Reply With QuoteYour point seemed to be our form at the end of the season proved something or other. Are we shifting the goalposts now then?Originally Posted by ccfc_is_my_life
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Which would then tend to reflect upon the differential in manager ability and summer signings, correct?
Your point seemed to be our form at the end of the season proved something or other. Are we shifting the goalposts now then?
Not at all, it all ties in together. Nobody with a straight face can claim we didn't have problems with the squad composition, namely a lack of pace and goals. No player got into double figures for the season after all, Helguson ( and I'd have loved it if he'd been a decade younger ) was top with 9. We had no-one with width and pace to stretch sides. The problems we had in Prem were already there in the Championship; difference being they weren't as badly exposed.
Knowing those problems, who did we sign? Caulker - great at Swansea, shown to be poor when not alongside Williams and made him captain. Medel, looked the part early on and faded over the season. The only player who could have potentially solved the pace/goals issue was Odemwingie. Conway and Gestede were bombed out to Blackburn on loan with perm deals agreed.
All that tells me that Mackay built an unbalanced squad, wasn't able to address it in the summer and played a defensive, counter-attacking style in the Prem without the players capable of doing it. Again, the problems with the squad in the Prem were there in the Championship and not addressed.
You're gently changing tack now it's been pointed out that your theory about our points total from the last 12 games just doesn't work based upon reference to another promoted club that achieved exactly the same amount of points across the same period.
Why not just concede that is actually the case rather than insist your argument still all stands up? It's hardly worth discussing things with you if you just plough on regardless and and just won't accept any problems with your arguments.
How am I changing tack?
Our form was poor at the end of the season. Whatabouttery was engaged in by pointing to Hull. I'd already said other sides dropped points as well as us, so raising Hull just repeated what I'd effectively said. Only difference was Hull staying up was raised as an additional point - which I then answered.
I pointed out the squad we had was unbalanced, problems were there in the Championship. Those problems weren't addressed in the summer transfer window; Hull made some shrewd buys. That's a separate point - hardly changing tack unless you magically believe any discussion relies upon incredibly narrow issues.
I'm more than happy to stand on the point our end of season form was poor - not only the results but the standard of play. I've given the reason for that and then pointed out Mackay failed to address those issues in the summer transfer window.
My argument still stands up, I've gone on to then give a bigger overall view of why imo Mackay failed and wasn't the manager many seem to believe.
A "problem" was raised with my argument and answered. Tell you what, I won't bother answering so you have the last word then.
These exchanges are beyond boring tbh. Probably shouldn't have replied to you. Won't make that mistake again.
Not boring at all, that was a good read and you both made some interesting points. He did a Columbo there, made a bit of a shambolic entrance but turned out to be sharper than expected. I enjoy the Malky threads, his downfall as a manager was incredibly rapid, when and why it started to go wrong for him is an interesting topic. I've got no problem with someone saying the signs were there even as we were winning the Championship, I don't see an automatic contradiction in that.
In the last 15 games of last season we got 16 points or something like that, but everyone seems to think we finished strongly?
Palace took 5 points from their final 10 league games that season, were promoted and stayed up too. To use our run-in results in hindsight as as a sign of what would happen the following season is far too simplistic imo.
My perception of the league winning season is the same as a few others here, we did finish poorly in my opinion.
All credit for the work done early in the season but it really did seem like every time we dropped points, so did the teams around us. As the games started to run out i never ever felt that we wouldn't go up but I remember checking other teams scores and upcoming fixtures a lot more carefully than I would have liked.
Not sure about when we were winning the championship, but I remember reading a blog from the premier league when we weren't obviously in any trouble, which highlighted us and Fulham as having really poor underlying stats, and correctly tipped us to go down. Even when we were doing ok in the premier league we were poor, just other teams were poorer
I thought we actually finished strongly, but didn't get the results we perhaps deserved. At the time we were playing a midfield three of Gunnar, mutch and Kim, and I think we played some lovely stuff, but were prone to letting the odd late equaliser in
Pretty much how I remember it. It looked like we could up a gear when needed, the midfield three was very nice. In hindsight we had the handbrake on too often but we didn't look like a team that was limping. Certainly deserved champions that season.
