O'Neil In, Out and Shaking it all about

[Deutsch Wolf]

Unfortunately we’ve not been out of tier 2 long enough to forget just how much of a shit league it is. Even if we did make an immediate return (we probably won’t) we’re now in the same cycle that Watford, Fulham and Norwich found themselves in.

There's no soft landing either. Because most of the squad will leave - from yesterday's XI, you cannot see Semedo (out of contract anyway), Ait-Nouri, Lemina, J Gomes, André or Cunha playing second tier football, Dawson will be 35 by then, and we'd look to quickly recoup what we end up paying for Strand Larsen and Forbs when they become permanent transfers - who knows who the manager would be (would not be O'Neil, but would it be someone who had a portion of this season and eventually took us down, or yet another manager? And what sort of manager are we going to be looking at?) and they've left themselves in a pickle of their own making with ticketing. Like you will obviously lose thousands off the gate automatically, and what do you do with season ticket prices. Leave them anywhere near where they are and you lose another few thousand because who's paying that up front for Championship football. Hack them by £200-300 as you probably need to do, and you tacitly admit that you've made a huge error and rampantly taken the piss, which doesn't seem to be something they're keen on doing.

That roadmap has long since been there though. They just didn't care to read it.

 

[prawnking]

Difficult to see a path out of all this with the decision-making in recent years.

Best hope would have been an experienced manager with gravitas like Lop taking over and steadying us for the season, but we already tried that and fucked it up.

Who knows what's going on in Jeff's head

 

[jd1981]

There's no soft landing either. Because most of the squad will leave - from yesterday's XI, you cannot see Semedo (out of contract anyway), Ait-Nouri, Lemina, J Gomes, André or Cunha playing second tier football, Dawson will be 35 by then, and we'd look to quickly recoup what we end up paying for Strand Larsen and Forbs when they become permanent transfers - who knows who the manager would be (would not be O'Neil, but would it be someone who had a portion of this season and eventually took us down, or yet another manager? And what sort of manager are we going to be looking at?) and they've left themselves in a pickle of their own making with ticketing. Like you will obviously lose thousands off the gate automatically, and what do you do with season ticket prices. Leave them anywhere near where they are and you lose another few thousand because who's paying that up front for Championship football. Hack them by £200-300 as you probably need to do, and you tacitly admit that you've made a huge error and rampantly taken the piss, which doesn't seem to be something they're keen on doing.

That roadmap has long since been there though. They just didn't care to read it.

I think we went through the remaining players for a championship season and it looked very weak ie wouldn’t break the top 10.
Would have to be a clever use of the loan market. I suspect they’d build a good championship squad that if promoted would struggle to get 25 points in the PL.
Reality is I think they’ll flounder and we’ll become a Stoke, Swansea, Blackburn etc just very nothing clubs.

 

[Lycan]

There's no soft landing either. Because most of the squad will leave - from yesterday's XI, you cannot see Semedo (out of contract anyway), Ait-Nouri, Lemina, J Gomes, André or Cunha playing second tier football, Dawson will be 35 by then, and we'd look to quickly recoup what we end up paying for Strand Larsen and Forbs when they become permanent transfers - who knows who the manager would be (would not be O'Neil, but would it be someone who had a portion of this season and eventually took us down, or yet another manager? And what sort of manager are we going to be looking at?) and they've left themselves in a pickle of their own making with ticketing. Like you will obviously lose thousands off the gate automatically, and what do you do with season ticket prices. Leave them anywhere near where they are and you lose another few thousand because who's paying that up front for Championship football. Hack them by £200-300 as you probably need to do, and you tacitly admit that you've made a huge error and rampantly taken the piss, which doesn't seem to be something they're keen on doing.

That roadmap has long since been there though. They just didn't care to read it.

If we went down we'd probably be left with this squad;

Johnstone
Bentley
King

Hoever
Lima
Lembikisa
Doherty
H.Bueno

S.Bueno
Mosquera
Toti
Meupiyou
Lonwijk

Doyle
Traoré
Hodge
Cundle

Chiquinho
R.Gomes
Bellegarde
González
Chirewa

Kalajdzic
Fraser
Chiwome

They might end up with Forbs still. Even if we went down I'd imagine they'd find a buyer for Strand Larsen or find a way to buy ourselves out of the deal. You're probably looking at shifting 2 or 3 out of that group as well, either permanent or another loan for some of the younger players. Then it'd be a few free/low transfers of the Josh Brownhill variety or maybe a cheap Mendes favour from a Portuguese academy. Probably good enough for a mid table finish, maybe with the right manager a push for the play offs.

