Tale of our Season,just not quite good enough and a bench too lightweight to impact games in the last half hour
Nothing wrong with the strength of the bench. We used it too late again. It’s been a theme of the season that McKenna fails to manage the game from the bench.
A fair few beers in at this point, but a frustrating, flat day at Portman Road. That wasn’t a good advertisement for Premier League football. A scrappy game where we arguably edged the first half but pretty much got outplayed in the second half. Low quality match, with the exception of Gomes in the middle for Wolves. Fair play to Wolves - second half, they looked the only side up for it. I thought McKenna was too late making changes. And the one change he did make early - Jack Taylor coming on - was completely ineffective. The guy is not Premier League standard. I’m not sure what our game plan was today. Couldn’t play it out from the back properly. Didn’t string much together in central midfield. Attack was mostly trying to make the most of long balls. Delap took his goal well. I thought Burgess and O’Shea were solid, but not sure how much culpability they had from the balls in for Wolves’ two goals. Tuanzebe and Townsend caught out a few times. Enciso and Broadhead nullified completely. For me, we were missing players like Hutchinson who - at his best - can string things together a bit. I just thought we’d show a bit more fight and desire with the season effectively being on the line today. Really disappointing performance. On that basis - and reflecting on our home form this season - we deserve relegation.
Agreed, today was not good. Unfortunately, Cajuste had his worst game of an excellent personal season. In regards Taylor, very strange substitution. He came in for Broadhead in the right side number 10 which is not his position - we had Jaden and Clarke on the bench who are surely more suited to the role. As others have said, other subs were way too late. Looking forward, we should have a really good championship squad for next season and as much as I have enjoyed this season and all the top players coming to PR, I’m looking forward to winning some home games again
For all of McKennas strengths of which he has many despite what people say I've never felt he's a great in game tactician. But the substitute situation has been a huge thing for us this season as it was for us last season (for opposition reasons). There have been many games where we've been competitive this season for about 70/75mins then the majority of teams bring off hundreds of millions of pounds worth of talent off the bench. I remember being at the Bournemouth home game and we put so much into competing but as the game wore on we just looked knackered and Bournemouth brought on more forwards players and the tide turned and just kept coming. That was us last season we had the ability to bring on tenacious forward players who could just keep pushing. Apparently when we beat Bournemouth on Wednesday they're having a mini injury crisis in the forward positions and struggled to bring any forwards and I think that made a difference for us. We don't have the quality to bring on like many others teams and we've also had a huge amount of injuries in those positions all season. There are lots of areas I feel we could've done better on this season but part of me thinks would it have made much difference or would it be like just rearranging the deckchairs on a sinking ship.
Agreed ptc. Unfortunately, two Premier League transfer windows hasn’t given us the comparable squad depth needed to properly compete against the established Premier League sides. Hopefully a promotion next season will give us more of a solid foundation to build from, but an instant promotion is far from guaranteed and it’ll still be a tough slog when we do return to the Premier League. In what was always likely to be a season of struggle, some of our problems have been self-inflicted. Some players (both newly arrived and old favourites) have more than struggled with the step up. Few of the summer signings have noticeably improved the quality of the starting eleven. Was overspending on top second division talent wise when there could have been better value found abroad? Some of McKenna’s tactical decisions have gone against us, most notably his constant chopping and changing of the side, as well as his late reactions in terms of substitutions. We’ve had a terrible injury record this season - is “over-coaching” and our approach to training affecting this? All ground we’ve gone over, but worth reiterating now relegation is all but confirmed. I’d be more disappointed if I was a Leicester or Southampton fan. They’ve at least had several recent Premier League seasons and clearly have some experienced, good players for this level. But even they can’t properly compete. Probably more a reflection on their poor manager appointments. Sacking off Cooper for van Nistelrooy must be one of the worst decisions in recent Premier League history. It’s surely the first time in Premier League history where the consecutive promoted sides have gone straight back down.
I think 1 of the problems of getting back to back promotions (not that I would change the last 2 years for anything) is that we haven’t had the time to set up a European / worldwide scouting system, hence Cajuste is the only player we brought in from abroad unless you count Godfrey. I’m sure the owners have long term plans in place and so, if we come back up, I think a scouting system would be set up
Apparently we were using Brighton’s scouting model in the Championship, but couldn’t use it as a Premier League club? Not sure if that’s just gossip or proven fact, so take it with a pinch of salt. We definitely need to be more active bringing in undervalued foreign players - particularly from leagues in the Netherlands and France. Ashton has said we prioritise British signings in the round of interviews he did back in the summer, but I do wonder how much value we get out of most of those deals. Obviously some will have worked out well - such as Delap if we sell him for £40 million in the summer. But will we make a decent profit on the likes of Hutchinson, Jack Clarke, and Philogene - to name a few?
Not just scouting model but data and for our own performance too. We bought the services from Brighton and became a competitor when we got promoted so they pulled the plug.
He’s abysmal is what happened. Maybe he’d have featured again as a last resort if we’d had more injuries.
The biggest issue is PSR, or FFP, or whatever it's called now. It limits the amount of cash promoted teams can spend, so even if your owners have deep pockets, they're restricted by the amount they can spend unless you ignore it and take a points deduction risk. It's not a system that is going to help diversify the teams that are in the league, it will help those that are already established stay there, and screws over the ones that come up.
I don't like PSR/FFP, it feels like a blunt tool put in place to solve a bigger problem and has caused a bit of a race to the bottom. Even if these protocols weren't in place I think we could've struggled, probably one of the biggest frustrations for me this season is our lack of patterns of play that we have seen so much over the past couple of seasons, for me one of the main reasons for this is we've brought in so many new players it's hard to develop those relationships in such a punishing league. For me the biggest problem is the disparity in finances between the PL and all the others. If the wealth of the PL was spread more equally through the football league for me things like PSR/FFP and ownerships standards would be far more effective.
You can trace a lot of the problems back to the inception of the Premier League which was a land grab by the top sides to secure Sky cash.The next logical conclusion (after the failed Euro Super League)is abolition of relegation then the elite are immune to any future dangers.
Also chuck in the changed format for the European Cup to Champions League all those years ago. That was set up so the same teams would qualify year in year out guaranteeing all that revenue.