Who's saying that though? ccfc explained himself well I thought, his last post was a good summing up of his position and had a lot of sense in it. Personally I felt that some momentum had been lost at the end of the season, in performances not just results, without being overly concerned about it. We'd had the promise of some good football before Maynard's injury, Tan was obviously going to put some money in and I was confident enough that Malky had just done what he had to do at Championship level before rebuilding in the summer for the Premiership. I thought he'd keep us up and try to play some football while doing it, I'm certainly not pretending to be wise after the event.
The advantage of hindsight is that we can look back and analyse but with Malky it's still hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong. Maybe there was a problem even further back. My stat about him is that from a position in or around the automatic promotion places he only won 3 of the last 10 home games at Watford in 2010-11, 2 of the last 10 with us in 2011-12 and 3 of the last 10 in 2012-13. You can interpret stats how you want but to me that indicates a manager who was getting 'found out' over the course of a season. If that was happening at Championship level then it was even more likely to happen in the Premiership. 5 points out of the last 24 seems to show it already had but, of course, people can put some of that down to Tan so the debate goes on. Hard to blame Tan for what happened at Wigan though.
OK. fair enough. It seems to me though a speculative theory that exists due to the eventual outcome. Just a simple comparison with the two other teams promoted with us who had equal or worse form in the run-in and both stayed up puts a bit of a whole in it. If it was a reliable indicator then why were we the only team relegated? In my view it's because there were more far relevant other factors in our demise. I thought CCFC was being a WUM tbh but maybe he has a genuine view, so fair enough.
A good night and I don't want an argument but you invented the theory yourself then debunked it. ccfc said a number of times that other teams finished poorly, his point is that they addressed their problems while Malky didn't. No one is claiming that teams who finish a season out of form will automatically get relegated next time round, no one's claiming it's any kind of indicator. Just that if there are problems or weaknesses then you need to do something about them, which ccfc felt Malky didn't. I think he exaggerated our loss of form at the end of the promotion season but he had a valid argument which he ended up putting across well, I've no idea at all why you thought he was on a wind-up.
So let's get this right. A team that gained promotion with three games left to play and ended up winning the league by eight points after being undefeated in their last eight matches (they lost just one of their final twelve matches) ended the season out of form? I see.
Also, there was a problem with "a lack of pace and goals". Okay the first of those assertions has some basis of truth to it, but the signing of Fraizer Campbell went some way towards addressing our lack of attacking pace (Bellamy was also still pretty quick then, Noone was quicker than he is now back then, Conway was no slouch, same with Kimbo) and that stat about no one scoring ten goals would not have existed if he had not only been with us for about 40 per cent of the season.
We averaged more than one and a half goals a game and only Watford and Palace scored more than us that year, so a lack of goals was never an issue and, as the season ended, we, obviously, were the best equipped of the promoted teams to succeed in the Premier League - it all started to go wrong when it came to improving a good squad and then it started to collapse in late September when the dispute between manager and owner found it's way into the public domain.
Asserting that the achievement of the 2012/13 side is somehow diminished because of what happened in 2013/14 is ludicrous, as is the claim that we ended our title winning season out of form.
OK. It's Fantasy Manager 101 imo to say you need to strengthen the team in the right areas upon promotion. I wasn't arguing on this point, just this idea that that particular sequence of results provided some sort of crystal ball into what came next.
If those sets of results weren't considered any kind of indicator I've no idea why they were referred to several times. Imo it was just a peculiar facet of that season and many teams encountered it. What came next imo was an independent set of decisions, circumstances that lead to our demise, with incoming transfers being one of them which is certainly an area for debate.
Malky left around December 27th in the PL and as far as I remember we were never once in the relegation zone under him. It really is that simple.
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Weird thread this. I'm not sure if you're referring to me or ccfc but I didn't say we were out of form, I just used the phrase to emphasise the point I was trying to make to Baloo, I wasn't referring to us. I said ccfc had exaggerated our loss of form and in the post before I said my view was that we'd lost some momentum by the end of the season, that's closer to a fact than opinion (we'd won 12 of our first 13 home games, 3 of the last 10). We still won the league comfortably, it didn't diminish our achievement in winning the title in any way and, in my opinion, was probably a good thing anyway because it made it easier for Malky to get Tan to release funds for strengthening the squad.
