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Not sure what the greatest fib is "£350million a week to spend on the NHS" or "I don't mind losing as long as we play good football"
Its a results business, We do well our crowds increase, hang around the relegation zone they go down. DJ's team played some amazing stuff in front or 12K but i used to leave so frustrated when we just blew a 2-0 comfy lead than a Bulut's boring mundane 1-0 to the city.
I think Bulut is a very effective manager, he has taken a squad of by the sounds of it, overly paid lower championship/top L1 players and made them top 10 due to his ability for the team to beat teams of a similar base.
We have a solid enough platform, just needs to add some (expensive) sparkle in the final third
What tiny budget is that? Our Chairman certainly doesn't think it was tiny, let's see what next year's accounts say before jumping to conclusions. If we managed to get the likes of Ramsey, Grant, Turnbull and Wilson-Esbrand here on a tiny budget then someone on the recruiment side is doing a brilliant job.
I found this quite amusing!
Last season, Collins played a few games, looked decent, then missed the rest of the season. One of the reasons some fans gave for our struggles was that Collins was injured and some thought we'd signed a top player.
This season, I don't think many would be disappointed if Collins left at the end of the season!!
How things can change in football!
Perhaps we, who attend every game, visit this messageboard regularly etc are too close. Three or four, what I would call floating fans, infrequent attenders, bought season tickets when we were in the Prem and went in the promotion years etc have said the immortal words to me the last couple of days, “Hey, the City are doing well”. Hard to argue with them after 3 consecutive wins without sitting them down and giving them a lecture on the nitty gritty. These are the people we want back in the ground though to swell attendances, we seem to go regardless, many will go to see a winning team regardless. After the Charlton defeat that caused Malky to be more pragmatic, the crowds turned up, lapping up every 3 points, however earned. There’s different types of fan and I don’t think that’ll ever change.
That's true, left back has been a problem for years, Collins came in for that cameo and looked very good winning a few man of the match awards got injured, and we struggled at left back again last season, the injury must have affected him, as he's never looked the same since, and yes ditch him now he's a liability.
Let's be honest though. We did beat really sh*t sides. I'm going tomorrow for the first time in ages. I'm hoping Turnbull plays. Only going for the corners.
This board has been more lively recently than it had been for ages. Amazing what a few wins do for the soul.
I hope that now our Championship status is more or less ensured that Bulut's future is decided,one way or other, and the club can start planning for next season.
Playoffs are out thus season, but with one or two additions we could have a real go next year.
Of course,if the Tractor Boys give us a hiding tomorrow it will be doom and gloom again.
SM ended up causing damage to the squad because he went around to manage it. The players he bought were clearly to play his style of football. And that is the issue with the club...we keep getting in different managers who play different football therefore requiring different players... there is still the argument that the board moved too fast to hurt rid of SM considering the amount of new players he brought in.
Again, an issue that traces back to the club and how its run.
I'm not anti Bulut to the point ill scream and shout for him to go, he seems a decent bloke and when he's got all his players fit he seems to get more favourable results, its just the way we play for me, im bored of watching an unskilled boring bunch of players, I want to be entertained.
Win next two were on.
How we get there doesn't matter to fans as it's a result business, Manager has been handed very little to turn us into some exciting team we love too watch , so ugly ,boring football is all we have .
See you all there tommorow??
Drink.lots
Drink lots
Classic
Whatever the budget is it's a tiny fraction of the budget Malky had. He spent around £12m in one season then over £30m the next but was basically scared of his own shadow, had us playing football that made our eyes bleed and yet you wouldn't have a word said against him on here. We had quite a bit of back and forth at the time but you never budged an inch in your admiration for him and his football. How do you feel about that now? I'm certainly not looking for an argument here, I'm interested.
I'd love to see us playing decent football too, we've talked about this loads over the years in the Academy thread and elsewhere. Thing is though that having bought a season ticket through the 80s and 90s, and when Malky was here, and when Slade was here, and Warnock and mad Mick, I'd feel like a complete hypocrite if I turned round now and said my love for the beautiful game overrides my support for City. If it ever did get like that then I'd just stop going (and coming on here) and find another hobby instead. Being a football fan isn't compulsory, surely?
