Originally Posted by
RonnieBird
How very very interesting that you mention bringing RH on in that game ,because that's EXACTLY what was in my mind when I wrote that ! At the time , I though " what the **** is he doing ?".
Thing is though that he made a call on the day and as we know it didn't work, but I expect he has his reasons - maybe Rhys had been on fire in training that week. Maybe Reid was off colour, or the manager was aware a long time before we were of his lack of commitment and duplicitous nature. We won't know till Reid writes his story in the papers one day, but you're quite right that it seemed a strange thing.
Yet, if it had worked and Rhys had scored a hat trick we'd all be remembering it as an act of genius by the manager.
When you're in command you have to make calls and sometimes they don't work out, but I honestly think that Sir Neil makes the right call more often than the wrong one, and more often than most managers do.
You're also quite right that some of his buys have been poor, but I can forgive him that - lot of managers have done as badly and not gotten any success at all.
I know, Sir Neil knows, and it seems that even Sam Allerdyce knows that we can't realistically compete with flash monkey football teams, and more importantly that's a trap which the majority of teams fall into but which can't get them anywhere.
What we're doing is different and might get us back into the premiership by brute force and discipline , at which point maybe we've git to think again, but in any case it's what we ARE doing now and so the best and only thing we can do is to cheer them on and be committed to that strategy.
Yeah, by all means people can mention what they think would be better now and again, but my point is that this can become very counter productive to the collective willpower of the club if it reaches a certain critical mass.
I think your posting there is about the right level in terms of constructive criticism actually , but many seem to go a whole lot further and tend to celebrate mishaps because it somehow vindicates their own previous prophesies of failure. I think the most upsetting thing I saw was the thread predicting massive 5 goal annihilations by Fulham at a point where we were clearly in trouble , then carping and apparent dissapointment when the rout was halted in that game.
We need the support of the crowd if this young team is going to match the old one then surpass them, and although it's hard, that can be done.