Sheffield United fans and the bogus cult of 'knowing'.

All advertisments are hidden for logged in members, why not log in/register?


WorkingtonBlade said:
Well I was all ready to make a sarcastic comment in response, and then I read it and found that it actually is interesting.

.
Click to expand...

If you turn the door handle up or down, you'll find you can actually leave the house.

Don't forget your anorak.
 
DOC PACE WAS MY DAD said:
Sorry conjecture find most of what you are saying is confused analogies?
Fans are paying supporters, mostly paying. Clubs may wish to call them customers. Some would call them stakeholders. Supporters now don't provide the majority of income, but supporters spend a considerable amount of their income on following their club. Supporters shout and sing positively to help their team on the pitch perform better. Physiologically this audience participation has been shown conclusively to improve the performance of their players and the result of the match.Supporters shout and sing at the opposition team and the match officials this too has influence and effect.

The club encourage and appreciate this crowd participation. However. should the club not care and or involve the supporters in liking/supporting/agreeing with the manager's actions such as player recruitment and selection; match day selection; tactics ; substitutions; player discipline; fitness regimes.
By and large most club supporters are patient and give the manager and players time to display what they can do.

However if one is paying a contribution towards team success, results and entertainment the supporters in the past had few real communication avenues to complain about a "service" .or the "product" the players and coaching staff were serving up on the pitch stage.

Club Boards and team management are heading for a supporter rebellion if they now these days take a attitude "we know what is best"

These last 5 seasons Blades have shown remarkable home and away attendance records and patience with the team in every season. The club has not delivered the results and entertainment craved for, Nigel Adkins and current season players have failed miserably and are way off targets and expectations. Fans deserve to have a say in the club
Click to expand...

This confuses "people who attend games" with "supporters" - and some of the people who attend games are very confused. See Doug's opinionated rant above.

I'm not sure patience is the first word I'd use to describe all the fans at, say, Gillingham - the first game of the season. Possessed maybe?

The club have just had a Fans Forum. Jim basically spoke to everyone in the ground in person every match - and sometimes went round for tea. So this not listening stuff is a pie in the sky which is wide of the mark.

As for "who knows best": given the choice between Adkins' judgement and the collective wisdom of the crowd I'd probably side with Nige, his team, and his credentials - with the odd nervous grumble about, say, McFadzean, Whiteman, and subs (his subs are terrible aren't they?).
 
William Henry Foulkes said:
This confuses "people who attend games" with "supporters" - and some of the people who attend games are very confused. See Doug's opinionated rant above.

I'm not sure patience is the first word I'd use to describe all the fans at, say, Gillingham - the first game of the season. Possessed maybe?

The club have just had a Fans Forum. Jim basically spoke to everyone in the ground in person every match - and sometimes went round for tea. So this not listening stuff is a pie in the sky which is wide of the mark.

As for "who knows best": given the choice between Adkins' judgement and the collective wisdom of the crowd I'd probably side with Nige, his team, and his credentials - with the odd nervous grumble about, say, McFadzean, Whiteman, and subs (his subs are terrible aren't they?).
Click to expand...


Some are just as confused as to the validity of Adkins comments in interviews.
 
You know, in going off on a tangent like this, I don't think we've really done justice to the spirit of the original post here. In fact, I have a horrible feeling we may have inadvertently proved the OP right, in all its multiple facets.

Admittedly I'd feel more confident in stating this if I had the foggiest idea what the point of the OP actually was, but I just have a feeling we've let ourselves down, let the site down and let the club down (if that's possible).

Do you think we could get away with claiming it was ironic?
 
Bert said:
Bert has no idea of what John Harris thought about anything, in fact he never once heard him speak. All Bert knew was that he was the manager and he wore a tie and beige cardy.
Click to expand...

I heard John Harris speak, at High Storrs School Speech Day once. Can't remember what he said though; I was only 10 and not even a pupil at High Storrs at that time. I only went because Ken Furphy was supposed to be the guest speaker but in the event he had to pull out due to "a very important reserve-team match".

So we got John Harris instead with whom my dad was more than happy. I do remember one thing Gentleman John said actually. It was September 1976 and United's start to the season had not been good which meant that Mr Furphy was not long for the job anyway, important reserve game or not. Directly before John Harris spoke the choir had belted out a song called "Down Among the Dead Men"; United's former manager therefore made a quip at the start of his speech that "Down Among the Dead Men" was where Sheffield United were currently floundering.
 
He should chaange the opening line to read 'I feel strongly compelled to wade into a debate about whether Adkins should be sacked or not....'

