Owzat wrote:mart wrote:bigmick wrote:Does anybody think we will finish above Spurs next season? Regardless of who's fault it will be, beachballs, hits on the woodwork, dodgy refs, Gerrard not playing as well every game as he did against West Ham in the cup final a few seasons back, fecking Parry/Purslow, the owners, the pitches etc etc etc etc. Putting all of that aside for a second, will we finish above Spurs next season with Rafa still as the manager?
If the answer is NO, is that it then, that's all we can expect from now on? If it's YES, how come, could you explain it to me?
I think with Rafa in charge, we will finish 6th next season.
Regardless of who is manager i think we will struggle next season if the clubs future is as uncertain as it is now. I really dont care if its rafa or some other manager taking over. The rafa debate takes far too much space here. We just have to hope the club is sold very quickly, and hopefully this time to owners that wants to invest in the club. The new owners will decide our future as a club. Until then i just hope we keep our head above water.
Too many people are hoping for the unlikelier of two events, blaming the owners for things that are not really in their control - RESULTS.
Sure they haven't given Rafa £200m to spend, but why is there the expectation they should have when no previous owner has? But the bottom line is Rafa has spent the money poorly and not produced results. You can't blame spending, to our normal level of £40m a summer, for results like the home draws against Brum and Fulham, away defeats at pompey, Wigan or Sunderland, or the limp away draws at Wolves and Hull, albeit the season was over by the Hull game.
THOSE are what cost us fourth, poor results against opposition we should be beating and not the owners or lack of funds.
So those who don't simply bury their heads in the sand and say it isn't Rafa's fault, lay the blame at the owner's door as a convenient scapegoat, there is the issue of how the manager is doing based on resources - not good enough. Sure the owners are responsible for the financial state of the club, but Rafa "not having enough money" is ridiculous because there has never been any figure by which to judge what they should be giving him. Noone said new owners have to give Rafa £75m a summer, there is no figure so assertions he is somehow short changed in the transfer budget are nonsense based on empty word promises from one of the two numpties.
What is a realistic hope is that a manager who can do better than Rafa could come in, more likely than this fantasy world change of ownership some are pinning all their hopes on. It is quite clear they want more money than anyone is willing to offer, they have a choice of cutting their losses or sticking it out and hoping the situation doesn't end up out of their control in which case we could be fecked.
But let's highlight Rafa's part in this. I won't call him clueless, but last season didn't exactly show his supposed tactical shrewdness. He wasted his budget on a RB and CM, not dwelling on that too long he also managed the aforementioned poor results which cost us fourth, and we were poor. Sure we lost Torres, another convenient way of taking blame away from Rafa, but it is Rafa's fault we are dependant on Torres (and Gerrard) so much because he chose to spend £20m on a CM instead of a striker, or £17.5m on a RB instead of a striker. He chose to play two DMs most of the season. He decides that anything before the 66th minute is "too early" to change things and even then his changes are routine and if not predictable then laughable come criminal.
You could point at 08/09 and say "look, we finished 2nd", but that was in no small part thanks to a fair bit of luck like the mancs had this season. They had og to thank for a lot of goals, we had a fair few late winners early 08/09 and some of those thanks to the number of red cards our opposition saw which was similar in number to the mancs' og count. We played well at times in 08/09, but when we were top it was not that convincing, ground out results with help from the refs and late winners. If you want the truth, our luck couldn't last and it didn't. We could have done with luck this season, but if luck is what is needed to make even fourth then it doesn't say much about the manager.
And those reckoning we would struggle to get a decent manager. Poppycock. It is always a line trotted out by those with no imagination. Sure WE couldn't predict who might come in, but no contract is sacred and how often do you see managers plucked from a club like Valencia that you didn't think would be our next manager? It isn't just a question of getting our absolute first choice, it is a question of is Rafa able to finish fourth next season or EVER deliver a league title. To me he might finish top four next season, he won't win the league because he has too many failings, in the transfer market and tactically. He isn't attacking enough, his signings are overpriced and trying to fit them into his formation so it works often makes them lesser players and every 'solution' just seems to bring more problems. Like with our full-backs, Johnson is more attacking and now our defence looks terrible because neither full-back can defend with no obvious attacking gain. We now have no Alonso so Rafa buys a £20m injured sub CM and plays Lucas next to Mascherano instead which makes for even less creativity. So in theory Johnson and Aquilani might be the same or better than Arbeloa and Alonso, but in truth they aren't yet we got no change from that switch (£37.5m cost to buy, £30m + whatever Arbeloa cost in sales which wasn't more than £7.5m)
We'll see which change comes first, manager or owner, but owners tend to have longer lifespans than managers. And you only have to look at St James Park to see what happens when fans get a hate on for the owner and wish him away, they're still wishing.
Rafa should really have resigned over last season's disaster. To not land the title is excusable, but to not finish fourth regardless of verbal guarantees is not. Seventh is not good enough, but he's not going to resign because he is deluded enough to think he's doing a good job and has all the excuses Mick quotes - and of course walking away would cost him £££££. Sometimes a love for a club can make someone stick at a job when they're failing, sadly the timing of his new contract may mean he stays because it costs a lot to get shot. But make no mistake, our situation is much worse thanks to Rafa and could be even worse next season if we finish fifth or below which is all too possible. Rafa won't suddenly get a pot of gold and his spending won't be any less wasteful than the past two seasons, so blame the owners all you like but Rafa is doing his share of the digging of our club's grave
That has got to be one of the, if not THE best post about Rafa I have seen on here.
Concise, honest, factual.
Nail on the Fu*king head there mate
It should be put on the Rafa thread as well for all to see
Cap doffed to you
have to go buy a club that the highest earner before they bought em was the f***ing tea lady.
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