Mantis Posted July 22, 2012 Share Posted July 22, 2012 You guys really MUST try to get over O'Neill, you know. It starts to look like an obsession and, what's more worrying, a refusal to face up to the issues of the present by blaming them all on the past. It's two seasons since he was with us and a lot has changed since he left. We have had two years of some of the worst club and football management I have seen since the late 60s. MON was the best manager we had since Johnny Gregory and brought us the only decent run of results and performance since JG. I like him for that because I like managers who help us win matches, gain points, move up the table, and do well in cup competitions. So I despise the two fuckwits who have followed on from him. As for saying he left us no legacy, he left us with a squad in 2010-11 that was more or less the one that had got us to 6th the season before and only the most incompetent of managers could have failed to build on that.It's not an obsession. People are just discussing a former manager. He may have been gone for two years but that doesn't change the fact that many of his signings are still here. I don't see anyone here blaming everything on O'Neill either. I think you need to face up to the fact that not everybody has the same opinion on him as you do. People want to discuss him, some will slag him off. So what? You don't need to take words said against him as a personal insult on you. As for building on what he left, I actually think it would've been very hard to build on the previous season. Milner (our most important player) was gone, we'd just gone a whole summer and only signed one player and the clubs we were competing against the previous season were spending more than ever. I'm not saying the brush with relegation under Houllier was acceptable, but I do think that given all that had happened in the run up to and during the season (injuries etc) 9th place was acceptable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sharkyvilla Posted July 22, 2012 Share Posted July 22, 2012 You guys really MUST try to get over O'Neill, you know. It starts to look like an obsession and, what's more worrying, a refusal to face up to the issues of the present by blaming them all on the past. It's two seasons since he was with us and a lot has changed since he left. We have had two years of some of the worst club and football management I have seen since the late 60s. MON was the best manager we had since Johnny Gregory and brought us the only decent run of results and performance since JG. I like him for that because I like managers who help us win matches, gain points, move up the table, and do well in cup competitions. So I despise the two fuckwits who have followed on from him. As for saying he left us no legacy, he left us with a squad in 2010-11 that was more or less the one that had got us to 6th the season before and only the most incompetent of managers could have failed to build on that. Well I said I liked him and for very similar reasons to you, but I don't see how that makes him free from criticism and not a major part of the hole we've been in. Pretty much all but 3 of the players he's signed have had to be written off, some of whom have picked up huge wages for doing bugger all. Houllier and McLeish were bigger disasters, I agree. Only McLeish was a rank bad appointment, Houllier really let himself and the club down when he was here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Folski Posted July 22, 2012 Share Posted July 22, 2012 The ones he got right he got very right but the ones he got wrong he got very wrong, unfortunately he got a lot more wrong than right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markavfc40 Posted July 22, 2012 Share Posted July 22, 2012 You guys really MUST try to get over O'Neill, you know. It starts to look like an obsession and, what's more worrying, a refusal to face up to the issues of the present by blaming them all on the past. It's two seasons since he was with us and a lot has changed since he left. We have had two years of some of the worst club and football management I have seen since the late 60s. MON was the best manager we had since Johnny Gregory and brought us the only decent run of results and performance since JG. I like him for that because I like managers who help us win matches, gain points, move up the table, and do well in cup competitions. So I despise the two fuckwits who have followed on from him. As for saying he left us no legacy, he left us with a squad in 2010-11 that was more or less the one that had got us to 6th the season before and only the most incompetent of managers could have failed to build on that. Bang on the money my friend. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bickster Posted July 22, 2012 Moderator Share Posted July 22, 2012 How I rate MON's signings that are left at the club now and how I rated them two years ago are bound to be a little bit different aren't they. Players have got older, lazier, less fit etc All manner of things have changed and the only players now left are... Guzan - still a good second string keeper and should actually give Given a run for his money this season Warnock- Bizarrely lost the plot after MON left, sense of position has gone, his radar is well off Dunne - was always capable of dropping a clanger every game, under MON it was one a game, now its more like 3 Collins - He was with Dunne a great CD partnership under MON, however since them the pair don't seem capable of playing together and also since MON left he's become involved in just about every off field escapade - probably now needs to be moved on Lichaj - I still rate him Delph - looked great until that knee injury, looked completely off it since coming back Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Woodytom Posted July 22, 2012 Share Posted July 22, 2012 For me, the quality of MONs signings is not all that big of a deal. Yes of course if he had decided to buy much better players, things might have been different, but I believe if he had used the same signings differently things may have been different. MON has a serious knack of getting the most bog standard a player playing way above his limits. However, he appears only able to do this if he they are playing in the first 11 100% of the time. I saw Habib Beye and Curtis Davies be outstanding at Anfield. A night when Nigel Reo-Coker ran the show! I saw Steve Sidwell batter Arsenal in a 2-2 draw at VP. Should have been about 5-0 at HT. We all saw that MArlon Harewood was capable of putting on a show when needed. However, all of this was far too few and far between. Had these players been used more effectively we might have