3 hours ago, roversfan99 said:

Im not convinced those players would do "very well" in League 1.

I'm bloody sure they wouldn't. Be more likely to drop straight through.

23 hours ago, aletheia said:

Team?

1
P Robinson (c)
18
B Orr
16
S Dann
5
G Givet
21
M Olsson
10
M Formica
8
D Dunn
35
J Lowe
12
M Pedersen
23
J Hoilett
24
Y Aiyegbeni

SPURS

24
B Friedel
28
K Walker
13
W Gallas (c)
4
Y Kaboul
25
D Rose
7
A Lennon
14
L Modric
30
Sandro
3
G Bale
11
R van der Vaart
10
E Adebayor

 

 

Blimey, we had the ultimate bottle jobs like Orr, Dann, Lowe, and Pedersen up against players like Kyle Walker, Gallas, Danny Rose, Aaron Lennon at his peak, Modric and Bale and people wonder why we struggled to make any impression?

1 hour ago, lraC said:

Not to mention Millwall away, when we came from behind and won.

That was a dead rubber by that point tbf.

When it actually mattered the team couldn't produce a win for love nor money.

7 minutes ago, martonrover said:

It’s too early to make a judgement on Eustace, but JDT wasn’t “poor”, but very stubborn, and I do agree that he had lost interest and should’ve been relieved of his duties sooner.

It would take a highly skilled operator to get a tune out of this bunch of misfits, and a troubleshooter appointment was needed to give us a chance of staying up this season.

It doesn’t look as if Eustace will fit the bill, but it ain’t over until it’s over.

 

 

We might end up being incredibly grateful to Damien Johnson for those 3 points against Stoke. I agree a temporary firefighting appointment until the end of the season might have been best then rather than rip everything up and start again.

You'd have thought the most logical idea might have been to revert to the previous JDT  "model" of play albeit with a decent Director of Football in situ this time.

3 minutes ago, Mattyblue said:

You seemed to rate him pretty highly when he was here (which was noticeable as you don’t rate many folk 😅)

I liked the fact he wanted the Club to be ambitious and given the fact that footballing operations essentially boiled down to Waggott Broughton and him saw him as the Club's only real hope in the long term.

Ultimately though, results didn't match the hyperbole as likeable as he is/was.

As far as Eustace is concerned I don't really get the apparent hate towards him. His job is to keep us up. If he achieves that he will have succeeded no matter how ugly it gets. After that however, even if we stay up this season, I  don't see how playing in the current manner is sustainable in the long run.

3 hours ago, chaddyrovers said:

We aren't in deepest shite at all. 

I'm not sure where you get your optimism from after two wins from nineteen Chaddy but I fear that phrase in particular will come back to haunt you in years to come.

Talk about tempting fate.

JDT was fairly over-rated as a manager here imo. There's no doubt he had us playing an attractive brand of football at times but like Mowbray before him in his first season he managed to miss out on a play off place when it seemed impossible to do so.

In his second season the players appeared to have completely given up on whatever it was he was asking them to do and we were hurtling towards relegation long before his departure. Its no good playing pretty football if you're conceding 2-3 goals and losing every week.

All that said he was clearly very ambitious for the Club and was a man of integrity, unlike the rest of senior management. No Coach or Manager should be expected to work under conditions whereby  the Club's primary transfer target gets sabotaged either deliberately or by incompetence every year. It's a shame he didn't take up another Club job so we could have seen once and for all what we did or didn't miss out on.

The Sweden gig is pretty much a free hit for him. As long as he gets them playing some nice stuff then I don't suppose too much pressure will be put on him in terms of results. A bit like the working conditions here which seemingly he didn't like.

13 hours ago, Andy said:

I've had pelters for this, but I'm sticking with it - Leo will become a good GK and play at a higher level than Pears ever will.
Well, technically he already had (international football).

He's had a poor start overall with us, but I think there's a very decent GK in there.

You don't give up do you - he can't even catch the ball - bit of a problem for a keeper.

45 minutes ago, lraC said:

He scored PNE so can’t be right 

Still one of the worst players ever to wear the shirt though whatever roversfan 99 might say.

Might have been a few worse, O Mara, Mckinnon, Chris Brown and every striker the Egg has signed  spring to mind, but by god there isn't much in it.

The decision not to cash in on him looks worse by the week. What's up with Leonard? Imo his movement is far better than Gallagher's (not difficult admittedly) and he'd be the better option.

Looking fairly grim now.

Is that two wins in nineteen? Four games off half a season.

Szmodics apart, these players are pathetic. Good job for them they're at a Club where "There's no pressure on results".

Stoke winning

On 04/03/2024 at 11:06, only2garners said:

The meeting is being delayed at the request of the fans, not the club. We wanted a meeting to be after the next court date in India, rather than the day before. Likely to be on 26th now.

The meeting should have been held well before the Court date so that the FF could have ascertained the Club's stance and put their views across in advance.

