Exactly. It’s all lies and bs. Here’s another one, regarding an interview with Ben Manga. We’ve done none this type of trade. Time reveals all. They all spout absolute bollox.
If a PLC director or senior leader made statements like ours have that arguable mislead buyers of season tickets then they would be fired and or banned from holding similar positions Seems that the norm in football is to promise the world and deliver **** all I i never really thought either the club or the owners had the money so i am not totally surprised, but Duxbury and Pozzo have to realise that people are not suckered forever even accepting that supporting a football club is not the same as other transactions and relationships - A bit of honesty chaps - something like "there will be a period of austerity because we sold forward the future when in the PL and we wasted some money - but please accept this situation as it will not be forever" - I would rather than than watching us sell 100m of talent for under 50m and reinvesting a tiny amount in a punt on a guy that probably will not make it, with the usual "the market was not easy for value for money purchases (unless buying from us)
This confuses me a bit - it’s pretty clear to all that we are cutting costs. But what’s achieved by Ismael or even Duxbury coming out and saying that? Of course they are going to spin it.
It’s more lies on top of lies and untruths. It’s a catalogue and is one of the reasons people no longer trust them or give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. We can’t keep letting this type of thing slide every time. This is why we’re in such a mess, and along the way people keep saying it’s all fine and bend over backwards to justify everything they do.
This applies to every club though. Most of the bottom half have found a happy medium combining richer pockets than Pozzo and sensible management. Having a comparatively poor owner and the incompetence of Pozzo, Duxbury, Giaretta was only going to end in disaster. Throw Bayat into the mix creaming his cut.
I don’t disagree. But we are too passive as a fanbase. That’s been known for years. And each to their own quite frankly. I’ve only come on in recent days to chat about transfers or things I hear - once it’s closed I’ll retreat back into the shadows as I don’t have much interest in the too-and-fro that comes with post game analysis etc anymore. Gino’s doubling-down comments this summer put paid to any deeper interest I had.
There will be another fan meeting and it will happen again. No fanbase has a higher gullibility/stupidity factor than ours.
They probably thought more players would want to come and join the "reset" but not many will in reality given our well deserved reputation as a club run in the short term and with no stability. We cannot get away now as before now we aren't in the Premier league or fighting for promotion now either by offering money and the appeal of top flight football to keep anyone unsure happy. Wouldn't surprise me if we re-signed a Cathcart or Gosling at some point!
We explored a deal for Paul Onuachu from Southampton but finances were an issue - too much. Tom Davies was looked at but he wanted to play in the PL and stay north. Tiemoue Bakayoko’s agent was touting him around a few weeks ago. (This is not me saying any of these were close) As for the striker I spoke of earlier in the window and got grief for, I still don’t have a name. But will share if I do (and given the all clear to do so)
Doesn't strike me as the sort of player who would rush to come here really in the current situation as you suggest. I presume they want us to pay the guy from Southampton's wages but we refused. Sounds like he is off to France.
It was only ever going to pan out like this. Need a miracle couple of hours or this squad will probably be in a relegation battle imo
There are many words we can use to describe our current ownership, but one I like to use is ‘stale’. Like many of us if we stay in our jobs too long, or never change our lifestyles, or sadly too with relationships occasionally. Or like political parties in power too long. Stale. Time for change. When they came, it was exciting, it was new, other clubs probably envied our way of doing things, and of course we were successful too. Maybe people got complacent, but then more and more mistakes were made, salaries started being paid to those who’d jumped on the gravy train without seemingly being justified to do so, and so it is we’ve reached this current hiatus of being broke, of constant waffle and false promises in public, and many of us unable to trust what we are fed. There’s a horrible air of staleness around the regime. It’s sad to observe, but it was probably inevitable too. Yes we have by and large been a passive club. Being passive isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, and our generally mild fan base has meant we’ve got through the last 40 years or so without too many of the problems we’ve witnessed at other clubs. As I posted yesterday, before social media the very passive (and the very angry) fans would hardly have been noticed anyway, but of course now they are because they've assumed stardom/notoriety in their own right. We all have the individual choice to be angry at the club, to be passive about it, to attend or not attend matches, to get worked up over the lack of an extra defensive midfielder or to use that nervous energy worrying about our next electricity bill instead. Free world, free choice. Personally I’m more on the side of the discontented fans who dearly want change (as long as that change is better) but the passive fans/ones who still like Pozzo aren’t the enemy. They’re only supporters who see things differently from me. If we lose matches, if we recruit badly or not all, it's a bad day for all of us, not just the supporters who have a specific stance or point of view. We’ve not had a disastrous window. A disastrous window would have meant no signings at all. We’ve had a window that wasn’t as good as most of us wanted. A window that maybe didn’t match the hyperbole of the club’s statements. We’ve had a window that was maybe half decent but annoyingly wasn’t as decent as it could or should have been. It was a window that (and excuse me for giving any publicity to these online characters) neither Ron nor Wendover would have wanted. Neither one thing nor the other. It was all a bit.....stale! Like the club feels right now.
