Everyone is entitled to their view on it, I am not saying that your view is wrong or mine is right, mine is just the view I hold. I wasn't really all that pleased when it was announced he was returning and I said at the time he would have to show a lot of evidence he's grown since the meltdown when he left us before.
The post match interviews seem to be worse if anything and I am still not really seeing any material evidence that he's improved as a manager or that he is doing anything that Hecky wouldn't have done if he hadn't been sacked. The current debacle over Moore is concerning me also but that's a different story.
I think some of the tactical decision making this season has been terrible and we have somehow outperformed this rather than the reverse. The squad might not be brilliant, but I don't agree with the notion that Wilder has pulled a number of rabbits out of hats this season. The first 11 is plenty good enough to be at the top end of the league and it has been there until the recent injury deluge which in fairness now gives us a very subpar 11 in games.
I will keep mentioning the Moore signing as I think this is a big factor in how the new owners should be assessing matters over the next few weeks. The pressure put on the prince by Wilder to buy Brewster, which really triggered some of the financial issues, for him to then say not long after he wasn't ready for the prem and ended up being a disaster would give anyone pause when handing over cash for new signings. Whoever decided Moore was a good use of funds on a 3 year deal is baffling. If Wilder was the one behind that then again that would really ring alarm bells over the use of the funds we have.
The results have really masked the performances in the first half of the season for me personally too. We have laboured and scraped by on a good few occasions, only a couple of teams have really had a bit of lashing, even if we haven't scored so many. If we were to be promoted I would be very much expecting a similar return to our last appearance in the top flight. I don't see any lessons learned on the managerial side. But again, that's just my view of things so far. I'd be very happy to be proven wrong, but I think there's enough there now to indicate that a long term deal for Wilder would probably not be the best decision for the football club.
Transfers are always hit and miss for every club.
We signed Lee Evans, Ryan Leonard, Ricky Holmes and George Baldock together in 2017. One turned out to be a decent signing; the others weren’t.
What happened in 2020 is we started spending money as a mid-table premier league side - because we’d finished mid-table in the premier league and were showing ambition (so often called for by fans).
Our big signings were Berge, Brewster and Ramsdale.
One played a big role in getting us back into the premier league over the next few seasons and was sold for a fairly big fee.
One was sold for a sizeable profit to Arsenal.
One suffered long-term injuries and wasn’t a good signing.
That’s a fairly standard reflection of how successful transfers generally are.
The difference is that in 2020 we were spending 20 million pounds a go, instead of the 750 thousand we were spending in 2017.
It’s unrealistic in my view to expect all (or even most) signings to work out really well. The issue was just that we decided to pay actual premier league transfer fees for that very brief period, and then found ourselves as a mid-table championship side less than a year later with Slav in charge and losing more games than we were winning. If we’d stayed in the premier league and finished 9th again, we would have been making more transfers at a similar level, and the Brewster signing would have faded into the background. We didn’t, obviously, and now that signing has become a major issue.
I think it’s an oversimplification to zoom in on this or that specific transfer, and it’s better to look across the whole period and see, across them all, how it’s gone - judged by the results (which of course still leaves room for disagreement).
Moore arriving was part of our summer rebuild. We’ve mainly brought on younger players - I wonder if Wilder was considering the need for some experience, quality, …
My guess would be Moore had other offers, knows where he’s at career-wise and said his number one priority was a 3 year deal above anything less. Maybe we looked at our finances and decided we could live with that, while other championship clubs couldn’t. A three year deal doesn’t necessarily mean we think this guy is going to be our key main striker for the next three years - just that that is maybe what it took to get the deal over the line?
On the point of ‘Hecky would have done the same’, you may be right - because Hecky has lots of similarities and in my view is a good manager. But I think it’s generally a poor argument when a guy is doing well to say ‘Someone else could have done that pretty easily too’. They might, but there’s a fairly decent chance they might not as well!
When we reappointed Wilder, I thought it was a mistake to go backwards to where we’d been before. At this moment though, I think his results show that he’s done everything that we’d say we needed to by this point in the season. He deserves credit for that and support in my view
