While the teams below us continue to pick up unlikely points, we continue to play in a manner that attempts to avoid defeat. Which might even be excusable if we were managing to avoid defeat. But we're not. We're playing lousy football and picking up lousy results. If that trend continues (and it shows no sign of abating), it will only end one way.
McLeish is unwittingly engineering the 3rd Premier League relegation of his career. This time he is doing it with a more impressive squad of players. From where I'm sat, he doesn't seem capable of motivating these players or getting anything like the best out of them. I don't even have any issues with the team he is picking. His starting 11 is usually pretty good. He just sends them out with the wrong instructions. Every. Single. Week.
Recently it has become very tiring to constantly hear the rhetoric about everyone being behind him and the owners being behind him, 'we'll get through this' and the players believe, yadda yadda. Talk is cheap; talk is free in fact. Actions speak louder than words though. Insert your own cliché here. The fact is that results are sending us down. Our results and everyone else's results.
What's worse is that at this stage, with 3 games to go, I'm not even sure whether firing the manager would be a positive thing or a bad thing with regards to this season. Is it too late? Would the rudderless ship sink without trace à la Wolves? Or would it steady itself under the guidance of Kevin MacDonald and the senior players being given the freedom to express themselves? I don't know. But I think I'm willing to give it a try.
Sadly, we're also hearing that McLeish has the full backing of Randy Lerner. Now of course this is easy to say and typically you will always have the backing of the owner right up until the day you are fired, so I wouldn't read too much into that. Although it is something I'd rather not hear. It does beg the question though. Quite how badly must Alex McLeish manage this team before he no longer has the backing of the owner? Is he really meeting whatever criteria was set out in his contract? Did Randy really say that a relegation battle is acceptable? Is that the aspiration Randy has for the club now? Struggling to tread water at the bottom of the Premier League. I find that hard to believe, although I don't doubt that it's possible.
No-one likes to say I told you so when it comes to the fate of their football club. But I feel that Randy and whoever else questioned the motives of the fans can now see what they were saying all along. Yes there was a minority who were only concerned with where McLeish was arriving from and this was jumped on by the media and continues to be trotted out to this day, but the vast majority of fans didn't care about that. They only cared that we were hiring a bad manager. A manager with a chequered history of results. Yes he won an unlikely cup for the noses and got Motherwell to 2nd in Scotland but he also relegated the noses twice and got Glasgow Rangers to 3rd. His ups and downs are too extreme and his downs are more frequent. He relegated the noses twice in the worst kind of manner, playing anti-football, the worst kind of football and he's doing the same thing to us. Randy, seriously, we told you so.
I've (only) supported this club since 1987. We were in division 2 so I have never experienced a relegation. I'm sure plenty of you reading this will have. I'm resigned to it now and I'm strangely calm in the way that a condemned man accepts his fate. That all sounds a little melodramatic. It is 'only' football after all. But it is my club. I am mentally preparing myself for the Championship. In my mind it will now be a pleasant and unexpected surprise if we manage to avoid relegation. Newcastle's change in fortunes since relegation has somewhat re-assured me that all is not lost when you go down. Although for every Newcastle there are probably 10 or more others that didn't bounce back as strong.
If we do go down; and I appreciate we're not actually down yet; but if we do go, we will be back. It's not the beginning of the end but it might well be the beginning of something a little different. How different? Only time will tell. We don't know yet.
It was going to be an interesting summer either way. If we do go down, it will be a lot more so.
Surely after last night's catastrophe, McLeish's position is now untenable? Randy? Paul? Anyone?
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