Quote Originally Posted by Der Kaiser View Post
Last year I wasn't really concerned about how we played as for me the absolute priority was just steadying the ship which on face value, I think he did in the main, granted the wheels came off big time in the latter portion of the season. I personally felt he earned the extension just due to the fact he dragged other blokes players to a respectable finish whilst off the back of multiple embargoed windows and just a January window to really work with. However, I won't defend this start to the season and if he got sacked I won't be bothered given he has been backed, relatively speaking by our standards. The wheels that came off at the end of last season haven't come back on and it is just inevitable at this point.

All that said, I'll echo the point another poster made that this current crop of players are an absolute disgrace. Not a single fighter between them, and that's including a player who has almost only ever played for us (Ralls), a few who are local boys and others who are more than happy to play the villain when things are going well but don't replicate that grit when things are hard (Ng).

They are utterly spineless as a collective, and a few of them have now been part of teams that have got other managers sacked, and will almost certainly get our next manager sacked. Bulut will get all the blame, but theres a cohort of players who should follow him out when he is handed his p45.
I don't disagree with your comments about some of the players. I'm slightly baffled why this has become the case. Last season they made something of a habit of winning games they didn't deserve by staying in the game at 1-0 down and pinching goals late on, particularly through set pieces. That hasn't happened for some time.

You say the wheels came off in the latter portion of the season. I'd say things were that bad before then. After we beat Bristol City we won 5 out of 19 fixtures, failing to score in 10 of those. We managed a mini revival, beating 3 poor sides we were expecting to beat, then fluked a win against Ipswich to keep us in contention of a top half finish.

The game before Ipswich was a 1-0 win over Huddersfield. We've played 15 games since then. We've won 4 and been the first team to score in 1 of those 15 games. I would say the wheels were falling off between November and February, then the whole cart fell to bits from mid March onwards.

Our excellent start to last season, that mini revival of wins in February and some comeback wins against the odds were the reason we finished in the top half. Most of the season wasn't very good and our run from November to the end of the season overall was awful in most ways, other than a couple of expected wins and fortunate comebacks. For me, little has changed this season and this season's woeful start has come as no surprise whatsoever.

You may have noticed that I haven't mentioned Bulut at all here, yet. I don't see him as totally responsible for this. I don't think he's any good as a manager but, like you say, players take some of the responsibility. I will disagree slightly about transfers, though. Yes, we had an embargo, but we arguably had a better summer for transfers last year than we have this year without an embargo. A lot was made about this embargo as being some sort of serious handcuffing of the club in the transfer market. Since the embargo was lifted, we've paid for David Turnbull, who I don't think is good enough for us on showings so far, and a striker that's gone to Belgium. I doubt either of those gems were Bulut's handywork but it does ask the question of how we're run as a club. Bulut isn't the sole problem we have but the players are better than what they've shown for months now. He's far from blameless in that.