I can only guess what your referring to but one thing I'm confident I know as fact is if VT had anything at all he could have used in a criminal court against MM then he would have instantly
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Nice to see someone argue against me with a few facts rather than opinions and/or gossip.
A few opinions of my own now though - given Watford's financial situation at the time, I think Malky did very well to get them challenging for the top six for much of that season.
In 11/12, we did tail off with a lot of drawn games at home in the closing months of the season, but in our Championship winning season we were like a marathon runner who had got themselves a potentially winning lead around the fifteen mile mark and all we had to do was maintain that advantage - I'm not sure a team which wins it's league by eight points should be criticised too strongly for only winning three out of it's last ten home matches.
I'd also add that I think I'm right in saying that in the previous three seasons the teams Mackay was in charge of never had such an imbalance of home matches against teams in the lower half of the table compared to those in the top half during the second portion of their seasons.
As for that Sunderland match, I've said myself that I doubted whether we would have scored twice with Malky in charge - to my mind, we were only totally dominant in a Premier League match for a spell twice, the first was at Fulham and the second against Sunderland. We did play with energy and positivity that night for a time, but we also "blew up" in the closing stages in a way that a Mackay team never did at Cardiff City Stadium - we'd won all of our previous home matches where we scored first that season and we were good at getting 1-0s under Mackay.
A look at our opening away matches in our title winning season proves that there was a plan B. After a 0-0 draw at Brighton in the first of those fixtures (a result which appears to back the argument that we were a boring side that season), have a look at the scores in the next seven - 2-4, 2-0, 2-3, 2-1, 1-3, 1-2, 4-5, that's two wins and five defeats, with fourteen scored and nineteen conceded. That's a poor set of results for a club that had invested so heavily in new players that summer, but they are hardly the figures of a team that is playing dull and negative football. I've always believed (and our results back me up) that we tried to play in an attacking way away from home that season, but there was a rethink after the 5-4 loss at Charlton and a more pragmatic, but winning, style was introduced - there was a Plan B, but it was not one which led to more attacking football.
After that match at the Valley, there were times when we were quite boring to watch and I have a respect for those persistent critics of our style of play that season who would have their moan despite the fact that we were winning most of the time. It's funny, but I don't remember too many saying during that run of high scoring away games that they didn't mind us losing because we were playing attacking football, instead, there was plenty of stick flying about regarding us spending all of that money only to be so poor away from home.
Having got promoted by playing in a way that some supporters regarded as boring, it's always been a mystery to me why there were so many on here who appeared to believe that we would go into a season that was almost certainly going to turn into a relegation struggle with all guns blazing. So many seemed prepared to accept hard fought low scoring wins and draws when they were taking us to promotion, but when we started losing by one or two nil in the Premier League in matches where we played pretty cautiously, there was criticism of Mackay's boring tactics.
Anyway, Malky's a busted flush these days. After his racist comments, there's probably going to be at least some members of any dressing room he walks into as manager from now on who'll have no respect for him and no desire to play for him either and I daresay some of the mud from the financial mismanagement allegations will have stuck. However, certainly in terms of what he did on the field, he's still up there in the top handful of City managers I've seen.