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basilrobbie

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Everything posted by basilrobbie

  1. Cheers mate. We are too inconsistent I think, our current position of 9th feels about right. We''ll see - if we do make it it will because we have suddenly found something, and you know what we are like when we do. Actually, we are, after five years or so under Mr. Sadler, pretty much exactly where we started in terms of League position. And he has put around £16m in so far.
  2. I've been on holiday for a week so this thread caught my eye. I assumed it must be someone bumping an old thread to make a point ...... but it seems it is actually serious. I'd say it was incredible, when you consider your last thirty years of miserable under-achievement, but I have to tolerate the keyboard warriors at Blackpool, who behave in exactly the same way - irrational, volatile and unable to contextualise what they are seeing. And then there is the overwhelming sense of entitlement..... I don't watch you at all, and am quite willing to believe that you are not easy on the eye. But so what? You are playing in a muck and nettles Division, and sometimes you have to adapt to what you are faced with. All I know is that after a worrying start and a change of manager, you are now in the thick of play-off contention, getting significantly more good results than bad ones and giving the impression that the club as a whole is getting to grips with what has been a precipitous fall from grace. You seem to have done all that without waving a cheque book in the style of Wrexham or Stockport ; given how competitive the Division is I'd be inclined to give the manager a bit more credit for getting a tune out of this squad. And I wholly accept it is easy for me to look dispassionately at it. I think around 72 points will be good enough for 7th. That means going something like W4 D4 L3 from here in. If you managed to (say) go W6 D2 L3 you would have a shot at 4th and a home tie to start in the play-offs. Obviously, given the tone of the debate, that may not be the advantage it is usually is. But I would rather the board was tilted in my favour for any one off match. I don't think the main issue is whether you can make it. It's any six from eight, and they are normally decent odds. I think you have a tough run in, but so do others. The key issue for me is momentum - I know a lot about winning play-offs, and when we have done it we have almost always gone into them in really good form. So there seems to me to be an awful lot to play for. It's a good time for excitement, ad a very odd one for the panic-stricken OP and some of what has followed it. All in my opinion, which of course counts for bugger all.
  3. well, for what it's worth : I thought Mellon was a very solid appointment. He's effective without being showy and - dare I say it - based upon results, your team look as though they are beginning to reflect that. I take part in a NL prediction League elsewhere, and a year ago I would normally back against you as often as not. Nowadays I fancy you to get a result most weeks albeit you do have a tendency to struggle against teams towards the bottom. All that said : I think you need to finish top five if you want to have a good chance at winning the play offs. Having one home draw would be a big help. I think Bromley and Alty would be the big dangers, and it would be nice to finish high enough that you didn't have to play both. It's a really interesting league this season, from places 2-24. and will be even more so next season as the current bottom two in L2 are not likely to pull up a lot of trees.
  4. Whoever is behind that account seems intent on stirring up mischief. Or struggling for relevance.
  5. Good Pod. I agree that it is too early to write the season off, but equally trying to win a promotion play off from 6th or 7th is very hard in the NL format. I must say I am surprised that you haven't kicked on from the second half of last season and the section of the conversation about recruitment being a common denominator in your recent problems rang true with me. It may be me, but Mellon does NOT come across well in interview. He sounded a bit clueless to me, to be honest. Clearly, there is more to him than that. But he seems to be getting you used to the idea of a big rebuild in the summer. The stuff on MCOs interested me. I think UEFA are belatedly looking at it, but it may come into sharp relief in the new, expanded form of the World Club Championship, where it may be almost impossible to keep clubs from the same stable apart.
  6. Good post, and on the two highlighted points : (1) Always a risk, but Labour have consistently offered the Government a cross-party approach to getting this on the statute book. I think there is every chance of that happening, should it need to. That could possibly include "nodding it through" if a General Election comes earlier than expected. (2) there isn't a regulator on the planet who could promise to head off all failures. But a system of licensing backed by regular inspection reduces the risks, and I hope that DCMS all be bold and create a wide range of powers along the lines that the FSA asked for in its evidence to Crouch. We will see.
  7. This might help Glossop https://www.blackpoolsupporterstrust.com/post/the-king-s-speech-2023
  8. It's a hugely important step. and very, very satisfying. But the harder work starts now, probably.
  9. It's a lot better place to go than it used to be. But still a bit uninspiring.
  10. Interesting as always. I'm mildly surprised that he was sacked this weekend, but I wasn't at Bromley! I suppose the Board felt that quick action was needed to salvage a top seven push. Currently it looks like 71/72 points will be needed for 7th place. That will need a sustained effort from where you are even at this early stage. The name I was expecting to hear as the potential new manager was Kevin Maher. I'd hate to see Southed lose him if there is any way of avoiding it - they are having a bad enough time already. But the reality is that he may be out of work in a couple of weeks and he needs some job security just like anyone else. Hee's clearly talented and has shon enormous resilience under pressure there. He'd be a catch for anybody, on paper. But I hope for Southend's sake that he is never in the running. If it had been a decade ago I might have made a case for Thompson, who has a decent coaching pedigree at the second and third tier level. But I think his best days may be behind him.