Then the Magna Carta and Spanish Inquisition recital ending with 'so who do you think the next manager should be?'

All makes perfect logical sense :D
 
I've always find it a novel idea that all football fans watch football and don't attempt to gain further knowledge of the game. That were somehow alcohol fueled morons who just cheer when we win and boo when we lose. If someone on tv can help with my understanding of the game then that's good. I found Gary Neville's analytical approach to be a big development in punditry - precisely because of this reason. He treat fans like cerebral beings, and demystified the idea that without coaching badges you cannot understand the unfathomable science of football. Of course this doesn't make Gary Neville or indeed the fans capable of managing a squad of players, any more than understanding Shakespeare makes you capable of writing or performing it. Its precisely the same when fans analyse how a successful football club is run imo.
 
Last edited:
Greenwich Blade said:
I heard John Harris speak, at High Storrs School Speech Day once. Can't remember what he said though; I was only 10 and not even a pupil at High Storrs at that time. I only went because Ken Furphy was supposed to be the guest speaker but in the event he had to pull out due to "a very important reserve-team match".

So we got John Harris instead with whom my dad was more than happy. I do remember one thing Gentleman John said actually. It was September 1976 and United's start to the season had not been good which meant that Mr Furphy was not long for the job anyway, important reserve game or not. Directly before John Harris spoke the choir had belted out a song called "Down Among the Dead Men"; United's former manager therefore made a quip at the start of his speech that "Down Among the Dead Men" was where Sheffield United were currently floundering.
Click to expand...
September 1975 not 1976?
 

Silent Blade said:
September 1975 not 1976?
Click to expand...
34nk7dd.jpg
 
Conjecture said:
I’m quite reluctant to wade into the debate about whether He should stay or He should go. As someone who strongly disagrees with the sacking culture at the club and the way it has been run in the last ten years, it's depressing to see so many people possibly enabling a chairman (chairmen? Chairprince?) who appears to have so little foresight that it's genuinely possible to speculate that he runs this club by use of an iPhone app (I wonder if he will regret those late night extra credits he bought to sign John Brayford when his next phonebill comes though. Is Jose Baxter the bastard child of a delayed flight to Brussels and a bored, lonely scotch at the wetherspoons at Gatwick airport?).


Anyway, banging on about the inadequacy of Kevin McCabe is far too easy and, whilst it is my first post and I might want to 'play it safe', a line must be drawn between that and pointing out the blindingly obvious. I'm more interested in the reaction of many fans to our team's, and Adkins', disappointments, which I believe are corrosive and symptomatic of a wider theme that now runs through football.


It is in vogue to 'know'. When I've heard people talking united in the stands the interchange is less a discussion and more a series of a bold statements about tactics, players and how to be a coach. Statements more reliant on tonal rhetoric and logical fallacies - nobody seems that interested in changing their mind. The image of 20,000 people bellowing their own point with such self belief and vehemence that nobody is actually listening is undoubtedly pregnant with existentialism, but it ain't gunna stop us dropping points to Fleetwood Town in the 92nd minute.


Perhaps it just seems that I have only just discovered that many people blindly follow their own egos, and essentially this is what this phenomena is, but I think the roots of this modern incarnation can be arguably traced to the rise of the 'super-pundit'. Perhaps you can see a semblance of what we have today in Alan Hanson's 'you can't win anything with kids', but after that was so spectacularly proved wrong he was largely ridiculed and, let's face it, Alan Hanson was sort of a sideshow anyway. The early advent of interactive television in which the viewers had the option of either listening to him forcibly observe things we had all just observed, to try to work out whether his slurring was due to his accent or liquor, or to speculate about the scar on his head (where is the perpetrator today? Haaland, you have no idea).


Things are rather different now. Whereas Hanson stood out amongst the conjecture (I promised myself I wouldn't use that word) his modern day (more self-loathing) equivalent, Grahame Souness, isn't even wheeled out for the big games. "Football experts" have far more airtime than the sport itself, before and after the games. Not just former players, either. Sports writers now have their own celebrity, and have even started crossing over to television. These people have become the language of football and, unfortunately, that is not the language of humility in the face of uncertainty and complication.


I don't want to completely disregard pundits and commentators, and when I say they don't know what they're on about, I mean it in the nicest possible way. Of course, nobody does. The closest anybody in game has come to really 'knowing', was when the Dons at Juventus were playing Godfather. I find that one of the great joys of life is having long wandering conversations about football - full of self-contradictions and arguments based on wild assumptions. It's almost like a strange form of group meditation. And that is all these pundits are, professional people championing the act of talking about football, something you can't really predict - just for the fun of it. Their personal experience can certainly make their observations more interesting (although must congratulate Micheal Owen on his Herculian efforts to prove that this is not always the case), but deep down they know that they have absolutely no idea what's going on.


