Steve Bruce

[DCJonah]

4 hours ago, villalad21 said:

I'm tired of having to rebuild every 3 years. We need consistancy at this football club we can't keep changing managers every single year, we're becoming a laughing stock.

I'm sick of it. But you don't stick with an under performing manager just for the sake of it. 

[Rob182]

Are we really a laughing stock though? I'm sick of all this woe-is-me bullshit. 

 

Many teams in the league will envy our league position, finances, squad and ground right now. There are plenty of clubs in this league that would like to go back to being an established Premier League Club. Leeds, Forest, Wolves, Derby, Middlesbrough, Fulham, Norwich, Hull, Bolton, Sunderland, QPR. ... I could go on. All of these teams have, at one point, dropped out of the Prem and then had to make decisions in an attempt to climb back up again. Are all of those teams laughing stocks too? If so, the Championship should have it's own slot on Live at the Apollo.

We're where we are because we're having a bad spell. We're 3 points off the play-offs and could change manager if we continue our bad form in the next few games. That's a statement that could probably be said about half of the teams in the league at some point in the last few seasons.

 

Every team will get laughed at for something at some point, usually motivated by morons on Social Media shouting "Oh my god, look what [insert team] have done". A laughing stock, we are not.

[Darth Villa]

1 hour ago, Rob182 said:

Are we really a laughing stock though? I'm sick of all this woe-is-me bullshit. 

 

Many teams in the league will envy our league position, finances, squad and ground right now. There are plenty of clubs in this league that would like to go back to being an established Premier League Club. Leeds, Forest, Wolves, Derby, Middlesbrough, Fulham, Norwich, Hull, Bolton, Sunderland, QPR. ... I could go on. All of these teams have, at one point, dropped out of the Prem and then had to make decisions in an attempt to climb back up again. Are all of those teams laughing stocks too? If so, the Championship should have it's own slot on Live at the Apollo.

We're where we are because we're having a bad spell. We're 3 points off the play-offs and could change manager if we continue our bad form in the next few games. That's a statement that could probably be said about half of the teams in the league at some point in the last few seasons.

 

Every team will get laughed at for something at some point, usually motivated by morons on Social Media shouting "Oh my god, look what [insert team] have done". A laughing stock, we are not.

It's refreshing to read this as it does feel like hysteria has taken over sometimes, as we are all pissed off with recent results and many doubt Bruce is the man to lead us back into the Premier league. All that being said, we are still a massive club with a half decent squad, passionate (and bloody wealthy) owner plus the largest away following of anyone in the Championship - other fans can't fail to notice our commitment to the cause! If we lose on Saturday and Bruce is sacked, all those aspects will remain minus one potato head..

Edited December 28, 2017 by Darth Villa

[Rob182]

4 minutes ago, Darth Villa said:

It's refreshing to read this as it does feel like hysteria has taken over sometimes, as we are all pissed off with recent results and many doubt Bruce us the man to lead us back into the Premier league. All that being said, we are still a massive club with a half decent squad, passionate (and bloody wealthy) owner plus the largest away following of anyone in the Championship - other fans can't fail to notice our commitment to the cause! If we lose on Saturday and Bruce is sacked, all those aspects will remain minus one potato..

Exactly. We're far from being a laughing stock. We're just another team trying to get promoted. It's better than being one of the teams fighting to avoid relegation. Naturally, emotions get the better of people sometimes, but things aren't as bad as is being made out.

 

It would be a lot worse if we had an owner or CEO that had massively gambled with our finances, but we haven't. We've restricted Bruce's transfer budgets, in case we don't achieve promotion. Of course, books will need to be balanced if we don't go up, but we'll still have the last parachute payment, we'll have Gollini, Gil, Tshibola & McCormack returning from loans which we can sell (or a new manager can use), we'll see a few players leaving when their contracts end (Gabby, Gardner, Hutton etc) and I believe next season's FFP will no longer include the £80m loss from the 2015 season. I might be wrong, but I also think that Amavi's transfer will officially go through at the end of the season, so that money will be counted towards next year's incomings too.

