Your right, sack Hughton, hire Huckerby, start immediate work on increasing the ground to 50k seating capacity, with another 30k terrace, find a Russian oil man, or even better a yank who can finance us by extreme borrowing at high rates, who will change our name to the Norwich Vikings and change our kit to purple! PURPLE! Then we'll win cups and stuff, COYP! Bah! P.s. I do speak for all us not606er's, don't I?
Bloody Hell I don't believe you lot! I hate to think what you would do if there was a real crisis! Why can't you just sit back and enjoy it rather than knifing each other all the time? When you were in League One this board used to be a right laugh with every canary pulling in the same direction! Now you're in the Premiership you are a right bunch of miserable f uc kers!
The first game I saw as a city fan was at home to Reading the season we went down, we lost 2 nil then the next game I saw was the Colchester one. We were awful in both games. Fair weather? No I don't think so. I do enjoy exciting football though.
It certainly wasn't a situation that would be applicable to everyone, but simply based on my experience, if a couple of hundred* of people like my mum got season tickets, the atmosphere would certainly change compared to if they'd been taken by City fans who've seen the hard times. Equally though, perhaps I'm just digging myself a deeper hole, and for some people moaning might just be part of their "football experience", whether there's any real reason for it or not. *chosen fairly arbitrarily, because if you get a small group booing loudly in one area, crowd-mentality can often mean plenty more people start booing.
International breaks don't help that's for certain, it gives people time to over analyse things and focus on small trivial details. I'm going to be honest with you all here, there is two games that have pissed me off this season against Hull and Villa, I'll give and take a lot of the other games because they've been against the high end outfits in this league. I thought the fans reaction after Chelsea was a bit severe as we played well, so long as we put away all the mid table and lower end clubs and we should be laughing, defensively Chelsea read us well their last man always managed to anticipate the final pass into RVW a lot of other teams in this league won't read us like.
As I have think you have mentioned before all of this is caused by the pressure of being in this league and the almost desperation by every fan to stay here. Things will improve as the teams results do so until it does we will all be suffering. Personally I am old fashioned in that you play your best team every week, go out to win every game and win all the competitions you are in otherwise what is the point? I want a cup win, stay in this league, see European football at some stage. The only ones who can get that for us are the manager and players so hopefully they will get it sorted sooner rather than later. Signs look Ok but we are still languishing at the wrong end of the table. Get past the Man City game and have a run against these around us and let's see how things are. But like I said go out to win, that would get many off Hughton's back. No inept Spurs or Hull performances, more Chelsea and we will be OK.
Those two parts, in isolation, is not so much a strange concept to understand, in logical terms, but football does not always follow the rules of logic. I think it is wrong to presume that we any team will improve year on year too, there is no assurance of this at all (Take Stoke for example who seem to have gone backwards in the last 18 months), so in short, even if we are still in the PL in 10-12 years (possibly more), there is no assurance we will have made it to a European league placing or win a trophy in that time. We could still easily be a 12-20th place team in that time, and I would suggest little or no improvement will have taken place (relatively)
The reason why Stoke are currently struggling is that they have had to abandon the strategy that made them a safe mid-table PL side. That strategy has enabled them to punch well above their weight since gaining promotion. The much-vilified Pulis performed every bit as much of an odds-defying miracle as the much-lauded Martinez did for several years at Wigan before finally reality caught up with them. It is too early to say that Stoke are now "struggling" if by that you mean going backwards. They have gambled that they can do as well playing a different type of football under Hughes as they did under Pulis. The odds are stacked against them but we shall see. The point is, though, that it is wrong to compare our situation with that of Stoke and Wigan. We as a club are far better equipped to move up to a higher level than either of them.
thai makes a good point about no certainties in football but to be honest, although they haven't improved their league status year on year, they have improved every other aspect by being a stable premier league club and i'd certainly argue they currently have their best ever squad of players to pick from. i don't agree that we are 'far better equipped' to move to a higher level than stoke - we probably are than wigan ever were - but there is no reason why we can't continue to improve with decent management on and off the field, even if that doesn't correlate with year-on-year improvement position-wise. you have to take into account the fact that other teams around us will sometimes make bigger strides than we will so it might look as though we are going backwards but we aren't. every season we stay in the premier league makes us a stronger, richer and bigger football club. who wouldn't want that?
@Superman Yes, I should have said "better than Stoke" and "far better than Wigan". Stoke currently spend more than we do on wages both in total and as a percentage of turnover (75% on a slightly smaller turnover than ours), while also carrying some debt (£14M was the last figure I saw). That says to me that our potential for improvement is greater.
perhaps. i'd say we're pretty closely matched to a club like stoke. fan base, history, stature within the game, potential...
This is where we could end up going round in circles though, final league placing is critical to the "continuing improvement" of the club, and if they are unfortunate enough to drop this season, next or the year after etc....the chances are, the club may take a huge step backwards, as most clubs relegated from the PL now seem to do. I agree they did appear to be stable.....until last season, and if the latest reports coming from that part of the country have any substance, not all is well in the Potteries right now, with the potential to create some instability - Hence, there really are no assurances in this crazy game.
with regards the bit in bold: no it isn't critical at all if you're talking about what i am, for example finishing 12th then 11th then 17th this season. to the eye it might look as though we've gone backwards but i'd be 99% sure we'd actually moved forwards as a club. sure, if you're relegated there is only one way of looking at it but i'm talking about finishing anywhere above 18th.
Though I do agree we are similaly matched to Stoke currently. I agree with Robbie that we can and will move past them, Youth champions (Could granted be a one off), ability to charge more from a similar sized and commited fan base with little local competition. It will be interesting now that we are practically debt free, how we balance our wages to turnover ratio. Will it grow as a proportion and is there a ratio that the board would see as a cap? Given the rewards based nature relating to finishing position it would be hard to have an absolute fixed ratio unless there is a proportion of pay that would be performance related. Bah!
as i understand it, the wages to turnover has leapt from a remarkable 49% last season to just over 60% this current season. it's not a move i like but i appreciate it was inevitable and being debt-free allows us to be more flexible on this front.
The point I was making in my earlier post was that Stoke were indeed stable until the pressures against continuing with the Pulis strategy forced them to change. I don't think those pressures came originally from the Stoke board. The moral IMO is that when the board of a club who have manifestly managed the club's fortunes well over a period of time are pressured into not following their preferred plan for taking the club forward, the odds against continuing at even the same level increase and the prospect of a downward trajectory becomes very real. As you say, success can never be guaranteed, any more than a win can be guaranteed. But do fans really want to make lack of success or worse even more likely?
