by Slim » Mon Mar 21, 2011 6:07 pm
John, I have great respect for your cab driving skills and role as an infantryman in the Crimean War, but on this you are not right. Now I say not right because I don't know if you are wrong, but your almost fanatical obsession with this aspect is in no means right.
You claim that we have a revolving door of managers and you are indeed correct about this, but we have other aspects. Corrupt chairman, overreaching chairman who spent too much that we couldn't afford, lack of money, lack of reputation. Given a stable environment, would Pearce have been able to challenge for honours with no money? Probably not, some may argue that Bolton and Stoke are financially poor, but both in recent times have been buying clubs and we would have been a continually selling club, so I would marginalize any manager pre-billions for the last 15-20 years as our reason for success or failure. Not completely wrong, but certainly only a minor factor.
Now I have no problem in giving the right man time to get his team in place, but what exactly have you seen in Mancini that makes you think he is the right man? Did Mercer seem like a clueless moron while he wasn't getting the results on the pitch or did it seem like we were at least heading in the right direction? We've had people go on about negative tactics, I think we can ignore that as it's been done. But what about the other aspect of his job, in his time at the club we have shipped out good solid players proven at this level in this league and replaced them with chancers, most of which have not come off. Silva is the only one I could point at and call a success, the rest range from "give him time" to "the worst player we have signed in 20 years"<--seriously, who said this? Was in the Kolarov thread. We have shipped game winners out for plodders and while you said unrealistically we should have 25 players of equal quality who can step in, I would think that our owners sinking hundreds of millions into the clubs would be entitled to having a squad of sufficient depth and quality that we can cope with all but the absolute worst of injury crises. As it is, Tevez gets rested and we are incapable of mounting even the most token of meaningful attacks, are we really that fragile? And who is to blame if we are?
We have this small squad who are exhausted according to Bobby, well who the hell's fault is that? We have two listed injuries at the moment to Tevez and Given, okay we just got Johnson back but being he was coming off the bench more often than not, how much impact would he have had on results or fitness of an entire team? Probably not that much. So let's show up the scenario's here...
a) Players are really exhausted:Rotate what we can, Milner, SWP, Boateng, Boyata, Jo, Guidetti all get some games as we plan around the more important fixtures such as the FA Cup and a possible top 3 deciding match against Chelsea.
b)Too many competitions:Sacrifice a competition, I am 100% sure people would understand that the Europa, while a good competition is lowest on the totem pole here and with a possible 9 round robin matches, it is the most intensive. Send the kids in, if they win then great, if they don't well it's good experience for them.
c) Players aren't really exhausted:Bobby lays the groundwork for failure, wasn't the piss poor tactics, transfers and selections, it was the exhaustion. Easy way to spot this is if he plays almost the exact same 11 players every week, ignoring form and fitness and certainly not taking into account the exhaustion that he preaches to the media.
d) Bobby has lost the dressing room: Your temperamental prodigy has a 1 in 2 strikerate for goals and cards, almost seems at times he is looking for someone in the right position to lose it with him and ship him out on the earliest plane back to Italy. Your captain hands in a transfer request, your former captain takes a banned substance and while the player you shipped out to Madrid went to great lengths to avoid criticising the boss, in what he didn't say you can infer his life was made pretty miserable and the atmosphere one of fear at City.
I am not saying I know 100% what's going on and some of them sort of dance around the point rather than making one, but the fact is, I am not pissed at the results, I am well and truly pissed off with the groundwork that brought us to this point. Groundwork that should have been done but wasn't, actions that were taken but shouldn't have been and quite frankly, 99% of his decisions appear on subsequent evidence to be the wrong ones. I am sure Busby and Mercer didn't get the results they wanted while they were laying the foundations of a successful era, but I am sure they were moving things in the right direction and were you privileged to goldfish bowl coverage that we are today, you would have seen that.
Wow this got long, tell me if it came out making any sense in the end.
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