Derby County tonight!

[ToTaL ITK]

'Kin hell lads! calm down. If i thought you would all be arguing i wouldn't have started the thread

[A Quiet Monkfish]

Who knows, it’s impossible to tell. Im trying to deal in facts amongst a deluge of opinions. These are all facts.

1. We made the worst start in the history of the club by taking one point in seven games with the last defeat coming while Riza was in charge.

2. We have thirty nine points from thirty three games with Riza in charge - that’s well above the bottom three over that period and equates to something like fifty six points over a season.

3. We have two 1-0 wins all season and have kept two clean sheets in our last twenty seven matches - that last stat in particular is relegation form surely.

4. Forty three goals scored in thirty nine games isn’t great, but forty two from thirty three under Riza is certainly competitive by the low scoring standards of this season’s Championship. - we’re the eighth highest scorers in the division since Riza took over. That comes down to about sixty scored in a season, nothing spectacular, but better than you’d expect from a relegation side.

5. The obvious counter to point 4 is that only Plymouth and Luton have let in more than us since Riza took over from Bulut.

That’s a mixed bag and Im not claiming that Riza has done a great job,far from it. However, I disagree with the argument that we are where we are because of Riza and that this is a squad of players that would be comfortable in mid table were it not for the manager - this squad is weak mentally and physically, ordinary in execution from and ineffective offensively and defensively when it comes to set pieces and clearly not good enough at keeping the ball out of our net. Any manager that kept a team with those weaknesses up after they’d made a club record worst start to a season would be deserving of some credit surely?

You've got to be a pretty decent team to recover from 1 point from 21 available, and we're not pretty decent. There may be 3 teams worse than us, but we're always playing catch up and aren't good enough to have that average sort of run that can put you up amongst the 'going nowhere' brigade. It's noticeable that there's a band of mediocrity in this Championship that seems incapable of challenging for the play offs but doesn't get dragged into the relegation battle. That we are in that battle is unfortunate for this squad, who don't have the steel for it, and also a manager who doesn't know how to grind out wins instead of draws and draws instead of defeats. Those teams around us all seem to have woken up and become battle hardened - not something you could tag our squad with.

[North Cardiff Blue]

Riza has beaten Swansea and Derby, and got a draw against Boro. Bulut had a tough start but Derby are garbage and the Championship is proof anyone can beat anyone. We made it harder by having Bulut in charge, who is a dreadful manager and one of the very worst Tan has appointed

Yes, that's right. Bulut finished 12th with a weaker team, so he must be terrible. It was awful NOT having to worry about which bottom-of-the-table relegation candidate we weren't going to lose to next.

But with Eric's Pep things are so much better, even after the new Manager bounce with all the players backing him and pushing us away, he has successfully dragged us back down with a double over Luton and many more spectacular performances.

We've spent money on a big improvement in players and he's doing an amazing job of trying every possible combination and finding more and new positions to make decent players look shit. He might still fail at relegation if he keeps picking that Salech mind, maybe he could try him as a centre half?

[J R Hartley]

Arguing over the best manager between Bulut and RIZA is like two bald blokes arguing over a comb.

Utterly pointless. Both are shite and both to blame for us getting relegated this season. Bulut started this shit season rolling with the worst start in the clubs history and the squad he built going into this season, but RIZA had more than enough games to do something about it and was given some good players in the transfer window.

[Bobby Dandruff]

1. You're using your opinion as if you're qioting facts and so I'll do the same and say that last season was a freak in which the stats show us as consistently one of the weakest squads in the division - albeit a weak squad which was able to keep clean sheets, unlike this one.

2. Every side in the Championship goes on a mini run of good results at some time in the season - we've had two decent runs of results followed by the inevitable fall from grace because you cannot expect to have any concerted success when you only keep two clean sheets in twenty seven games.

3. That's your opinion about how poor other teams are. Mine is that we were lucky to beat Millwall, Norwich and Hull while I struggle to think of many we haven't won that we might have - maybe Stoke and Watford.

4. How can we have possibly have a starting eleven "easily capable of mid table?' when we can only keep two clean sheets every twenty seven games? These players aren't as good as you think they are.

In my opinion, Riza made a really big mistake in his third game in charge (Bristol City) and the worst thing about that is there's been few signs that he learned from it. As I mentioned we've had two decent to good spells this season, but, having started so poorly, they've both been followed by bad spells where the same old mistakes are repeated. Riza has made mistakes, but he's not been helped by a squad that keeps on repeating the sort of defensive mistakes I don't believe you can blame managers or coaches for when they keep on happening so regularly (always assuming the coaching staff have tried to sort things out on the training ground).

Having watched us defend for eight months now, it cannot be denied that we're hopeless at it. I also look at this team's character and they wilt too easily, they don't strike me as having the street wise credentials that are needed in this division and they are weak when it comes to basics like set pieces - I think most managers currently in this division would not be able to keep our current squad out of the bottom six.

How is finishing 12th ‘my opinion’? It is a pretty clear fact that I don’t think anyone can dispute.

And how is a team that features player like Robertson, Salech (on current form anyway), O’Dowda, two decent keepers and quite a few others including a much lauded Champions League player (who I actually think is rubbish) not good enough when they have clearly shown in flashes that they are. (taking the lead on 22 occasions but not seeing out the game?)

That is on the manager and the berks who appointed him Robert and pretty much everyone on this board can see that.