 

The end is not nigh yet lads and lasses. Bruce might not be the man to take us up, but it doesn't mean we're doomed.

[Dr_Pangloss]

6 hours ago, villalad21 said:

I'm tired of having to rebuild every 3 years. We need consistancy at this football club we can't keep changing managers every single year, we're becoming a laughing stock.

We will get consistency under Bruce, consistent shite.

[Dr_Pangloss]

1 minute ago, Rob182 said:

Exactly. We're far from being a laughing stock. We're just another team trying to get promoted. It's better than being one of the teams fighting to avoid relegation. Naturally, emotions get the better of people sometimes, but things aren't as bad as is being made out.

 

It would be a lot worse if we had an owner or CEO that had massively gambled with our finances, but we haven't. We've restricted Bruce's transfer budgets, in case we don't achieve promotion. Of course, books will need to be balanced if we don't go up, but we'll still have the last parachute payment, we'll have Gollini, Gil, Tshibola & McCormack returning from loans which we can sell (or a new manager can use), we'll see a few players leaving when their contracts end (Gabby, Gardner, Hutton etc) and I believe next season's FFP will no longer include the £80m loss from the 2015 season. I might be wrong, but I also think that Amavi's transfer will officially go through at the end of the season, so that money will be counted towards next year's incomings too.

 

The end is not nigh yet lads and lasses. Bruce might not be the man to take us up, but it doesn't mean we're doomed.

Failure to get promoted this season firmly puts on that path, a basic understanding of accounting will reveal as much.

[Rob182]

5 minutes ago, Dr_Pangloss said:

Failure to get promoted this season firmly puts on that path, a basic understanding of accounting will reveal as much.

Enlighten me then please. I'm under the impression that there will be some balancing of the books to be done, but we'll still be far from being doomed.

[Grasshopper]

18 minutes ago, Rob182 said:

Enlighten me then please. I'm under the impression that there will be some balancing of the books to be done, but we'll still be far from being doomed.

Edited December 28, 2017 by Grasshopper
reply removed - answer leads off topic

[DCJonah]

27 minutes ago, Rob182 said:

Exactly. We're far from being a laughing stock. We're just another team trying to get promoted. It's better than being one of the teams fighting to avoid relegation. Naturally, emotions get the better of people sometimes, but things aren't as bad as is being made out.

 

It would be a lot worse if we had an owner or CEO that had massively gambled with our finances, but we haven't. We've restricted Bruce's transfer budgets, in case we don't achieve promotion. Of course, books will need to be balanced if we don't go up, but we'll still have the last parachute payment, we'll have Gollini, Gil, Tshibola & McCormack returning from loans which we can sell (or a new manager can use), we'll see a few players leaving when their contracts end (Gabby, Gardner, Hutton etc) and I believe next season's FFP will no longer include the £80m loss from the 2015 season. I might be wrong, but I also think that Amavi's transfer will officially go through at the end of the season, so that money will be counted towards next year's incomings too.

 

The end is not nigh yet lads and lasses. Bruce might not be the man to take us up, but it doesn't mean we're doomed.

The impression i have is that we won't have much to spend and a squad to rebuild. That is not a great position to be in. 

It looks like our owner has gambled with our finances to get us back up quickly but wasted it with the wrong managers. 

[TheStagMan]

9 hours ago, AJ said:

Here is the thing. A manager can either set up for either a team built for attack, or to focus on defence, or preferably, a bit of balance. Mistakes will happen. If you make a mistake in attack, it is a missed opportunity and hand back possession to the opposition. If you make a mistake in defence, the opposition has an opportunity to put one past our goalie. Which mistake's consequence is more tolerable? Are you guaranteed to win more with a clean sheet, or by scoring goals?

