However crap the football is tonight, it will still be more entertaining than listening to Ralph speak. Fiendishly clever, I calls it.
Wait, wait...............He did say that Parts of the Stadium and the Training centre will be refurbished in the summer??? The Channon suite will become a Chinese restaurant and the Liebherr pavillion will become a pergoda. The future is bright, we,re fed on ****e...... Viva la Champignon.
Right just listened to the audio, and at the risk of being controversial, I don't see a great deal wrong in what he's said. Be interested to know if it's come from him or Gao though. But a few examples : A league aa competitive as this, only small percentages can make you go up or down the table? Agreed. A season finishing 8th and reaching a cup final is a great achievement for a club of our size? Yep... We've had a great few years but that doesn't mean we should forget who we are and what stature we carry? ****ing spot on for me. I see why people might moan that 'ambition has changed' but for someone like me who never bought into regular European football etc. I don't mind hearing that too much, it's unrealistic to think we will get CL or whatever and I think those unrealistic goals have contributed to the negativity - ie talk of top four finishes but selling top players constantly doesn't add up.
It is much clearer in audio....better that than read all those words. I have never got all this talk of ambition or lack of it. To some fans our situation is changed if Kreuger says we will be in the CL next season and Champions the year after. The likelihood of that is unchanged by talking about it or not talking about it.
I always knew Krueger was full of hot air, however the contradictions to previous statements means nothing he says will be believed and some of it was a little worrying due to its complacency.
Mostly, talk of ambition is something of a barometer for the intentions of our leadership. We're below a point a game and sitting 15th, and our chairman's reaction is to shrug and say that we're a small club. There's no question that finances are our primary driving force, even with our new ownership, but I don't know that our non-football leadership quite understands how dangerous a game it is to try to generate a profit when relegation will wipe out years of gains. Also, Ralph's love of exaggeration continues: He then repeats that line again later. While he has a long history as a head coach, 25 years is overstating it by several years. Not a major point, but very much in keeping with Ralph's tendencies.
Radio SOlent reporting a storm of comment about RK calling us a small club....he seems to have really touched a nerve
Certainly aren't in world football, and financially we no longer have the excuse that we're in debt. We aren't giants, but we aren't half as small as we're feinting at right now, either.
In this league I'd say we are and there's plenty of clubs in the league below who you'd have to say are bigger too.
Not in financial might. We were 10th in revenues in the 2015-16 season in England (and 22nd in the world). We earned a hair more than Everton, and we'd all laugh uproariously if their chairman came out and declared that they were mere minnows without two pence to rub together.
I'm not talking in financial sense. Edit - and if you are Ralph was talking comparatively to Liverpool etc. Wasn't he?
I'm not sure that anything other than the financial sense matters. And Ralph was speaking in pretty broad terms...might've been comparing our size to Liverpool, but he was also justifying our drift backward by suggesting that, as a small club, merely finishing in the top half should be considered a very good performance.
Come on Ralph, come out and give that clown your backing now. See what happens at the next home game.
'We are definitely attempting to strengthen, but take that sum aside we need to look at the squad as a whole and it will be invested over the next two windows.' You need to do more than attempt to strengthen or we won't be in the PL next season and guess what, that's a far more expensive game than getting in players in January.
This is exactly what I was thinking earlier. He wouldn’t say anything that Gao hadn’t endorsed, which is the most depressing thing of all. The Liebherr dream has died I’m afraid.
