Our PL manager records

Entitled to have the wrong opinion Turgid is being kind as a description of Roeders reign. His love of Shola was worse than Pards too. Very direct archaic football. Great record as a manager though through West Ham, Newcastle and Norwich..................

The only shame was we replaced him with the worst of the lot. Trio of hell Souness, Roeder and Fat Sam.

 

I'd place Roeder a bit in front of Souness and Fat Sam.

 

So would I, just not very far. Worst period watching Newcastle was that period of those 3 passing the job to each other. Even though we were route one under Smith, got tanked under Ardiles, at least there were positives. And I was young enough to have ridiculous over enthusiastic support in me.

Allardyce ruined a year of my life without doubt. Souness was just clueless but Sam actually had a plan. It was just so ****ing horrible. I still have flashbacks of our centre backs pumping 60yards balls to the smallest frontline in the league, the inept Martins and Owen.

 

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Souness utterly destroyed the club, alienated all the best players and was taking it to the depths of hell, what Roeder did was magnificent. He should have been allowed to continue the rebuilding process.

The guy not only had to cope with the fact Souness had got rid of what made Bobby's team special, he also had to deal with the worst injury crisis the club has EVER had... and he still sits there with pretty incredible stats...I remember a man who got the best out of Peter Ramage FFS...

 

I remember him for the good things he did and if he'd been left to get on with it, life would have been a lot better.

 

Agree with you, JPF.

I remember Roeder as someone who corrected the situation after the inept Sourness left. For me, statistics aside, Souness is probably the worst manager we've had over the past 35 years. The reason? He inherited an excellent squad from SBR and had good financial backing. He really did have the Sadim Touch: he turned everything brown. And, unfortunately, Shepherd was much the same because we now know he staked the future of the club on him.

So Roeder did a good job in steadying the ship. However, he was undone by an injury crisis of mega-proportions - and there was no money left.

Gullit, Ardiles, Smith, Ardiles - all had their faults - but extraneous issues (politics mainly) made their jobs particularly difficult. Souness had no such excuse.

 

Whilst Roeder undoubtedly took us on at a low, what cannot be ignored is how bad and archaic our football was under him. Very direct and tough to watch. He thought Shola was the 2nd coming - enough said! When Pardew points to our injuries, people say "ah but a good manager can still get good results even with bad players". Yet its always trawled out as a valid excuse for Roeder? (I actually think it is valid for both) It seems Roeder gets cut more slack because he is well liked whereas Pardew is hated by the majority.

Roeder spent good money (15-16m ish, I think his net spend was 10m though he was allowed frees) on Duff and Martins who both turned out to be absolute nightmares. He turned down Sol Campbell while he was actually still a good player. Took Rossi on loan then never used him. Lets not forget he probably had a full 25 man compliment of 1st team squad players to utilise unlike our streamline efforts these days. He got smashed 5-1 at home off Birmingham in the 3rd round of the FA Cup too. We ended up 13th 10 points or so adrift of mid table and only 5 clear of the drop zone. We didn't take many hammerings but we lost 17 games and only win 11 all season. Fair enough he had a **** defence to work with but then surely he should have prioritised his money instead of blowing 11 on Obafemi ****ing Martins!

It was depressing stuff from my memory. You look at Pardew who I agree in an ideal world should go, he has a smaller squad, less money by far, and at least had us playing some decent football and winning games early on this season. Its like we are saying as long as you are not a nasty man and don't get beat by many then you're alright. Roeder's stats are skewed massively by his success the previous season in his honeymoon period when the players were lifted by the shackles of Souness disappearing. When he got control and had to continue, he couldn't hack it.

 

Yep, I think the SBR/Souness decision is arguably the single biggest mistake in the history of the club. If you factor in Souness as about the worst ever with the simply ludicrous decision to sack SBR, it's a mightily huge error.

 

Set us back years. A minority of fans agreed with it bizarrely (I remember the game well when a few started booing). The maddest thing of all was we always started quite slowly under Robson so it was nothing new. Facing up to a world without Shearer, then choosing to do it without Robson was just silly. Regardless of a few fans booing, only one person made the decisions about the comings and goings of managers at the time, and that was Fat Fred. As much as I despise Ashley and his lack of ambition, Fat Fred's wild stupidity was much more damaging.

 

The only statistic to take from this is Keegan, Robson and Roeder had a pattern roughly of won two, drew one, lost one.
The rest all win one, lose one, draw one.
Pards is more win one, lose one, win one, lose one, draw one.
And all the managers who left here have held their hands up and admitted they had personal short comings which contributed to their departure, apart from Sham who still believes he's a top manager.
Pardew appears to think in a similar vein to Sham in that it's always someone else's fault.