I’ve been suspicious for a while now that LR despite his obvious and valuable contribution in his early days, his influence has been gradually getting in the way. Sparky whilst he has faults like most football managers, has been picking players bought by LR, this trend has happened elsewhere and failed. The coaching side is falling short for the PL, we have £M’s worth of players out on loan, having overpaid for them by a country mile. Anyway the squad cannot change now until January and it will be interesting to see what happens with team selection and above all performance on the pitch. I make one plea for Saturday, NO BOOING our players. No matter what happens, they’ve all we’ve got for now and are the only ones to get this mess in the League position sorted out. Many of them are already many degrees lower in confidence that is an absolute requirement in the PL.
You compare the recruitment under his watch to that of his predecessor (Mitchell) and the drop in quality is alarming.
Just because the window isn’t open, doesn’t stop negotiations and conversations happening. I’d expect that to be happening all year.
It'll be interesting who made the decision (over Reed and Hunter). Does Ralph does that level of power? (And if so, did he do it because he felt it was right thing to do for the club, or because he wanted to take the heat off himself?) Or is this very much a Gao decision? Either way, it's great news in my book. (And at least in the short term, it's probably great news for Hughes too. I'm not sure the club would want to seeking a new manager, without having first replaced Reed - and I'm guessing replacing Reed will take longer than 5 minutes. Although medium-term it might be very bad news for Hughes, because once Reed's replacement is in position, they might well decide to remove Hughes. Depends largely on results in the intervening period, I guess.)
Don't know what's been previously said about the demise of Uncle Les but I'm a bit intrigued by the timing of the announcement? couple of days before a pretty important game isn't a great time, don't suppose the players will be that bothered, but I'd rather they concentrated solely on the game?
It’s true that Wes was the only potential Netherlands player in either squad on Sunday, but would Ron give up a golf day to watch what was always going to be a one-sided thrashing?
