What can be learned from this season?

[Champagneblade]

So it’s drawing to a close now and relegation is inevitable. We might somehow rally to take 19th but that would be the best we could hope for and also seems unlikely.

Clearly mistakes have been made, some by circumstances, some also by lack of decisive decision making.

So what can be learned? He’s my non-definitive start of the thread:

1. Set a style early and recruit towards it - to a large degree our focus was heavily around that cheeky number 10 we had. The recruitment of Archer felt more like players we wouldn’t mind rather than players who fit. Either McAtee into the 10 or recruiting another 10 would have appeared the most judicious. If we were using Archer to replace Sharp and then still getting a ten and sticking to 3-5-1-1 then fine, but it didn’t appear the case.

2. Be more organised and don’t enter the season undercooked - at some point decisions have to be made on recruitment. Writing off winnable games effectively because you are having to youth players where new recruits should sit is no way to retain momentum. It shouldn’t be observed at such a high level.

3. Don’t sign players you’ve hardly seen. I’d love to know what redeeming features someone saw in Grbic. I don’t think Wes is a Prem keeper. But I’m not even convinced Grbic is an adequate Championship keeper.

4. Play the percentages with the recruitment - unless highly proven already, stay away from players with obvious physical limitations. Yea, you might see an Messi of such outstanding ability or a Maradona. I’m not suggesting we be myopic, but Traore is your example. He looks extremely ill-equipped for the English game. Likewise we have to get bang for our buck, so paying high wages for many players who have ropey injury records is asking for your season to be derailed by Christmas.

Sarcastic responses also very much welcome on this thread.

What else can we learn?

 

[Badger Blade]

Foreign recruitment needs some stringent criteria attached to it. Plucking a dwarf out of the Swedish league who had a small purple patch of form doesn't suddenly mean he can cut it against the best players in the world every week. John Lundstram had 3 months of his life looking like a Premier League footballer but we know all too well that one swallow doesn't make a summer.

Brentford are, in essence, a crappy poor relation in terms of London football but have been very savvy over who they've signed from abroad which is why they have achieved what they have.

It CoSts MoNey!!

Yes, it does but if its done properly it'll reap the benefits. Just because we went up 6 years ago with a rag tag bunch of ne'er do wells and a system that fit perfectly doesn't mean it happens again any time soon - for us or for anyone else. If Ipswich go up and finish in the top half next season, I will stand corrected.

You can't make a silk purse from a sows ear, no matter how hard we try.

 

[Rodley]

It’s mostly off the field stuff isn’t it?

Do your business early in the window so you can have a proper pre-season.

Better squad and contract management. Don’t ever end up in the position that you’re selling your best players on promotion to the Premier League, you need to strengthen not replace what you have.

Improve how we scout and recruit.

Improve the fitness and conditioning programmes.

 

[BalticBlade]

It’s mostly off the field stuff isn’t it?

Do your business early in the window so you can have a proper pre-season.

Better squad and contract management. Don’t ever end up in the position that you’re selling your best players on promotion to the Premier League, you need to strengthen not replace what you have.

Improve how we scout and recruit.

Improve the fitness and conditioning programmes.

This more or less hits the nail on the head. This summer it will be interesting to see how much we've learnt from last year's mistakes. My guess is we'll repeat the exact same mistakes. We won't get enough players through the door early enough, which will lead to a poor pre-season, a poor start to the season and injury after injury after injury.

 

[Brian Deane]

I'll keep it simple,
Need to do better across the board and fucking wake up.

 

[steve26272]

We need a cunt, a ruthless cunt that is

Berge & Ndaiye should have had a gun to their head in June to sign or be sold that month to highest bidder giving us time to reinvest

Hecky should have gone sooner, probably after Newcastle

Anel should have had captaincy striped and given to Robbo sooner

Wilder should be gone now we’re down and replaced with a younger coach giving time to assess the squad

Whoever recommended Traore, Larouchi, Slimane should have been sacked in November meaning we don’t compound by signing Grbic & Holgate

Whoever recommended Grbic wants sacking this morning

We need someone who is

 

[Berkshire Blade]

The club is rotten from the top and needs a complete new ownership.

Mind you I thought that before last summer

 

[Bell4]

That the Owner needs to go .

He had no plan and that plan came into fruition through late, reactive , erratic, toss of a coin - actions re player sales , player recruitment , player retention , management replacement and new owner attraction strategy.

Until he goes or actually puts in a plan to address the above we will stumble and continue to die a death by a thousand cuts .

