Matt Crocker, Danny Butterfield, David Thomas plus some other less high profile staff (such as academy goalkeeping coach Vince Bartram).
This is a big window for Sports Republic. If you look at the big decisions they’ve had to make since coming in, you would say really it’s: 1. Whether to sack Ralph in the summer or let him start the season 2. The summer transfer window 3. Ralph’s replacement 4. The January transfer window I was very much behind the idea of letting Ralph start the season, so can’t really complain on that one, but with hindsight, we should have parted ways in the summer and given a new manager both a pre-season and the World Cup break. Not a huge error as you could have made a good case for both keeping and sacking Ralph. What I do see as a huge error is the summer window which essentially condemned Ralph to the sack, and has given Jones such a difficult job. Bringing in Jones to replace Ralph has raised eyebrows. Early days but pressure on NJ is now huge. January window will either lead to our relegation (and probably Jones’s sacking), or our survival. So it’s an incredibly important time for the club, and especially Sports Republic who, let’s be honest, haven’t yet lived up to our expectations.
I think that initially SR seemed like they were the saviour to our problems. Much like when you're trapped in a relationship with a ****ty partner, someone new and comes along and you think, this is so much better! This is exciting, there's definite changes here. Then a year in you realise you've just changed one bag of ****e for another and just changed what problems you had. SR have made mistakes in every area you highlighted but the biggest being no.3. They had a chance to try and redeem themselves but once again they've blown the rent money down the bookies, but don't worry the horse will definitely come in this time
Doubt we’d be able to get a deal done whilst Lorient are negotiating with potential new owners, which is a shame.
4 February 2023, after we've just lost to Brentford: "We did try really hard to sign a forward, including the lad at Lorient. Unfortunately the discussions regarding their ownership ultimately meant that we couldn't finalise the deal before the window closed, despite our best efforts and willingness to wait until the last second. But we have every confidence in Che and Adam."
And the cycle of “we will re-asses our options in January” to “January is notoriously hard to get deals done, we will retry in summer” continues.
Don’t understand the negativity towards SR. They invested a lot of money(by saints standards) in the summer. The lack of striker has clearly cost us, but the hit rate in the summer has been decent. plenty of saints supporters can’t see beyond their noses
They’ve made some questionable decisions, I think it’s fair to be critical. We bought 8 (12?) new players and are bottom of the table, despite 70m spent. We had minimal investment with Gao, but we were never in this dire position. Why would we not be critical?
God this thread is depressing. We've got some of the best youngsters in the country and need to sprinkle a bit of experience in there to help them shine. I like that we are linked with Sander Berge - fits the mould and is still only 24. I'd be keen on someone like Origi on loan too, despite his goalscoring issues. Someone with the quality to make a difference for a few months, a bit of experence and would likely be avilable. But otherwise I trust in the process. It is as always going to take time with such a young squad.
The current dire situation is more the fault of years of under investment coming home to roost For me as an owner SR gave Ralph and his coaches the resources and the chance to improve the side. They failed in the short term, but I don’t see how SR can be the ones to take much blame for that
I think it’s fair to say years of low investment have led to where we are, but blaming Gao for this year’s performance is not. He kept us in the league on a shoe string, someone new comes in and we immediately tank. Does it seem fair to blame him? In hindsight SR took the wrong approach, we signed too many players with little experience. We kept Ralph when we should have got rid. When we finally sacked him we replaced him with ANOTHER inexperienced member of staff, in the most important position. It’s as much SRs fault as gaos (if not more IMO) because they haven’t improved on what came before. Perhaps in their first full season they should have taken a more conservative approach? Perhaps given the timing of manager changes we should have chosen a more conservative option?
