I'm in agreement with all of that Hartley, and rejoicing in my small way that some sort of recovery seems to be in place.
That is, if I am allowed to comment on it, as I am not a fucking massive billy big bastard Bladey Blade.
pommpey
Ok, I'm gonna risk some wrath......
Innocent question - which player are you referring to when you say we sold our best player at the start of last season? Are you referring to the sale of Maguire?
Looking back at the OP (which was quite a while ago!), your main gripe appears to be the sale of Murphy. It would appear in both cases (assuming you did mean Maguire) that both players wanted to leave the club. Are you advocating then, that the board enforce the contracts of these players? I certainly don't agree with that stance (if indeed that is what you are suggesting), for several reasons, player can't go = player unhappy and unsettled = other players unhappy = fans unhappy because of player not showing loyalty to beloved club and so on.
I believe in both these cases that the club got good prices for players who wanted to leave. In recent history, the most frustrating sale was McDonald because of his paltry minimum fee clause. I don't know the details but I assume he was still on the same contract as when he first signed, I don't know if he had been offered improved terms once he's showed what a player he was, but it's obvious an opportunity was lost there.
The next point of course is whether the board then made all those funds available to the manager and in that respect I think you have a valid point, however we did buy Brayford and we have bought Sharp and paid quite a bit. It doesn't add up to the total received but I'd hope funds are available if the right player is available that the manager wants.
Again, going back to the OP, there is a depressing list of players that have left the club, some I would argue were good business as in the case of Agana who had clearly become injury prone and played little after he left for £700K. Obviously others were not and one of the most frustrating for me was the sale of Deane and Fjortoft and later Borbokis which lead to Spackman resigning when that side had looked like promotion contenders to that point.
For me, you could argue the sale of the 2 Kyles was a huge mistake too, but the club did get £8m. The biggest mistakes for me by McCabe have been his managerial choices and the timing of those decisions. The season we were relegated was disastrous, although I never particularly liked Blackwell, I felt it was a huge mistake to sack him after 3 games with seemingly no back up plan of who to replace him.