In hindsight we should have kept him and binned off any players that didn’t rate him tbh. Players have proved time and again that they aren’t worth listening to. Normally changing the manager is the best option, but in this case changing all of the players and keeping him would have made more sense. If they can’t even be arsed to play against a league 2 team they can all **** off
I have to say that was my position for a long time, I eventually shifted to he needs to go because he looked so spent. The single point of failure was not getting a striker. Adam’s failure in front of goal this season did for Ralph and led us where we are. If we had taken half the piss easy chances we created early on we would be nervous rather than fecked. but what we ended up doing was Binning off off the experienced players, recruiting a bunch of trainable up and comers then binning him off anyway leaving us with this. Worst of all possible outcomes.
really? Interesting. Che was excellent for him when he worked and pressed hard. then the Leeds rumours started and it seemed he was one of the unhappy players. He’s been a good buy overall just not able to lead the line. Adarma has been disastrous. Schad I think called it. But he wasn’t the worst, so far it’s Aribo for me. I watched two minutes of highlights and couldn’t work out what the heck we were buying. Seemed to blunder through with little idea what he was doing. And yep, that’s him thru and thru.
Our scouts should all immediately be fired tbh. If it’s true that these players weren’t selected by Ralph… then I genuinely regret calling for him to go. Big part of the reason I wanted him gone is because I thought he was focusing on bringing in players with limited technical ability as he was focusing on willing runners. If he had no say in these players then he should still be here and given money to spend.
It’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario to me. When we signed Adams and Armstrong we were shopping in the bargain bin for strikers and both were relatively cheap. I don’t know if anyone can be bothered to look at the windows they moved to us and highlight any other strikers who have done well in that price range? Whilst Ralph may not have wanted them, the option might have been them or no one, or another alternative deemed worse. He was really hamstrung by the lack of funds when it came to signings
Frustrating part is 12-18 months ago We were genuinely considered a decent club with a top manager and a good option for exciting players. Now.. not so much.
He didn’t want players from the Championship, so guessing he was after better European talent that we probably couldn’t afford.
Our track record of signing strikers from abroad is pretty poor too. Just feel this article is a bit incomplete without stating his preferences.
That Gabbiadini bloke wasn’t bad iirc. And some chap called Pelle springs to mind. To be fair to our recruiting department, Rickie Lambert’s career was a good advert for lower league strikers stepping up when given the chance. So they probably thought they could repeat the trick.
It’s the lack of investment from the Gao years which is coming home to roost. Too many average/poor players stuck in the team playing alongside inexperienced. only JWP and KWP are good enough to be consistent PL players in most teams. Everyone else is too inconsistent.
Disagree with this. Gao may have spent very little, but when it was spent it was spent wisely. SR have thrown plenty of cash on bad purchases. All we needed was 3-4 key signings, this is 100% on SR.
Was it though? Hoedt, Vestergaard, Lemina, Elyounoussi, Gunn were all bought under Gao (plus a few more debatable transfers such as Walcott, Djenepo or Diallo), and far from the definition of spending money wisely! In the main, its been very hit and miss regardless of who the owner is.
True. It seemed to work better though. If we had spent 25-30m on a striker and 20m on a half decent CDM we would be halfway there to staying up.