It ain’t looking good - at best

 

[247Blade]

So it’s drawing to a close now and relegation is inevitable. We might somehow rally to take 19th but that would be the best we could hope for and also seems unlikely.

Clearly mistakes have been made, some by circumstances, some also by lack of decisive decision making.

So what can be learned? He’s my non-definitive start of the thread:

1. Set a style early and recruit towards it - to a large degree our focus was heavily around that cheeky number 10 we had. The recruitment of Archer felt more like players we wouldn’t mind rather than players who fit. Either McAtee into the 10 or recruiting another 10 would have appeared the most judicious. If we were using Archer to replace Sharp and then still getting a ten and sticking to 3-5-1-1 then fine, but it didn’t appear the case.

2. Be more organised and don’t enter the season undercooked - at some point decisions have to be made on recruitment. Writing off winnable games effectively because you are having to youth players where new recruits should sit is no way to retain momentum. It shouldn’t be observed at such a high level.

3. Don’t sign players you’ve hardly seen. I’d love to know what redeeming features someone saw in Grbic. I don’t think Wes is a Prem keeper. But I’m not even convinced Grbic is an adequate Championship keeper.

4. Play the percentages with the recruitment - unless highly proven already, stay away from players with obvious physical limitations. Yea, you might see an Messi of such outstanding ability or a Maradona. I’m not suggesting we be myopic, but Traore is your example. He looks extremely ill-equipped for the English game. Likewise we have to get bang for our buck, so paying high wages for many players who have ropey injury records is asking for your season to be derailed by Christmas.

Sarcastic responses also very much welcome on this thread.

What else can we learn?

We need to start our season at the same time as our competitors!

 

[Beans]

So it’s drawing to a close now and relegation is inevitable. We might somehow rally to take 19th but that would be the best we could hope for and also seems unlikely.

Clearly mistakes have been made, some by circumstances, some also by lack of decisive decision making.

So what can be learned? He’s my non-definitive start of the thread:

1. Set a style early and recruit towards it - to a large degree our focus was heavily around that cheeky number 10 we had. The recruitment of Archer felt more like players we wouldn’t mind rather than players who fit. Either McAtee into the 10 or recruiting another 10 would have appeared the most judicious. If we were using Archer to replace Sharp and then still getting a ten and sticking to 3-5-1-1 then fine, but it didn’t appear the case.

2. Be more organised and don’t enter the season undercooked - at some point decisions have to be made on recruitment. Writing off winnable games effectively because you are having to youth players where new recruits should sit is no way to retain momentum. It shouldn’t be observed at such a high level.

3. Don’t sign players you’ve hardly seen. I’d love to know what redeeming features someone saw in Grbic. I don’t think Wes is a Prem keeper. But I’m not even convinced Grbic is an adequate Championship keeper.

4. Play the percentages with the recruitment - unless highly proven already, stay away from players with obvious physical limitations. Yea, you might see an Messi of such outstanding ability or a Maradona. I’m not suggesting we be myopic, but Traore is your example. He looks extremely ill-equipped for the English game. Likewise we have to get bang for our buck, so paying high wages for many players who have ropey injury records is asking for your season to be derailed by Christmas.

Sarcastic responses also very much welcome on this thread.

What else can we learn?

I've just submitted (honest!) some writing to the Pinch on this very topic - the undercooked / be more organised point is one that sticks out to me.

108 days passed between clinching promotion against West Brom and kicking off against Crystal Palace, and we moved so slowly. Our first signing (Slimane) arrived two days before our first friendly, and only the third permanent signing (Trusty) signed two days before our last friendly.

The above only exacerbated by the fact that we knew Doyle and McAtee were going back to their club, we knew that Marseille were interested in Ndiaye, and we knew that Berge was entering the last year of his deal.

The Souza deal dragged on for three weeks during which he was told not to train very much for fear of nixing the deal, so he essentially missed out on a preseason of any kind. Unless a signing is going to be a nailed-on game-changer - and there was no indication that Souza would be more than a good defensive midfielder - then the club should just cut bait and move on to other targets.

 

[Yogi]

So it’s drawing to a close now and relegation is inevitable. We might somehow rally to take 19th but that would be the best we could hope for and also seems unlikely.

Clearly mistakes have been made, some by circumstances, some also by lack of decisive decision making.

