had done little to justify one, but we're a different club now. If, like an awful lot of supporters, your main judgments on your club's manager are based on what you see from the first team in their home matches, then, undeniably, Russell Slade has done better than he was doing - we have a very good home record, results are good, the team are certainly playing for the manager and the football is a lot more watchable than it was.
I think it's significant that most of the criticism directed at our manager in this thread relates to his appearance - it's a lot harder to criticise Russell Slade on footballing grounds now than it has been at other times during his spell here.
It may be harder to be critical, but it's not impossible. If, as seems very likely now, we don't make the Play Offs, there are a few matches which will be looked back on as key during our season, but I'd also argue that, in general, our away form hasn't been good enough. I still believe the "underdog" football we played during Russell Slade's first year at the club resurfaces from time to time away from home (four points from our away matches against the current bottom four is a poor return for a team in our position) and we appear to think that an away draw is always a good result - it often can be, but we seemed reluctant to push on for wins sometimes at grounds where other promotion chasing teams would look for three points rather than one.
I'm not convinced by our manager in the transfer market either - if it's true that we are trying to sign Lex Immers permanently, then it seems we will have a bigger transfer budget than last year as long as the embargo is lifted, has Russell Slade done enough so far to convince you that the money will be well spent?
There's also my personal gripe about youth development and, as someone said on my blog yesterday, it's hard to imagine our club's young pros and Academy scholars being thrilled about any offer of a new contract to our manager based on what he has done for the youth set up at the club so far. If Russell Slade does stay, I truly hope he does something in the next year to shut me up about this matter, but, if we keep on going like we are, the standard of young player at the club will decline and this is bound to have an impact on the first team eventually.
When all's said and done though, we have a manager who has got the team maintaining a promotion challenge with just five matches left to play, despite having no sort of transfer budget to work with and an embargo against the club over the second half of the campaign. He's also had to reduce the size of the squad by cutting the wage bill and not all of the players who have left would fall into the deadwood category.
People look at that from the outside and say Russell Slade has done a terrific job here. It's a hard to argue effectively against the facts above (at least I view them as facts) - if it was my choice to make I think I'd still look elsewhere for a manager, but it would be a very close call and I can understand why Vincent Tan might think he's better off sticking with what he's got.