Anyone who believed we had a squad in season two and three to achieve anything more than we did is delusional. At times we had to use academy players in order to field a team. The upside of that is we provided a very good “pathway” and produced some excellent academy players, a couple of which have moved to B’Muff, and provided much of the cash to help stabilise our finances, and also funded our recent arrivals.
I think the point is, we should have been. That was clearly SL’s expectation from Nige and he didn’t deliver, and as all managers do when that happens, he pays the price. Nige let a lot of good players go for ZERO, that left him in the position of having to use kids, can’t have it both ways.
The reason he let them go for zero, is no one was prepared to pay for them, and they were on too high wages, hardly his fault as he wasn’t involved in their purchase, or setting their wages. That’s how he steadied the ship, he then had to use academy players, as that’s all we had, and could afford, but still managed to preserve our championship status, if he hadn’t sold them, and removed their wages, we may well have broken FFP