  11. Thompson has made his career on being a very good coach, who plays the "good cop" role with the players. This is potentially an opportunity for him.
  12. Fair point. I start from the premise that, across the top five Divisions, only around one seventh of them are successful (in terms of advancement) in any one season. Given how inherently difficult that is, I feel that clubs reach for the loaded revolver far too often and far too soon.
  13. I'm interested in institutional failure and how it is addressed. I made a successful career out of that and developing performance management frameworks. And then there is the combination of Matt "Mellifluous" Dean, Halliwell The Erudite and ...... The Other One. How can anyone stay away?
  14. Tough call this one. Very few people know what managers are like in the workplace, so we look for proxies to give us a clue. On the downside, he doesn't come over very well on social media, and many of you think he is limited tactically. On the upside, the club clearly bought into his plan when he was appointed and are prepared to back him financially. I think he's been a bit unlucky in that he had had two poor spells bookending a period in the middle when the club was right at the top of the form table. The end of season came at a bad time for him. He's had barely a year, fifty games and the club is largely where it was when he took over. My club are four years into a new regime and also more or less were we started. It's not uncommon. I think it is a very hard decision to make when there are factors that could pull you either way. And I would imagine that the club's senior folk are mindful of the fact that they can't keep swapping managers and handling the fall out that it brings.
  15. When we were in trouble we were always very conscious of how few people we were able to turn to for support. The Trust that I am part of swore that we would never in the future watch the fans of another club struggle if we were able to do anything to help. So that is why we try to look out for the fans of clubs who are having a hard time, even if we can only offer moral support. I don't think that is "odd" at all.
  16. (1) Gatse, budgets ad wages don't win football matches. Players do. Well motivated, well coached players. (2) They are giving him pelters, and in large part they are being thoroughly disingenuous. They know we were a small club in the Championship, and they know that the majority of the Division operates the economics of the madhouse. But it doesn't stop some people having unrealistic expectations - and continually being disappointed. (3) Again, we have had this owner for four years, he has poured getting on for £20m in and we are back where we started. It happens, because people don't always make good decisions and money doesn't always mitigate the impact when you make a mistake. (4) I'll have a wry smile on my face too, not for the first time. Football offers no guarantees. Spending big doesn't always translate into success. Being a big fish in a small pond might actually make you more likely to drown. And starting life in a hugely competitive environment assuming success will come your way quickly is a fast track to disappointment. Why do that to yourself?
  17. What I'm saying is that 2 up out of 24 (which is what is the case in the NL) is as tough as it gets. And you are starting from a position of disadvantage as compared with some of your competitors - in my opinion. If it was easy then Chesterfield would be long gone and Wrexham, Nots County, Stockport and a host of others wouldn't have found it so tough to succeed. You may be right about the overall standard, but I suspect that it probably isn't a lot different from L2, except that there are a lot of upwardly mobile clubs who reach it as a de facto ceiling and then make it a highly competitive environment. Again, an opinion. Finally, I didn't say accept your lot. I suggested that being realistic in your expectations would take a lot of heat out of a fraught environment. But it's your environment, not mine, and I just comment as an outsider who would like to see you do well.
  18. Interesting listen, as always. I don't watch you, so can't judge that side of things. But I do think the fanbase is becoming a prisoner of its own expectations. The league you are in is possibly the hardest in the entire pyramid to get out of at the right end. You start a fair bit behind some battle-hardened clubs who've been there or thereabouts regularly and not succeeded. So you need to stop expecting success I feel, and start hoping for it. "But we are Oldham", I hear some of you say. To which the answer is - "so what"? Yes, you were a League club of many years standing. But you were a crap League club for a lot of the later years, and nobody in this Division is going to be intimidated by you. What will get you out of it is hard work, ingenuity and unity. Only you know how you are doing on all three, or whether Unsworth is the right man. He's had fifty games now, and I'd imagine over the next couple of months the Board will reach conclusions about him one way or another. One last thing - my club has won the play offs six times, and in practically every one of those winning years we started extremely slowly and then accelerated. It is too early to panic, and as fans you have a big say in whether the next managerial appointment is properly planned and considered, or rushed into in a panic.
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