The ground would be completely deserted though, sub 20K on weekends, 16/17K on weeknights. You'd have Blues in the same league outspending us, Albion either finishing higher or in the League above us and Villa still in Europe.

They'd keep us at that level for a season or 3 while parachute payments keep coming in, hoping for a minor miracle that all the young players start to come good together at the same time or they luck out by appointing a decent manager. If we don't get promoted in that period we'd just fade into obscurity and the cycle of just trying to avoid relegation would start again but one league below.

Can't wait.

 

[Dire Wolf]

If we went down we'd probably be left with this squad;

Johnstone
Bentley
King

Hoever
Lima
Lembikisa
Doherty
H.Bueno

S.Bueno
Mosquera
Toti
Meupiyou
Lonwijk

Doyle
Traoré
Hodge
Cundle

Chiquinho
R.Gomes
Bellegarde
González
Chirewa

Kalajdzic
Fraser
Chiwome

They might end up with Forbs still. Even if we went down I'd imagine they'd find a buyer for Strand Larsen or find a way to buy ourselves out of the deal. You're probably looking at shifting 2 or 3 out of that group as well, either permanent or another loan for some of the younger players. Then it'd be a few free/low transfers of the Josh Brownhill variety or maybe a cheap Mendes favour from a Portuguese academy. Probably good enough for a mid table finish, maybe with the right manager a push for the play offs.

The ground would be completely deserted though, sub 20K on weekends, 16/17K on weeknights. You'd have Blues in the same league outspending us, Albion either finishing higher or in the League above us and Villa still in Europe.

They'd keep us at that level for a season or 3 while parachute payments keep coming in, hoping for a minor miracle that all the young players start to come good together at the same time or they luck out by appointing a decent manager. If we don't get promoted in that period we'd just fade into obscurity and the cycle of just trying to avoid relegation would start again but one league below.

Can't wait.

Fuck sake that's a depressing read. If that really is the future I may just stop watching and not bother now. I can't bring myself to face going through all that shit again.

 

[prawnking]

Time to spend the rest of Sunday in a Wolves-free mode I think! xx

 

[Tony Towner]

My biggest concern is whether this side of January we have the players who could keep a clean sheet irrespective of the manager. Obviously there's some fairly simple changes you can do to make us more compact and you'd sack the clown who is our set piece coach, but I'm not sure that'd be enough with the current personnel.

 

[Wilf Wolf]

Anyone would think we’re a charity giving GO a chance to turn things round. Surely any analysis of our football since February comes to the same conclusion which is he is miles short of what is required of a PL manager. Not acting now is only delaying the inevitable and in all probability the cost of sacking him will be a fraction of what appointing a competent manager might achieve by keeping us up.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

I've got us down for 10 points for the remainder of 2024, which would leave us on 11 from 19.

That's going to be too much to overhaul; we need to reverse both historical data (how many teams have stayed up after a start of 1 point from 7 games, this is by any metric our worst ever PL start, including seasons when we went down) and abysmal form that has lasted for seven months, while fixing a defence that is conceding at a rate of 3 goals a game when we can't sign anyone and the manager has never had us defending well on any level.

 

[Johnny75]

I've got us down for 10 points for the remainder of 2024, which would leave us on 11 from 19.

That's going to be too much to overhaul; we need to reverse both historical data (how many teams have stayed up after a start of 1 point from 7 games, this is by any metric our worst ever PL start, including seasons when we went down) and abysmal form that has lasted for seven months, while fixing a defence that is conceding at a rate of 3 goals a game when we can't sign anyone and the manager has never had us defending well on any level.

I don't think he gets that.

He's got 6 points from the last 57 available!

I can't see us beating 3 teams. Between now and Jan 1st.

 

[Del Woppio]

He seems like a perfectly nice bloke but every day longer makes it closer to hatred. He should never have been in the frame to get the job, and actually in the fuller picture he's been worse than I expected, despite my hopeless naivety getting me near falling for that little purple patch in the middle. This start to the season has been outrageously bad

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

I don't think he gets that.