My personal favorite it Paul Scholes. Not so much for the points he makes, but more for the way his eyes wander as some demented lunatic like Jamie Redknapp jabbers on about 'what you just can't do at this level'. It's almost like he his having an existential crisis live on the television...What is all this? Who are all these people? Have we all gone completely insane?


Not that I blame them...I think this is a fair interpretation of the whole situation:


If people do not watch them, or read their work, they will not be paid. If they admit that they don't know what they're talking about, people are likely to divert their attention towards somebody who appears that they do. They do not have the power to make people agree with whatever they believe, so a Frankenstein's monster of popular opinion (normally the more reactionary opinions) is presented, one that many people will already agree with, and the argument is delivered with stirring passion and conviction designed to get people all worked up. "It's alive". Now, with social media and the huge presence of the watching viewers on sports TV themselves (twitter-time), the viewers are more involved than ever. They can play 'football expert'.


(I've clearly gone a bit too far with this point - people aren't that malleable and this is not a completely new phenomena. However, I do think there is enough truth in some elements of argument for me to go on, so I will...)


Neil Warnock was divisive, and deservedly so, but his greatest triumphs were built when he cultivated a belief that we were all in this together. His own technique in doing this was basically to publicly state that the players were rubbish, or, more accurately - they lacked in ability but were special because of their belief and spirit. They were in it together, and this is an important part, in the face of adversity. Jose did it with Chelsea by turning the referees into the enemy, Leicester are doing it this year by trolling the elite, and Neil 'one last job' Warnock is using his old trick down the road. Obviously the subsequent lack of success for Warnock and Jose is evidence that this is not the simple recipe to success, but it does tell us something about the spirit of success. Perhaps people disagree but I vividly remember that, in the 03 season, the promotion season and the premiership season, people moaned, complained and roared with frustration when the team were flat or players (Montgomery) misplaced a pass, but there was a general level of subordination amongst the fans that isn't there anymore. I don't mean subordination of the fans to the manager, the players, or even the club. Just the subordination of the fans to the frustrating, unpredictable intangibility of football itself.


And it might be some of these factors that have created such a corrosive situation at our club and led to our pathetic demise on the field. The trajectory of our plight can be plotted by clear examples of mistakes by Kevin McCabe and the board. Perhaps the most obvious display of incompetence was sacking Wilson solely on the hunch that Morgan might stamp his feet hard enough to get us through the playoffs. For me one of the most offensively poor decisions was to back Blackwell through an entire pre-season before sacking him after only two games, destabilizing the team and starting in motion a chain of events (in which other glaring errors were made) that got us relegated. From a solely footballing standpoint, McCabe is very short-sighted and seems to have absolutely no plan. As earlier mentioned, there seems to be no clear footballing recipe for success - only to try to search for it earnestly. Sacking managers to alleviate fan pressure and deflect attention from your catalogue of failures is cowardice.


Football managers will come under fan pressure and take criticism that they do not deserve. There is a mountain of evidence for this. Sheffield united do not have the wrong plan, or the wrong direction. They don't have anything. All the club has to show for the last ten years is a litany of poor decisions made at the boardroom level, and an attitude amongst the fans that cultivates a belief that they have the ability to really change things at the club themselves. The cult of 'the expert' in the football media and the empowered role of the fan has created a situation in which people are led to believe that they really have the power to change things on the pitch...and it's true, to an extent...

Fans have the ability to stop something from happening.

They have the ability to destabilize something.

They have the ability to help create something positive.

The fans, however, will never have the ability to start something on the pitch.

And neither does Kevin McCabe, unless he gets lucky. But that's okay. The club is clearly in a bit of a mess, but as long as he keeps satiating the fans' impatient urge for success, he can rely on the speculation of a new manager and the promise of better things to come to provide an adequate smokescreen to allow him to slink away.


Who do you think our next manager should be?
Click to expand...


Good first post but everybody on here learns a lot from each other I'm sure - about football and human nature. In this strange environment we swap views, information and "meet" all sorts of people we would never have come across and its educational. The ego point is a great one but such is life.
 
bornablade said:
Please Bert tell me he didn't wear that cardy over his shoulders.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, John Harris was before my time. But I'd imagine with the likes of McNulty there'd have been a Monday morning birching and / or horsewhipping. I think I'd have approved of that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

All advertisments are hidden for logged in members, why not log in/register?

All advertisments are hidden for logged in members, why not log in/register?

Back
Top Bottom