Nothing much you can say or do after the hearing has happened.

On 05/03/2024 at 11:46, superniko said:

Broughton probably mentioned the international break hoping by that stage we'd be mid-table and he could just reel off a few lines about next season and tying up the player then, to which happy clappers would defend him and the club. 

It's backfired for him (as has everything he's done since joining the club pretty much), as we're now in a relegation battle and he's going to come out and explain (or remind us) of how much he cocked up in January whilst we're 1 point above a relegation place and in free-fall.

Hope the curry was nice at least.

Wonder how the talks to secure Mcguire on a pre contract agreement are going...........

Or have they forgotten the script already that that is what they promised to do?

Does anyone know if we are still going to Court on March 12th as things stand?

37 minutes ago, Andy said:

Impossible to disagree with this.

Feels like they’re cheating the fans, themselves.

I can accept us being shit if we’re grinding out results. We’re currently shit and failing to beat the teams below/around us.

Eustace has shown absolutely nothing, other than to emphasise how much of a miracle JDT worked last season (and the first half of this).

If we do go down, it’s completely deserved.

You're looking at JDT through extremely Rose tinted spectacles - Eustace for all his faults has scraped seven points from seven games. JDT managed two from his last seven.

Not that this is good enough. I would never underestimate the ability of this squad of players to snarch defeat from the jaws of victory. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we lose on the last day to drop Into the bottom 3 for the first time.

12 minutes ago, Devon Rover said:

Was that Hyam telling the fans to calm down when yet again he took it backwards? This are  bunch of twats we've got here. 

And this guy is our captain. 

Says it all.

Is Broughton still here? That's two players he's signed (Ennis and Fleck) who haven't even been fit enough to play.

We must be living in some weird parallel universe where that's deemed acceptable.

The worst thing about Moran for their first goal is that after being cheaply beaten he doesn't make any sort of effort whatsoever to get back, and try to retrieve the situation, just sort of jogs back casually behind the Swansea player.

36 minutes ago, Andy said:

There was a very real chance of it happening last time, but TM (in fairness to him) did a very good job of reuniting and rebuilding aspects of the club.
Gets forgotten sometimes, but the role he played was absolutely vital.

We now have nobody at the club who is capable of turning this nosedive around.

He had about five times the budget of everyone else, you have to give him credit for the promotion but by the same token it would have been a  very poor effort had we not bounced straight back.

Too early to say if Eustace could or couldn't do something similar, I don't think people are cutting him much slack at the moment.

For me it boils down to which of the squad would you want alongside you in the trenches when things weren't going so well?

Szmodics, Scott Wharton definitely.

Pears / Mcfadzean maybe? 

On that basis I'm not expecting a positive outcome.

7 minutes ago, Wing Wizard Windy Miller said:

The Gallagher conundrum.

He is our best defender but our worst attacker.

Ergo useless.

You wouldn't play a centre half who couldn't defend to save his life but who popped up with the odd goal every five games or so.

1 minute ago, roversfan99 said:

Hes no more use to us than Telalovic? Than Markanday? Moran? Ayari? Koumetio? Sigurdsson? Garrett? Both keepers?

No. He offers nothing.

3 minutes ago, tomphil said:

We were always more likely to head to league 1 under these lot than back to the Prem and so it came to pass.

Since bouncing back it has always been more likely we'd drop back again than even challenge the top 6 by May and so it'll come to pass whether it's this season or next or the one after.  Next time though it'll be a long hard old slog to even get back into the Championship.

There is only ever one way out of this doom cycle.

Last time it seemed to be a no no being in League 1 for some reason. The owners seemed quite happy to carry on paying the wages of high earners like Mulgrew Dack and Graham to facilitate a swift return to the Championship.

Even sanctioned the purchase of Armstrong in January.

This time? I'm not so sure. Don't see us bouncing back for some time should the worst come to the worst.

l

On 01/03/2024 at 18:07, Armchair supporter supremo said:

Broughtons signings overall have a better good 2 bad ratio than any other venky period apart from maybe bowyers, especially with the minimal funds he's had and other entities at the club seemingly trying to scupper every signing he makes that costs over a mill

No offence but that-s absolute bollocks.

Great signing in Szmodics, Tronstad maybe OK, the rest ranging from poor to downright disastrous.

9 minutes ago, roversfan99 said:

I know he was poor today but we had to carry on with him clearly not fit due to lack of alternatives. But your agenda towards Gallagher is bizarre.

He is bang average, but there are at least 10 players in this squad alone that are worse, he clearly isnt one of the worst players to have ever pulled on the shirt. The owners that again seem to have been swerved in terms of blame have cut the budget to the extent that Gallagher is actually quite useful compared to some of the players weve had to beg steal and borrow for.

You keep saying this, but he isn't, he's no better despite costing £5m and being our highest earner on £16k p.w.

And the joke is  we actually hung onto him for grim death in January. Still, you'd expect  nothing else from a Club as dysfunctional as ours.