He's got 6 points from the last 57 available!

I can't see us beating 3 teams. Between now and Jan 1st.

I've got two wins. Southampton and Ipswich.

Draws against Fulham, Bournemouth, Everton and Leicester.

 

[Boozad]

I've got two wins. Southampton and Ipswich.

Draws against Fulham, Bournemouth, Everton and Leicester.

I’ll be round in a bit for a pint of what you’re having.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

He seems like a perfectly nice bloke but every day longer makes it closer to hatred. He should never have been in the frame to get the job, and actually in the fuller picture he's been worse than I expected, despite my hopeless naivety getting me near falling for that little purple patch in the middle. This start to the season has been outrageously bad

Nowhere near hatred for me.

Hoddle was forever with the air that he was doing us a favour and ridiculously misused players that should easily have made top six in a poor Championship as well as pissing the remainder of our parachute money away on a ludicrous signing (also tried to torpedo a season by staying in charge and getting paid for two entire fucking months doing nothing, then leaving and handing his successor a tiny, poor quality squad with no money and nothing set up), Saunders is perhaps the worst manager I've seen in the entirety of British football in 35 years and an absolutely reprehensible specimen on every conceivable level, Lage almost managed to undo four years' of work all on his own in just over a year and while we stopped him short of that, he did cost us some good players because they hated him, and he was just a fucking prick who lied all the time.

I absolutely fucking hate those three.

O'Neil isn't in that league or even close. At worst you could say he's close to the glib levels that Dave Jones ("why practice corners when you score so many off open play", "people talk about formations but once those players cross that white line, they don't matter", "we're looking up at Man City, not down at West Brom") sank to, but I don't think he's even that annoying. He certainly isn't as bad as Mark McGhee for stupid shit that he says in public.

He just isn't good enough, I can't really have a go at him for that, no more than I could have a go at Dave Edwards for not being good enough year after year after year. That was the fault of managers who kept picking him because at least you could trust him to run around a lot. This is the fault of our chairman who doesn't know what he's doing and once appointed Walter Zenga when we gave him his own free choice.

 

[prawnking]

I still can't believe we're literally conceding three goals a game. Embarrassing for everyone involved

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

I still can't believe we're literally conceding three goals a game. Embarrassing for everyone involved

As I said yesterday - it took DJ's 2003 effort (Oakes-Irwin-Butler-Craddock-Naylor as our back five, bar Murray playing the opener at Blackburn) TEN games to concede this many.

It is quite unreal. I'm not even sure which of the five goals yesterday is worst. Perhaps allowing Nathan Stearman to amble into the box unchallenged, all in the first 70 seconds of the game (a game that we kicked off and had possession to start with, no less), and then our £10m keeper dives out of the way of a header he could have blown away if he'd just stood there.

But there's a lot to pick at. How about for the third time in seven games, the opposition have a corner, and we just leave someone at the back post in literally five yards of space for no reason, and he heads it in without moving once or having to jump.

Christ.

 

[Woburn Wolf]

As soon as he hears 'we want Fosun out' GoN Will be fired.

Then let’s sing it loud and throughout the Citeh game.

 

[ROVERT47]

City game will probably be ok, it’ll be when we go 2-0 down against Palace that it’ll kick off.

 

[Woburn Wolf]

Sad to say that with one vaguely acceptable 5 min spell they’re likely to get an earful of ‘Gary O’Neils barmy army’ from a bunch of idiots who would rather be in League One than accept they were wrong about him, Lage, Nuno and god knows how many other things.

Who in their right mind would sing “Gary O’Neil’s barmy army”

 

[Woburn Wolf]

Anyone would think we’re a charity giving GO a chance to turn things round. Surely any analysis of our football since February comes to the same conclusion which is he is miles short of what is required of a PL manager. Not acting now is only delaying the inevitable and in all probability the cost of sacking him will be a fraction of what appointing a competent manager might achieve by keeping us up.

Agree 100% but the Chinese are known for not wanting to lose face and having given him a new long term contract just 3 months ago sacking him would be a difficult call for them. Unfortunately this would very likely result in our being relegated. Happy days.