The argument in favour of McCabe boils down to "we could do a lot worse". And it's true. We could have a chairman that put the financial stability of the club in doubt, one that called debts in and risked having the club wound up and such. In that sense only are we fortunate to have a McCabe who genuinely seems as though he won't ever be threatening the existence of the club. I'll also give him credit that the development of the club's infrastructure in the way of ground improvements, the academy facilities, and similar have been good.
However, this is in many ways faint praise. The academy is a nice thing to have, but facilities like that exist at a club for the express benefit of the first team. And our first team has been, and for a number of years now, way below where it should be in respect to our infrastructure. In this sense all we're saying when we say good things about McCabe is "he won't bankrupt us". The measure of success is not anything beyond ceasing to exist.
The idea that we're well run is hard for me to see. We only have to look back the last couple of seasons to see utterly baffling financial policies. Clough said that he needed two or three key positions and we'd be there. And nobody seemed to dispute this. Why then, was there no intervention from the club as they watched him sign around two dozen budget players? Far from being the cheap way, this was a very expensive way to bring failure. It wasn't what we needed, and it wasn't even what the manager had said he wanted. That's the point at which the "technical board" or whoever is functioning in that role is supposed to have alarm bells sounding and correct the course. It's not like Clough signed all the cheques personally and we couldn't stop him.
And that poor running of the club led directly into the Adkins hangover. He was handcuffed by the huge squad and stretched wage bill, and his only permanent additions in the Summer were Sharp (resounding success) and Woolford (the other extreme). I don't want to let Adkins off the hook too much given his tragic use of the loan market (Hammond especially), but you do have to wonder what might have been if he'd been able to build a squad rather than continue to make do with the likes of Coutts, JCR, McEveley and such. And including more of our bizarre contract negotiations like allowing a player the option to make his deal permanent as oppose to the club making the call. That was a new one for me, at least. Further more if Adkins had been forced to make do with what he had, and what he had proved to be woefully short (something we've very clearly been aware of given the Wilder clear out), wouldn't it make some sense for the board to show some strength and stand by the manager who'd fit all their criteria for the job? Again, I'm not really that sympathetic to Adkins, it's just that we can hardly look at his tenure and say that the board showed much sense of direction.
I've posted at length in other threads about our haphazard choice of managers, so I won't go too much into that again. Needless to say that Wilder fits none of the criteria laid out before we appointed the last one, which is a worrying sign from a boardroom.
So all-in-all I do feel "safe" with McCabe at the helm. I don't see us struggling to stay alive in the way Rotherham and even Wednesday once did. But is that enough? How many of the rest of you have friends across the country that are so puzzled and ask you questions like "How are you still so shit"? I never have a good answer. I can't figure it out myself. Not without coming back to the chairman, that is.
