Sport Republic's end of season interview

Things have been going downhill since Cortese left, really. Sure, we lucked out with the recruitment of Koeman, and the likes of Pellé, Mané, Virgil, and Tadic, but that was it. A steady downhill slide ever since, with one set of bad owners and management replaced by another. Ralph was a brief respite, but he had zero backing, except for the signing of the brilliant but injury-prone Danny Ings.

 

I prefer the silence.

 

Agreed. And while things failed pretty spectacularly this season, I'm fairly blasé about relegation because it had felt like a matter of time anyway, because the rot was pretty deep. We have an involved ownership group with a workable plan, they just need to execute on that plan. And getting chastened might help long-term.

 

Good points but I guess I would counter that we were well run within our limitations. If that was crisis to crisis then they did well at that. The new ownership group was supposed to stabilise things. For an ownership group to get us relegated in the first season and lay the blame at the feet of the team they initially said were doing a good job seems like deflection to me. Ultimately Ralph wasn't on good terms with the dressing room so they tried to fix it and got the recruitment balance all wrong. Too much change too soon in the playing staff. Now they have taken some very wide swings with the axe and felled a lot more. That amount of change is very hard to implement all at once but that is what they are attempting to do. Hopefully they compartmentalise well and the playing and coaching staff are fully supported in what they need while the office and boardroom sort their **** out.

 

I'm surprised you feel that we were badly run. you've said yourself several times that we have remained a secure club on a good financial footing. We had achieved the main goal of staying up on the least money in the league, even hit the top of the league for a brief moment. I think the problem was primarily lack of investment/turnover in the playing squad, poor leadership didn't seem like a biggie, nothing that was newsworthy anyway.

Like you I'm blase about relegation though I think if we had survived next season would have been a step forward.

 

Prior to Gao, yes, though that was mostly a cynical attempt by Liebherr to maximize her own profit. Our financial situation in recent years had actually gotten pretty alarming, and I said as much. We had major cashflow issues, the outside loan we had taken out had onerous terms, and our owner couldn't cover the debts if needed. If we went down under Gao, I fully expect that we'd have faced administration, and that was my take at the time:

https://not606.com/threads/confirmed-saints-sign-roméo-lavia.401262/page-6#post-15941329

https://not606.com/threads/the-martin-semmens-appreciation-thread.394533/#post-15072719

 

The thing that I am embarrassed about most as a Saints supporter this season isn't Saints relegation it isn't even SR or even Ånkerman. The most embarrassing thing for me being a Saints supporter is having a Saints supporting Tory Prime minster.

 

Maybe the word well run was wrong. But, we kept ticking over and, most importantly, we survived and kept our heads above water. Everyone knew where we stood and who did what.

That's all changed now.

At the end of the day, Sport Republic have come in, and to their credit, have spent a lot of money. However, that money has been spent poorly on the wrong type of players. Wrong decisions have been made left right and centre, whilst the club structure is seemingly dismantled piece by piece. Now, some might argue this is necessary, I'm not so sure. As I said, we always kept our heads above water under the previous regime. We were never in any serious danger.

Again, sure, we might have been circling the drain for a while, but I'm not convinced that the old regime would have made the mistakes that cost us of last season. That's on SR, and SR alone.

Sport Republic decisions have cost us relegation, in my opinion.

 

That's not exactly how I remember it. We survived, yes, but repeatedly by the skin of our teeth. We regularly had months-long stretches of being absolutely atrocious. Our previous four seasons: 17th, 16th, 11th, 15th. Would you rate Everton as a team that keeps ticking over given that they've managed to have consecutive sub-40 point seasons while staying up, or are they a bad team that has been fortunate that others have been worse? Because for my money it's the latter, as it often was with us.

 

That was ok. I can see some of the rational, and if this kick up the arse galvanises something resembling a well run club, then there could be some fun to be had.

Bring in the Vegan.
(No issues with vegan’s, just in case!)

 

SR have cost us this season through their mistakes for sure. The question going forward is Have they learnt from their mistakes ? Hopefully they have only time will tell.

 

Hm, I certainly don't remember surviving by the skin of our teeth for a while. Yes, we had streaky runs but the good runs often kept us up without ever worrying about going down.