This has been going on for far too long. It was the style of play that saw us relegated. Backwards sideways football does not win games. This has been our biggest problem on the pitch for the last few seasons, and should, and had to be, the number one priority that had to be addressed. Adomah's goal against Barnsley, where the ball went through half a dozen players moving up the pitch, that was beautiful. When I saw that, I thought " Yes! That's the shit we are talking about!" Unfortunately, it has proved to be a freakish event, never to be repeated.

Steve Bruce should never have been concerned about this rot creeping  back in. He should have done all that was possible to ensure we never see that "style" of football ever come back. If he wanted this club to get back to its former glory, then that should have been his apex priority, especially if he had identified it as a problem with the club. Well, the rot is back, and Bruce has acknowledged it. OK. So, when setting up against a young, pacey, Brentford side, you put two mostly static defensive players in the middle of the park for Brentford's wingers and forwards to use as traffic cones? Sorry, but that is not trying to discourage the rot. That is nurturing it.

Well said, you win games by scoring more goals than the opposition, not by keeping clean sheets.

[macandally]

From the outset it was obvious Bruce was not going to build the roots for the club to go forward, tactically inept, poor coach and very much an old school manager.  The fact Wayne’s and Round have backed him the way they have smacks of near termism:

Terry, one year deal, Jedinak/Whelan/Samba all the wrong side of 30, Onomah/Johnston/Snodgrass adding value to others players.  These players are the core of the current first 11 and none of these signings were signed with an eye on the future, all were based on promotion this year and I would argue signed on the basis of “available” rather than “needed”.  In poker terms we went all in with a pretty shitty hand!

There are two candidates for me (Pulis would have been a third, painful to watch but would have got us up).  I like Rowett, I think he has proved by the way he has gone into Derby that he has the persona and temperament to manage a big club.  He plays effective football and has the tactical nous to adapt, he would be my number one choice.

Dean Smith is the romantic choice for me, Villa fan, got average teams playing good football and working as a team.  Has done well wherever he has gone and encourages teams to be inventive.  Success needs the right man in the right environment at the right time and there is a hope that he could be our modern day John Gregory, he is my second choice though.

For both of these potential managers, January is the wrong time to come in.  For both to succeed I think we need to clear out the old guard, the 30 somethings and those whose reputation is greater than their ability. I would give Bruce until the end of the summer, no money at all in January and whether we go up or stay in the Championship, pull the trigger then.  That gives Rowett/Smith the summer to look at the Youth, look at who needs bringing in and how we go about getting up.  Fundamentally we organically provide our first team rather than throwing cash at it (see Southampton, Bournemouth, Swansea etc)

 

Edited December 28, 2017 by macandally

[vreitti]

No doubt it'll be more challenging going forward, as it's looking ever more likely we ain't going up this season.

We aren't doomed though. Far from it. We have a decent enough U23 squad. We only need a manager with some nous how to build an identity and playing style. I'd much rather see us hanging here for a while, and actually developing the football aspect, as opposed to going up with minimal or no chance of staying there.

[Zatman]

3 hours ago, turvontour said:

When Mane scored 12 goals in 37 seconds we became a laughing stock.

Way before that. 8-0 to Chelsea and shipping 15 goals that week was worse

[Zatman]

3 hours ago, turvontour said:

When Mane scored 12 goals in 37 seconds we became a laughing stock.

Way before that. 8-0 to Chelsea and shipping 15 goals that week was worse

[briny_ear]

1 hour ago, Rob182 said:

Are we really a laughing stock though? I'm sick of all this woe-is-me bullshit. 

 

Many teams in the league will envy our league position, finances, squad and ground right now. There are plenty of clubs in this league that would like to go back to being an established Premier League Club. Leeds, Forest, Wolves, Derby, Middlesbrough, Fulham, Norwich, Hull, Bolton, Sunderland, QPR. ... I could go on. All of these teams have, at one point, dropped out of the Prem and then had to make decisions in an attempt to climb back up again. Are all of those teams laughing stocks too? If so, the Championship should have it's own slot on Live at the Apollo.

