Only outright promotion is acceptable this season. Sunderland, Portsmouth and Charlton should be the three clubs vying for it. It is utterly embarrassing to be languishing in a league table below Accrington Stanley. All of this "6th place is the target" is cringeworthy.
Sir Chris built a 100 point plus L1 Championship winning team on ….. less than £1m and a Chief Exec who understood football even if he was a Man Citeh fan. As usual the Belgian is trying to do it on the cheap.
If your stated aim is promotion, you are aiming for first or second place. End of. There may be a group of teams well enough endowed to battle it out for an automatic place - the idea is to finish above them and go up automatically. You don't 'aim' for sixth place unless you do what Plymouth did last season when you accelerate after a bad start and try and grab the last place up for grabs (to a large extent we did exactlt the same, though our season was overall 'meh' while Plymouth were very bad followed by very good). We are supposed now to be happy to aim for sneaking into the play off places because it is finally accepted wisdom that RD wants to sell and won't invest in a squad to aim higher. However many people were happy with these sort of targets when the club wwere supposedly not for sale, and there are even a few who laugh at any sort of dissatisfaction from defeats and claim that while there is football of some sort on offer, everything else is mere details - quite how these people end up 'supporting' any club is probably worthy of scientific research, as if you don't care about the result and just want an afternoon at football, you could just as easily visit other clubs, as Elfs is doing around the non league circuit. But why anyone would see an ongoing campaign to hopefully sneak into the play offs, with the hope that one day we will do ourselves a favor in a transfer window, as an acceptable target for Charlton is pretty sad stuff to be honest. Stockholm syndrome indeed.
I don't see the slightest chance of getting promoted under Roland. His penny-pinching philosophy makes it impossible for ANY manager to maintain a good enough squad for a whole season.
"Just an afternoon at the football" is what the ITTV lot want - some of them will be gutted that the Lib closed down yesterday, as that will disrupt their treasured match day routine. - Sit with your chums in the same seat you've had for 43 seasons - Ignore the fact that the rest of the row is now empty - Blame the ref for the poor result - Have a nice pint with your chums in Crossbars after the game. Repeat, ad nauseam
Just had a look at the 11th place thread on ITTV....a few absolute classics on there from the Apologists. Seriously Red - "We should always be in with a shout of finishing 6th () given the budgets & quality of some of our football" Sun Valley [who is an absolute w anker] - "Long way to go yet - positive vibes everyone!" Oldred - "I feel the best we can hope for is a play off place" Canterbury Addick [Meire fan] - "The 6th place is up for grabs" [] With fans like these ................FFS
Lee Bowyer...sorry ....."Bow"...is using that thread as the basis of his team talk for the Barnsley game on Saturday. "Right lads, fvcking listen up.......Accrington are still catchable and 6th place would be one hell of an achievement. Give it yer all today.......theres 6,000 out there cheering you on"
It's a bit like Gareth Southgate saying that he isn't worried about England not scoring goals because we are creating chances ….. here's the thing Gareth! …..GAMES AREN'T WON BY CHANCES CREATED BUT SCORING MORE GOALS THAN THE OPPOSITION... you ar5e!
Or like a golfer who's not worried about getting a bad score because he's creating birdie chances. If you keep three-putting the rest of your game falls apart.
I agree, but we have got a bigger budget than most of the League one teams. Accrington Stanley are right up there. We are not consistent enough to get automatic promotion. We now have a striker that can get us twenty goals a season. But with Baeur out we ship too many goals. I think we will finish around tenth this season.
If these clowns were told in 2005 we'd be where we are now, would they be happy with it? Of course not. As I said, clowns
And as @baraettmattesvensson can testify from our recent trip up there * - Accrington Stanley are a very poor side (* Elfs stormed out of the ground in a huff when Stanley equalised )
Did Lee Bowyer say automatic promotion was the target before this season began? Or did he just say promotion. I cannot recall...
To be fair to LB, the games Charlton had to win in order to turn the mess left by El Gobbo into a 6th place finish was quite an impressive run. This season however there is nobody else to blame. This season's team is all Bowyer's and he declared himself satisfied with it back in August.