2018/19 - The Mark Hughes/Ralph season was the only season where we were in the bottom 3 consistently, and took until April to survive. This was our closest brush with relegation before this season.
2019/20 - Naturally disrupted by covid, lost 9-0 & had a patchy start to the season but at no point did we ever look like going down. Not much investment.
2020/21 - No crowds, but we got to the top of the league. Yes, we fell apart in the last half (sound familiar?), and we dropped like a stone but again, never looked like going down. Not much investment.
2021/22 - Again, a superb first half of the season but again fell apart in the last half. Again, we dropped like a stone but never looked like going down. Not much investment.
2022/23 - Well, what a clusterfuck. Lots of investment and we've gone backwards.

Everton got lucky there were 3 worse teams than themselves, no doubt about it.

 

The owner, who admits he is not a 'football man', helped picked Nathan Jones.

Super.

I feel underneath all of this there is a fair amount of hubris, 'It's our fault, we made mistakes, but not really, it's their fault'.

Also they said it, this coming season in the Championship I'm judging it all now but results only. If we are struggling come Christmas it is their fault.

 

2017-18, we finished on 36 points. We were in the drop zone as late as the 35th match week.
2018-19, finished on 39 points. We were in the drop zone in late February before rallying to 16th.
2019-20, pretty sure everyone was disrupted by COVID, not just us. Struggled first half but finished a fairly strong 11th on 52 points.
2020-21, finished 15th on 43 points. Not terrible, also demonstrably not good.
2021-22, hung around the lower part of the table before a bunch of good results, before collapsing back to 15th.

Over the course of five years, our average finish was 15th on 42 points. We were in the drop zone for lengthy or late stretches in three of those seasons (for 10 matchdays in 2019-20 before our big rally), and in the other two we had months-long meltdowns. And that doesn't even get into the off-the-field silliness with our chairmen, absent owner, nonexistent sponsor, generally terrible recruitment, and increasingly dire finances. There's a reason I compared us to Sunderland rather frequently...they stayed up for a fair while too, always barely scraping by, before the sheer weight of mistakes caught up to them. We were very much on a path to do the same.

The only reason that we stayed up as long as we did is that Danny Ings' joints miraculously went a couple years without turning into slurry, something he had not achieved prior and has not achieved since.

 

I'm not disputing any of that. But apart of 17/18 (Pellegrino) & 18/19 (Hughes) ... were we in any (realistic) danger of going down? Not really, in my opinion. There was no miraculous escapes or near misses. We were streaky, and it was a downward spiral, but we kept our heads above water & we did bloody well considering the lack of investment. Maybe I was just optimistic we'd survive every year, but even looking back, we didn't look in any danger in those years.

Sunderland were the absolute definition of scraping by. There are similarities, of that I'm not disputing. Year in year out they'd look doomed by March, and every year they'd somehow survive. We weren't quite that bad!

 

In the five seasons before they went down, Sunderland's average finish was 15th on 40 points and a -14 GD, compared to our 15th on 42 points and a -19 GD. So the same position, with a slightly better points total and a significantly worse GD. Pretty similar honestly.

 

Now the question is will our stay in the Championship be similar?

I have said previously we feel like Sunderland and not any of the teams that came straight back up at this moment in time.

They seemed in disarray, had some errr so-so managers, and went straight down the bottom of the Championship the next season. Even their record in the Premier League that season looks very much like ours - 6 wins 6 draws!

 

Keeping our heads above water is one thing but to keep on doing it season after season is different; the writing's been on the wall for a long time and relegation was going to happen sooner or later. The last couple of seasons, especially, have been depressing to watch.
I'm hoping that relegation is a wake up call for everyone, the rot leaves the club and we start again with players that want to be here. Besides, already looking at the league next year is more interesting for me. The Championship was fun last time round after all!

Last season, the problem for me was the team selection; most weeks there were players in our starting line up that shouldn't have been in there. Everyone knew it other than the manager(s) themselves! Whether it was contract clauses or whatever I don't know but it was so frustrating. Hopefully that all ends now and the best players get chosen.

 

They were skint, and got stuck with a lot of really old players on massive wages...had to be the oldest team in the division, comfortably, and very few of them wanted to be there. I'm more optimistic about our chances because we should actually have the resources to get some quality Championship players to round out the squad after the fire sale, and we have a young group that's more likely to be motivated by the available playing time rather than resentful of the drop in level.

But Sunderland 'Til I Die is definitely the reason I wouldn't hold on to anyone who doesn't want to be here, heh.

 

Agree but just imagine for a few seconds how they might have handled Chelsea. That is a club in deep doo do.