We're where we are because we're having a bad spell. We're 3 points off the play-offs and could change manager if we continue our bad form in the next few games. That's a statement that could probably be said about half of the teams in the league at some point in the last few seasons.

 

Every team will get laughed at for something at some point, usually motivated by morons on Social Media shouting "Oh my god, look what [insert team] have done". A laughing stock, we are not.

Fully agree with this. I am feeling very unhappy and disappointed after the last five games but mainly this is down to my own high, probably unrealistic, expectations about how quickly our shipwreck of a club can be refloated.

And I often find myself clashing with people on here because I think they are being hopelessly unrealistic about how quickly and easily we can become a consistently successful club again, so I think there are some very overoptimistic hopes that are currently being brought down to earth.

But all is not lost. It’s still quite plausible we could make the playoffs and it is true many supporters of other clubs would envy that position. I was at a family party yesterday talking to my nephew who is a Sunderland fan and he was genuinely confused at how down I was about our position. When you think about the plight of that club, with a not so different recent history, you can see we are not in a completely desperate place.

The difficult calculation the board needs to make now is whether a change of manager will help us get back on course. I tend to think it would set us back, particularly because most of the managers on the market who would have the experience to stop the decline have recently gone to other clubs.

However, I was quite shocked at how little fight we showed against Brentford, in reality a moderate side who we should have been able to beat even with our depleted squad. Something serious has to change if our season isn’t to slip down the pan.

[S-Platt]

All most fans want to see is progression.  With Bruce I just don't see it we look absolutely clueless at how to play football.  Losing sucks but you can accept it if you see what the manager is trying to achieve.  

[Villarocker]

When Bruce does get the sack he will have nobody to blame but himself. Fair enough, the players haven't performed as they probably could/should have at times but there is no doubting we have the attacking talent to be able to beat most, if not all, of the teams in this league. The tactics, or lack of them, together with poor team selection, are what has cost us this season.

[Keyblade]

I can't believe there are fans who are buying into the whole hysteria nonsense which is nothing more than a weak deflection by Steve Bruce. I guess this is what gaslighting looks like.

Because of course this is nothing more than a blip obviously. Not looking like genuine promotion contenders halfway through the season should be no cause for concern. If anyone expresses their concern over this, then it's all just hysteria. I mean Cardiff has their blip right?

[Guest av1]

5 minutes ago, villarocker said:

When Bruce does get the sack he will have nobody to blame but himself. Fair enough, the players haven't performed as they probably could/should have at times but there is no doubting we have the attacking talent to be able to beat most, if not all, of the teams in this league. The tactics, or lack of them, together with poor team selection, are what has cost us this season.

Agreed.

Not that i completely agree, but there are fans that point to mitigating circumstances re: Lambert and Remi Garde. Some justifiable, some not. 

Bruce however given the backing he has received can have absolutely no complaints at all. 

[Rob182]

3 minutes ago, Keyblade said:

I can't believe there are fans who are buying into the whole hysteria nonsense which is nothing more than a weak deflection by Steve Bruce. I guess this is what gaslighting looks like.

Because of course this is nothing more than a blip obviously. Not looking like genuine promotion contenders halfway through the season should be no cause for concern. If anyone expresses their concern over this, then it's all just hysteria. I mean Cardiff has their blip right?

How is people saying that 'not all is lost yet' them buying into the whole hysteria nonsense? Surely that's the opposite? Surely the people overreacting and calling for a new manager every time we drop out of the play-off places is... hysteria.

 

Everyone knows that Bruce and our team are under-achieving. The aim at the start of the season was automatic promotion. But as we've spent most of the season in the play-off places, you would say that our chances of promotion were still alive (until we dropped out of the Top 6 this week).