FAO Pants (reading the conversation below)

A few points on Hamilton.

I agree - we missed out on some good players because the board wouldn't release funds to him. Although, it must be said, what he did with what was available to him was mostly pitiful. Raymond de Waard for ?225,000 was an appalling signing, introduced with the ridiculous hyperbole which, for me, made Hamilton so antagonising - "the Dutch Ryan Giggs".

Derveld was similarly abysmal, and he completely wasted McVeigh and Nedergaard, who, as it turned out, were very good players, but we didn't find that out until Worthington took over. Re-signing Garry Brady on loan was a bizarre move given how unremarkable he was the first time round, too.

Then there's Cottee and Walsh - two of the most loathsome players to wear the shirt in recent history - the crashingly mediocre McGovern and the equally unspectacular Notman. As for Holt, the fact that Worthington completed the signing after Hamilton left probably means that it was Worthington rather than Hamilton who wanted the player, which is why it didn't happen until after Hamilton went.

He had to earn the right to spend the Bellamy money by proving his mettle on the transfer market, which he singularly failed to do. Yes, it would have been good to have signed James Harper, but of your other examples, Paolo Vernazza's career nose-dived spectacularly, Ian Moore hasn't really fulfilled his potential elsewhere and David Healy was nothing special (although by no means terrible) when he did come here, so I'm not sure they'd have worked out to have been brilliant signings.

I think you completely over-estimate Bellamy's influence too. Bellamy was universally disliked, seen as a spoilt idiot by the rest of the squad and given his complete lack of any subtlety, probably not a great manipulator.

Things would have calmed after the Barnsley game and, in any case, given how unpopular he was, the rest of the squad would probably, under the right management, have bonded more after he left, much like Everton did with Rooney last season.

Besides, it got much worse after Bellamy left - it was only one game into the season.

(On a wider point, having one incredibly talented but astonishingly dislikable/insane player isn't necessarily a problem in itself - Stan Collymore scored 25 goals for a Forest team that finished 3rd in 1994-5 when the other Forest players refused to pass the ball to him, or celebrate him, when he was walking around the training ground punching Bryan Roy or someone for making gentle fun of him. Anyway ...)

Hamilton's rhetoric about a "title-winning" squad was more offensive than Worthington's, because Worthington HAD won it two years before, and it was far less believable. I agree with your point about it sounding equally absurd in retrospect, but at the time Hamilton's sounded much more ridiculous.

As were his constant statements about how well we were playing when we lost five in a row, after each defeat.

Hamilton was a terrible manager, who wasted the good signings he did make, and over-used his bad ones. He was an atrocious man-manager, too, and dismal at handling a far less intense media pressure than Worthington had to deal with in the Premiership.

I agree entirely with your desire to see Worthington leave now, but Hamilton was a far worse manager than he and the first part of Worthington's (considerable) achievement at Norwich was to clear up the mess he made.

Posted By: Ottosson Foxtrot, Feb 8, 01:07:06