seen their morale sustained and ultimately seen them perform better when called upon. When you look at the Leicester team he won trophies with and also where he got AVFC with what seems like a dire squad once he, left you cant help but feel he doesnt necessarily need a lot of quality to get results. How sustainable that is - Im not sure. What I will say is that bar Gareth Barry, Emile Heskey (after Leicester) and a world class Henryk Larsson, I cant think of many player who have gone on to perform 'as individuals' better than they did under MON after parting from him. I think the quality of the players he signed was appalling I think his ability to make those signings work was at times outstanding and at others abysmal. Overal, given the money that was spent - he probably failed. However I doubt Id have ever come close to saying that at the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Woodytom Posted July 22, 2012 Share Posted July 22, 2012 And the ironic thing about - Barry, Heskey (Leicester) and Larsson (not sure) is that I dont think MON signed any of them. Think to sum it up - Aiden McGeady was going to be signed as a repllacement for Milner. Awful Awful player. One of the worst Ive ever seen. I Bet wed have got 6th though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mantis Posted July 22, 2012 Share Posted July 22, 2012 Overall I think MON's biggest problem with transfers is that he never looks abroad. Ok, we picked up some very good players from the UK, but we also got a lot of expensive duds. Now obviously buying from abroad doesn't mean you won't get duds but what it does mean is that those duds won't have such a negative effect on finances most of the time. KEA is a perfect example. Even if he doesn't do that well, he'll still have cost us 4 times less than Reo-Coker and have been on half the wages. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zatman Posted July 22, 2012 Share Posted July 22, 2012 Warnock- Bizarrely lost the plot after MON left, sense of position has gone, his radar is well off even when MON was in charge he looked a liability in last few months. made a solid start but got an injury and never got back from it in Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AVFCforever1991 Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 Like all Managers, he made some good signings and some shit signings, it was just the amount of wages he spent of the shit signing that baffles me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stanthemanisgod Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 This debate really does go round and round in circles. When you look at the money we spent in comparison to those we were competing with we never got close. The Net figure is very deceptive because we had bugger all to sell. If you look at Spurs over the same period whilst their Net spending was lower than ours they spent almost double gross, just happened they managed to make a lot of money out of the Carrick, Berbatov and Keane sales. During that time Arsenal weren't spending big on transfer fees but were stil paying higher wages (on average) and still had the draw of CL football. We on the other hand had to pick ourselves up from one of our worst PL finishes, being a club that last won something in 96, we were never going to go out and attract the better players from day one unless we had the resources to pull a city and throw £150k a week wages and the dream of something special at players. If he was signing the likes of Harewood and Routlede iin his last season then I'd have been up in arms, but realistically even with money to spend we had a damaged reputation to repair before we could attract a higher calibre of player. The issue of wages wil come up time and time again, again in comparison to the other clubs around us when we were pushing for 4th place and trophies we weren't paying significantly higher than anybody and when you look at the previous sky4 and city we were still well behind. The major issue was wages as a proportion of income, and therein lies the major flaw in the Lerner/MoN model, even in the height of MoN 'glory days' income was not growing at a fast enough rate to support the expenditure. As much as it stings me to say but I honestly believe we've missed that train, if we'd have hung onto Utd's coat tails the season we finished 2nd behind them then we could be an established top 4 club, but now the markets have been tapped, the early days of the CL was the time to gamble and the foreign markets are now saturated with Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool fans. What MoN pehaps could have done, and something Lambert has realised he needs to do is tap into the foreign markets where transfer fees and wage demands are generally (not always) lower. It can be successfull as Newcastle proved last season but it is a higher risk strategy, look at the players like Makoun or even worse examples from our history like Balaban. It is much better imo to add a few foreign players to an established core than it is to rely almost entirely on relatively unproven foreign players hitting the ground running. The final thing I will say is it's easy for us to look back and say we should have signed player A instead of player B, or surely player C was available at price X, but in reality we do not know what enquiries were made, what players were approached and what players turned us down. What we can measure is results, points, goals scored and goals conceeded and league position, and ultimately whether you agree with his method or not MoN delivered a decent return on the money he spent. Finishing in the top 4 woud have been overachieving, I think, and finishing below the Euro spots would have been under achieving. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jacketspuds Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 As well as wages the other big problem is that apart from Young, Downing & Milner we made more or less **** all back on a number of signings, estimates below... NRC Paid £8.5m Sold Free Sidwell Paid £5.5m Sold Free Carew Paid Free Sold Free Heskey Paid £3.5m SoldFree Cuellar Paid £7.8m Sold Free Beye Paid £3m SoldFree Harewood Paid £4m Sold Free Shorey Paid £3m Sold Free Davies Paid £10m Sold £2m Milner Paid £12m Sold £24m Young Paid £9.5m Sold £18m Downing Paid £12m Sold £20m TOTAL Paid £78.8m Sold £64m If it wasn't for the last 3 OUT's we would have been even more screwed financially. No wonder RL wants us to sell players before getting any more in. Although it's nice to have them off the wage bill we have let about £45m worth of "talent" leave the club after collecting huge wages over a number of years and until Collins, Dunne and Warnock are gone too the remnants of MON's financial shitstorm, that he was allowed to create, will remain. