My thoughts (too many words, obviously)

We're in a strange situation at present. Normally, a recently relegated club within a parachute window should be throwing the kitchen sink at promotion, or else - but we did that ahead of 2014/15, and the wages this entailed ended up landing us in a whole heap of trouble. Plus, with the exception of that amazing 2011/12 season, when relentless momentum and passion drove us on, I don't think we ever had a squad quite good enough for the Prem.

That squad got older and older; we added to it with plain bad signings, a number of whom had dreadful attitudes. And the culture within the squad began to rot; it became toxic. Lazy players not interested in putting in the hard yards away from home; flat track bullies taking us nowhere fast.

For a long time, the criticism of the board was it was just sitting on its hands, wasting time yet again. But it doesn't apply now. We brought in a Sporting Director with an impressive record from his previous club. Wonder of wonders, we thought outside the box and brought in a highly rated coach from overseas. And now, even still in the parachute window, we're starting afresh.

But as long as we have these owners - as long as we're limited financially - "starting afresh" might well mean selling popular or even brilliant players in order to strengthen across the squad. Starting afresh means thinking a darn sight longer term than we have in recent years. Starting afresh means patience from all of us, and not jumping on one recruitment decision here or there as proof that it's all going to s**t.

'Patience' and 'long term plans' are precarious things in football. If we don't show signs of progress over the next season, no doubt I'll end up as pissed off as anyone else - and of course Webber and Farke want to be as successful as they can as quickly as they can. But they can only be as good as the whole club they're working for; they need patience and support from all of us.

Consider: in summer 1996, sick to death of us constantly selling our best players, the fans simply wouldn't have renewed had we not kept Darren Eadie and Keith O'Neill. Yet not selling them (turning our noses up at 10m or so in the process) set us back about 5 years; because it meant we couldn't strengthen the broader squad at all. We flirted with relegation several times over the next few seasons as a result.

Ultimately, no one player is ever bigger than a club our size - so I'm not implacably against us selling anyone in particular if it means we can strengthen more fundamentally. That's precisely how clubs with limited resources improve. This doesn't mean I want us to sell Oliveira, or Murphy, or anyone else; it does mean that the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. We need a young, hungry squad with high sell-on values; and if we sell some of them, we reinvest and get better.

Perhaps this is too optimistic. Perhaps we'll just drift, end up changing managers yet again, and will be straight back in the nothingness of the late 1990s. But pre-judging things at this point isn't reasonable at all. This is a new management and recruitment team, and they must be given time to show what they can do.

Posted By: thebigfeller on July 10th 2017 at 00:32:13

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