So what can be learned? He’s my non-definitive start of the thread:

1. Set a style early and recruit towards it - to a large degree our focus was heavily around that cheeky number 10 we had. The recruitment of Archer felt more like players we wouldn’t mind rather than players who fit. Either McAtee into the 10 or recruiting another 10 would have appeared the most judicious. If we were using Archer to replace Sharp and then still getting a ten and sticking to 3-5-1-1 then fine, but it didn’t appear the case.

2. Be more organised and don’t enter the season undercooked - at some point decisions have to be made on recruitment. Writing off winnable games effectively because you are having to youth players where new recruits should sit is no way to retain momentum. It shouldn’t be observed at such a high level.

3. Don’t sign players you’ve hardly seen. I’d love to know what redeeming features someone saw in Grbic. I don’t think Wes is a Prem keeper. But I’m not even convinced Grbic is an adequate Championship keeper.

4. Play the percentages with the recruitment - unless highly proven already, stay away from players with obvious physical limitations. Yea, you might see an Messi of such outstanding ability or a Maradona. I’m not suggesting we be myopic, but Traore is your example. He looks extremely ill-equipped for the English game. Likewise we have to get bang for our buck, so paying high wages for many players who have ropey injury records is asking for your season to be derailed by Christmas.

Sarcastic responses also very much welcome on this thread.

What else can we learn?

Squads eventually have a use by date on them and need to be refreshed on a regular basis to avoid all your best players hitting the wall at the same time

 

[Gaini Blade]

We need young FIT players who want to do well for the club.

 

[ChipButtyBlade]

We have a team full of ordinary players that just fuction at their level of football,there is probably just two players in the whole squad who when they get the ball i think something exciting and positive might happen....Hamer and BBD.

We need players who drive the opposition Managers mad with anguish,and a player who when they have the ball gets everyone excited and on their feet,the top teams have many players like that.............can i just have one.

 

[Bell4]

We need to start our season at the same time as our competitors!

We needed to start next season three / four months ago . Let’s hope Wilders meeting was constructive and we have a robust plan

 

[Nearly Jimmy Hagan]

Squads eventually have a use by date on them and need to be refreshed on a regular basis to avoid all your best players hitting the wall at the same time

Agree & Wilder said this regularly in his first spell at the club. After moving us up from L1, he targeted players like Neil Maupay, Ollie Watkins & Antonee Robinson but presumably due to finances we couldn’t compete & had to move on to alternatives lower down the target list. We’ll never know if we would have continued to progress with those players but they are established PL / Internationals now. It’s impossible to consistently keep moving forward at the highest levels without the required financial resources.

 

[Working Class Hero]

Agree & Wilder said this regularly in his first spell at the club. After moving us up from L1, he targeted players like Neil Maupay, Ollie Watkins & Antonee Robinson but presumably due to finances we couldn’t compete & had to move on to alternatives lower down the target list. We’ll never know if we would have continued to progress with those players but they are established PL / Internationals now. It’s impossible to consistently keep moving forward at the highest levels without the required financial resources.

Add Eze, Cash and Henderson as players who we'd have signed if the funds had been made available, and I think we could have been in a very different position.

 

[S64 Blade]

The big one has to be around contracts and recruitment, given the summer ahead and the big rebuild we have to contend with. I am not confident that we can do this well, but we do seem to be making an effort to correct this with the changes in personnel at the club.

Second to that would be improving fitness - which in some part is linked to the summer transfer window. Last year, we didn't get a settled squad with new signings until September (at best) and by that point, we were already well behind the rest. I saw a Twitter post this morning with the Premier League table at 0-75 ,minutes and we'd be on 29 points, 2 off 17th place and with a game in hand. I think this highlights a lot of our problems for not being competitive and being way-off having any chance of ever staying up.

 

[Bladesman]

The Premier League has highlighted how poor our fitness was under Hecky and that you can't just get away with it in this league. Wilder at least acknowledged the fitness was shit when he arrived and said it would take a while to rectify it. The fitness needs to be sorted before anything else. It doesn't matter who we sign or even re-sign as it's not going to be much good if they will spend half the season on the sidelines.

PA needs to also needs to hurry up and find a buyer or find some serious investors to enable all the restructuring of staff and players. He may have found some investors? if that's the reason the new training ground has been purchased.

 

[cooperblade]

As an absolute minimum, set a budget now (for wages and transfers) and stick to it.

Tell the manager what decisions will be made by him and what will be made by the board in terms of retaining players - if it's the board, make those decisions now.

Tell the manager what bids would be accepted for which players and stick to it. E.g Arblaster stays unless someone offers £25m.

