Will the board be watching this poll, I wonder?
After yesterday’s game I was angry with Ralph for not setting the team up to close the game out, and particularly angry with JWP for being in the wrong place. Now I’m not so sure my anger was justified on either count. Football is a great example of chaos theory in action, where random events have unexpected consequences. Trossard’s lengthy injury timeout would have made those last ten minutes or so a nightmare for all the players, but more so for the obviously nervous Saints team. Alex’s injury, presumably incurred while making that save, was something neither he, nor James, nor Ralph, had any control over, but the pressure of the situation made it even worse. I suppose Alex should just have gone down screaming, like Trossard did, and got the game stopped, and then Ralph could have assessed the situation. But he didn’t.
All that was meant to absolve Ralph from the immediate blame for dropping the points, but of course he isn’t completely free of guilt, neither are any of the players. We should have been comfortably ahead by the time of Trossard’s injury, and that is down to Adams and Armstrong and Redmond and Broja for missing chances, and down to Romeu and that utterly stupid foul, and of course down to Ralph, with whom the buck always stops.
People will say that Ralph now has a squad he has built himself, which is true up to a point. The players he has bought have all been at the cheaper end of the market, as is obvious when we play a team like City or Man U or Chelsea, when their 3 subs are worth more than our entire squad. That’s what Ralph has to live with, and those are the constraints any replacement for Ralph would also be working under.
Given all that, I am a Ralph-in voter. If Saints are bought by someone willing to invest heavily in the squad, I would still give Ralph a chance to see the kind of players he could attract with a larger budget. After that, it would be down to results.