Two things about Malky, although his approach changed after that Charlton 5-4 (for a while after that I think we had the worst away defensive record in the division, we’d conceded a five, a four and two threes in away games before three months of the season was out, but we’d scored nine in those four matches ourselves), I never felt it was as defensive as we’ve been under Bulut. Mackay also had the excuse that he was in the Premier League for the last half a season he was here and that was no more than a battle for survival from day one. Would he have won that battle if he’d stayed? Who knows, but what is clear statistically is that we were a better side under Mackay than we were under Ole.
The other thing is that Mackay was lucky from my perspective that we hadn’t had almost a decade of playing physical, attritional football with an emphasis on set pieces when he took over, if we had, I might have had a different attitude towards him, so, by the same token, it could be argued that Bulut has been unlucky when it comes to my opinion of him. After all, we play much less long ball crap than we used to under him, but our passing football is not played with a positive approach as the way we seem so happy to go back to the keeper once we get close to the halfway line indicates. Also, on Wednesday, Grant and Wilson-Esbrand, two of our better players I’d say, were guilty of shockingly bad basic errors of technique or giving a simple pass which makes you wonder about what they’re doing in training. I didn’t hear him say it, but it was claimed on here that Danny Gabbidon had compared Wednesday’s match unfavourably with pub football and this was a game which I’d say was a bit better than quite a few we’ve been involved in lately= City fans have had around a decade now where the large majority of our victories could be described as “winning ugly” and I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only City fan for whom that line has worn thin.
However, it’s not only the boredom factor that has made me anti Bulut, just as bad for me is how he talks after defeats and how he singles out players for criticism in public (all players who to different degrees have the “x factor” that we so lack without Ramsey). I don’t like how he went from about mid November to the end of December talking as if it was some sort of holding operation until the transfer window opened when he could get some decent players (if I were a regular in the team in the final two months of last year, those comments would have really annoyed me) and then we got his rant after the Plymouth defeat when we hadn’t signed any one yet.
It is possible to support a team and not like the way they play. Nothing would please me more than a win today where we went toe to toe with Ipswich in terms of attacking play and came off deserved winners, but I’ll still be very happy if we get a win by the more likely way of getting ahead, then spending the rest of the match defending our lead because we’ll have done something we’ve not done yet in beating one of the top teams.
I’ll finish by saying that those first three away matches under Bulut were not what we’ve become used to seeing from his teams - think back to the Ipswich game where we played some really nice stuff at times and Ramsey’s goal was a beauty in terms of pass and move football, but what happened at half time with Ollie Tanner was a huge clue as to what we had coming and what happened in the second half had a lot to do with that decision. If you compared our games at Leeds and Leicester with what happened when they came to our place a few months later, it was like chalk and cheese - of course, they’re good sides and we’d probably have lost even if we’d not rolled over like we did, but even last year’s team was never as passive as we were in those games and have been in one or two others at home - let’s hope that a more confident team can give Ipswich more of a testing time of it than Leicester and Leeds got.
Fair enough, thanks for the reply. Personally I'd say that having flirted with relegation twice in a row and being under a transfer embargo made this season more of a battle for survival than Malky going into a Premier League season back then having spent the best part of £50m and having a winning momentum from the season before but that's just my opinion.
Entertainment in sport is a tricky one. Ultimately, a team (or even a sport itself) will lose followers without it but I think sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for. I seem to remember a few sets of fans having protests about the way a team was playing (probably involving Allardyce) but the change of direction led to a drop down the table. Ipswich fans finally chased Mick out the club when they were 12th in the Championship, they finished 24th the following season. How entertaining did they find that? How entertained by Bazball are all the England fans in India this week, the Brighton fans in Rome etc? We had bigger crowds to watch Malky and Warnock's teams than anyone else here, what's the moral of that?
Bulut has been a frustrating character at times this season, of course, but the players seem to be putting the effort in for him and hopefully he's just been concentrating on building the platform that Llan Bluebird talked of earlier and a more palatable end-product will come in time.