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stanthemanisgod Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 Whilst I agree half an eye should be kept on resale value, ultimately you do not buy a player thinking about selling them, ideally they'd all turn into Rio Ferdinand's and stay at the club until their value to the club has passed. You recoup value from performances, league positions, european competitions, gate receipts, sponsorships and TV rights. What is difficult to determine is how much the combined effort of the squad as a whole contributed financially and whether we got close to recovering any of the £45m you have quoted as lost on 'talent' leaving the club for free. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AVFCforever1991 Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 Wow when you put it like that, MON made some terrible terrible choices. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markavfc40 Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 This debate really does go round and round in circles. When you look at the money we spent in comparison to those we were competing with we never got close. The Net figure is very deceptive because we had bugger all to sell. If you look at Spurs over the same period whilst their Net spending was lower than ours they spent almost double gross, just happened they managed to make a lot of money out of the Carrick, Berbatov and Keane sales. During that time Arsenal weren't spending big on transfer fees but were stil paying higher wages (on average) and still had the draw of CL football. We on the other hand had to pick ourselves up from one of our worst PL finishes, being a club that last won something in 96, we were never going to go out and attract the better players from day one unless we had the resources to pull a city and throw £150k a week wages and the dream of something special at players. If he was signing the likes of Harewood and Routlede iin his last season then I'd have been up in arms, but realistically even with money to spend we had a damaged reputation to repair before we could attract a higher calibre of player. The issue of wages wil come up time and time again, again in comparison to the other clubs around us when we were pushing for 4th place and trophies we weren't paying significantly higher than anybody and when you look at the previous sky4 and city we were still well behind. The major issue was wages as a proportion of income, and therein lies the major flaw in the Lerner/MoN model, even in the height of MoN 'glory days' income was not growing at a fast enough rate to support the expenditure. As much as it stings me to say but I honestly believe we've missed that train, if we'd have hung onto Utd's coat tails the season we finished 2nd behind them then we could be an established top 4 club, but now the markets have been tapped, the early days of the CL was the time to gamble and the foreign markets are now saturated with Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool fans. What MoN pehaps could have done, and something Lambert has realised he needs to do is tap into the foreign markets where transfer fees and wage demands are generally (not always) lower. It can be successfull as Newcastle proved last season but it is a higher risk strategy, look at the players like Makoun or even worse examples from our history like Balaban. It is much better imo to add a few foreign players to an established core than it is to rely almost entirely on relatively unproven foreign players hitting the ground running. The final thing I will say is it's easy for us to look back and say we should have signed player A instead of player B, or surely player C was available at price X, but in reality we do not know what enquiries were made, what players were approached and what players turned us down. What we can measure is results, points, goals scored and goals conceeded and league position, and ultimately whether you agree with his method or not MoN delivered a decent return on the money he spent. Finishing in the top 4 woud have been overachieving, I think, and finishing below the Euro spots would have been under achieving. This is an excellent post. You are spot on in everything you say. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caw2510 Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 Great: Stylian Petrov, , Ashley Young, Brad Friedel, James Milner Good: Luke Young, Stewart Downing, John Carew Curtis Davis Average: Chris Sutton, Phil Bardsley, Nigel Reo-Coker, Brad Guzan, Carlos Cueller, Richard Dunne James Collins Scott Carson Poor: Shaun Maloney, Marlon Harewood, , Nicky Shorey, Fabian Delph, Stephen Warnock. Disaster: Didier Agathe, Gabor Kiraly, Wayne Routledge, Moustapha Salifou, Zat Knight, , Steve Sidwell, Emile Heskey, Habib Beye and are we classing milner as a mon signing since we had already had him on loan before Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big_John_10 Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 Curtis Davies is a good signing and dunne is only an average one? Is that the Richard Dunne voted into the premiership team of the year? Zat Knight a disaster? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mantis Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 You're also forgetting that Dunne has been very poor in the two seasons since he was voted into the Premier League team of the year. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markavfc40 Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 Disaster: Didier Agathe, Gabor Kiraly, Zat Knight, , and are we classing milner as a mon signing since we had already had him on loan before WTF. Zat Knight cost 3.5 mill did a decent job for 2 seasons never giving less than 100% and was then sold for 4 mill. He was far from a disaster. Agathe was a short term squad filler early in O'Neills tenure at a time when the window was shut, Kiraly was a short term signing due to a keeper injury crisis a few months after O'Neill arrived. Milner was signed two years after we had him on loan. If O'Neill didn't sign him then who did. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Big_John_10 Posted July 23, 2012 Share Posted July 23, 2012 You're also forgetting that Dunne has been very poor in the two seasons since he was voted into the Premier League team of the year. Managers sign players to play for them not for other people. Not his fault houllier and Mcleish couldn't get the best from him. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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