Poor ol’ Valerian Ismaël has been totally screwed over by our defective owner, and recruitment team. More fool him though for declaring that he is happy with our current squad, and even going on to say that “a thinner squad is easier to manage”. Which manager in their right mind would want a smaller squad over a larger one, in any league, let alone the long-haul slog that is the Championship. And for him to even say that implies that he himself admits that he’s not good enough to manage a large squad. A double negative blow.. really… Beyond words that anyone can justify an expenditure of £50,000 on signings. Even if that player had the ability of Haaland (which he obviously does not), the complete lack of investment in other areas of the pitch is an utter disgrace.
Thank you for sharing. None of those feel like Manga players to me. You have to wonder if he’s really involved at all!
I'm sorry, but I don't think this is accurate. No, I wouldn't argue that this window was literally 'disastrous', but it is about as close to that as it could be realistically. It has left us very clearly strongly exposed to significant danger should basically anything 'go wrong'. Thanks to some combination of arrogance and delusion, driven by clear potlessness, we can now legitimately express concern about the potential for a relegation battle, which is something that seemed a lot crazier, and was roundly dismissed by some, at the start of the window. (Again, that's not me saying we will be relegated, or guaranteed to be in a relegation battle - it's me saying that I don't believe, based on the evidence we now have in front of us, that many right-thinking people would feel comfortable discounting that possibility offhand) Even if it doesn't, it's far from clear that we have enough players and quality to last the season. Half decent is extremely generous, and could only really apply if you give rather undue weighting to the extremely overdue jettisoning of dozens of players, even then done seemingly in quite a scattergun manner.
Agreed. A few weeks ago I thought the possibility of relegation was fanciful. Am genuinely shocked by how poor the recruitment has been though. We are one or two injuries away from being in big trouble
I can of course extremely readily believe that we would have a poor, disappointing window, but even in all my longstanding cynicism I am still quite amazed that we find ourselves immediately in this position again after last year, thinking how close we are to the possibility of fielding already non-versatile players entirely out of position just to fill a team (as a result of any potential injury in certain areas of the pitch). It's like Groundhog day, but breaking down slightly more each time.
It's clear now the focus has been on reducing or even eliminating the massive external debt. If the transfer window dealings have achieved that then that has some merit in my book. Gino's taking a massive risk with our Championship status though as the squad is beyond threadbare.
I’m not surprised at all at the quality of those we’ve bought in or lack of additional signings. Said it before, signs were all there when Pozzo confirmed that we would be external debt free. Only way to do that was trim the squad dramatically only issue I have, away from that I wish Pozzo would sell, is wtf do we need manga and all the other recruitment cronies
I'm slightly struggling to express this properly, but basically, I think that if you are responsible for messing about so close to the sun that you basically get burned, I do think that you then also have a responsibility in loudly correcting that to do so in a measured, intelligent way, that (as you say) doesn't risk blowing up your situation altogether - I can't really give Gino et al any great credit for removing the external debt, if that is what has happened, if they did it by just essentially taking their ball and going home/pressing the big red button and instantly and irresponsibly selling off any asset of note without replacing any of them. (Hopefully this makes any sense at all...)