I know you feel this topic has been done to death but I still find it interesting that, even with the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to put your finger on exactly what went wrong for Malky as a manager. It was a spectacular fall from grace. You can blame Tan all you want for what happened at City but that doesn't explain Malky's abject failure at Wigan.
Having gone at Liverpool with Gestede, Miller and Mason at Wembley then looked to expand our style of play later in the year with the signings of Maynard and Noone, he retreated into his shell completely after the 5-4 Charlton game. While that benefited us in the short term, maybe it was the start of his downfall too. He seemed to run out of ideas completely after that and didn't have any kind of a plan B, even with a large amount of money to spend in the summer of 2013. A move back to the Championship with Wigan should've suited him but he failed miserably there. Very odd.
The post you replied to was aimed at ccfc - he was the one who said we were out of form and had limped over the line when, in reality, we strolled to the title. I think virtually any side would lose momentum after winning twelve out of thirteen home matches. To have maintained the momentum you talk about, we would have had to end up with a home record of something like won 21, lost 2, when has anyone had a record like that in the modern day Championship? The important thing in our "fall from grace" towards the end of the season was that we only lost one in twelve at the end of the season and there was only one defeat among those last ten home games you mention - we had got ourselves into a position where draws were hardly disasters.
We were defensive and set piece reliant most of the time in the Premier League under Mackay, but was that always out of choice? It was at times, but in other matches things just worked out like that because we were playing at a level where every side we played (if you go by how the league table ended up) was better than us. The truth for me though was that we were better than a few sides while Mackay was in charge (the league table at the time of his sacking told us that) - we went out and attacked Fulham at Craven Cottage and the game should really have been over at half time, we were cagey in the first half against the jacks and West Brom at home, but looked to win the game in the second half and we picked an attacking line up when we went to Norwich.
People talk about Mackay being "found out" by the time he was sacked and maybe that would have been proved to be the case if he had stayed with us for all of that season, but the facts are we were a lot higher up the table when he left than we were at the end of the season and we had most of the struggling sides to play at home when Tan got rid of him - we had beaten the only two lower half teams we had played at home under Mackay.
As for where it all went wrong for Mackay, there were bad buys once we had got promoted, but I think the real damage to him was done after he left Cardiff. The release of those e-mails definitely hurt him in many ways and I would suggest that this included in terms of his self belief and how he was perceived by at least some of the Wigan players he had charge of. I think most people's work performance would suffer if they had a former employer holding a grudge against them who was prepared to pay a lot of money to dig into what were private e-mail conversations, someone who was prepared to make public accusations of financial impropriety against them which may be true, but have not been tested in a court or tribunal despite it now being nearly four years since they were first made and someone who would release damaging information against them at a time when they were about to be appointed in a high level position.
I'm not saying that Malky Mackay isn't guilty of what Vincent Tan has accused him of and I for one view him differently after the details of those e-mails became public knowledge, but I think anyone's work performance and public credibility would suffer given what he's been through since he left us.
We were 17th when he left and finished 20th.
I'm in the "we were getting found out camp".
Stoke and Villa away were there for the taking. He celebrated the point away to Stoke like we'd won the champions league but if we had a bit more ambition we could have put them to the sword.
Whilst individually some coud argue that his signings that summer weren't all bad, they did nothing to address the lack of balance in the team.
When you compare Malky's transfer activity that summer with what Warnock has done this year in a lot less buyer friendly market then it was nothing short of woeful.
We needed pace, we needed guile but what we got were water carriers.
Hull and Steve Bruce put us to shame in the transfer market that season.
We had major issues alright. Non more so than to transfer our captaincy to an alcoholic, compulsive gambling manic depressant ( caulkers words not mine). Not sure what chance we stood from that point alone!!! Put that together with the fact that VT became unhinged, refused to discuss any form of win bonus scheme for the squad following promotion to the prem and threatened to withdraw the old championship scheme if the players or management crossed him further. When hudson went in to see Choo and Delhman on the behlaf of the players he signed his own death warrant with the club and when MM signed the players complaint letter he was dead in the water also.
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