Tell the manager the approach regarding players with one year left - and stick to it.

Make a commitment to never again have blanket freezes on offering new contracts to players. If the board can't do this, I think Wilder should walk. Happy for there to be parameters, rules etc but just allowing an en masse running down of contracts is stupid and has cost us dearly on many levels.


If Wilder can get the above, then it's on him to build a plan, a squad, and a philosophy with the resources available to him.

 

[Champagneblade]

I've just submitted (honest!) some writing to the Pinch on this very topic - the undercooked / be more organised point is one that sticks out to me.

108 days passed between clinching promotion against West Brom and kicking off against Crystal Palace, and we moved so slowly. Our first signing (Slimane) arrived two days before our first friendly, and only the third permanent signing (Trusty) signed two days before our last friendly.

The above only exacerbated by the fact that we knew Doyle and McAtee were going back to their club, we knew that Marseille were interested in Ndiaye, and we knew that Berge was entering the last year of his deal.

The Souza deal dragged on for three weeks during which he was told not to train very much for fear of nixing the deal, so he essentially missed out on a preseason of any kind. Unless a signing is going to be a nailed-on game-changer - and there was no indication that Souza would be more than a good defensive midfielder - then the club should just cut bait and move on to other targets.

Look forward to reading the article. Always enjoy the pod when I have time to catch up, though there is only so much of hearing someone else’s misery that can compensate for your own!

It’s the moving on. We spent a long time in denial about Ndiaye when it should have been obvious he was off. We are not so good at the top level. That therefore means there is a pretty large group of players who will add something so yes, move on to other targets if some are dragging. Luton didn’t seem
To find it so much of a struggle.

 

[Champagneblade]

Squads eventually have a use by date on them and need to be refreshed on a regular basis to avoid all your best players hitting the wall at the same time

You only tend to end up performing revolution if you’ve made a bit of a balls of evolution!

 

[Rodley]

As an absolute minimum, set a budget now (for wages and transfers) and stick to it.

Tell the manager what decisions will be made by him and what will be made by the board in terms of retaining players - if it's the board, make those decisions now.

Tell the manager what bids would be accepted for which players and stick to it. E.g Arblaster stays unless someone offers £25m.

Tell the manager the approach regarding players with one year left - and stick to it.

Make a commitment to never again have blanket freezes on offering new contracts to players. If the board can't do this, I think Wilder should walk. Happy for there to be parameters, rules etc but just allowing an en masse running down of contracts is stupid and has cost us dearly on many levels.


If Wilder can get the above, then it's on him to build a plan, a squad, and a philosophy with the resources available to him.

Spot on.

 

[BobblesBlade]

Take some of Jocs DNA ( scientifically not sexually) and make a clone.

I firmly believe him being injured ruined Wilders opportunity to cement our place in the Prem.

 

[WF10BLADE]

I'm sorry, but we fuck about every pre season and seemingly only have 1 or 2 ideas, we are often scratching around on deadline day (as this is where we get the best value)

We have effectively known what league we will be in next season since promotion.

There is zero excuse now for not getting our summer strategy in place.

We need to ship out all the shit, get Brewster fit and look to build a promotion team around him.

 

[Tickhill Blade]

We need to ship out all the shit, get Brewster fit and look to build a promotion team around him.

 

[ReeceofBDTBL]

I'm sorry, but we fuck about every pre season and seemingly only have 1 or 2 ideas, we are often scratching around on deadline day (as this is where we get the best value)

We have effectively known what league we will be in next season since promotion.

There is zero excuse now for not getting our summer strategy in place.

We need to ship out all the shit, get Brewster fit and look to build a promotion team around him.

Get Brewster fit? Tell me you’re taking the piss

 

[AgaMonkey]

It’s not just the standard of players at our disposal that lets us down. Nor is it necessarily about when we signed them. Admittedly, both factors have contributed to our shit show of a season. And we were never gonna embark on Florist levels of expenditure to buy the quality we need to stay up.

But, for me, our lack of fitness and athleticism is unforgivable. It’s been a problem a long time in the making. Many of us were saying it the last time we got relegated from this division.

It’s ridiculous that we run out of steam at the end of every game. We are, by some way, the least fit team in the PL. Hardly anyone can last a full 90 minutes.

Conceding late goals has been a consistent and consequent feature of our lack of fitness.

So, for next season, as a starting point, we have to get everyone fit enough to play in the PL…and we have to maintain that. You never know, we might not pick up so many injuries if everyone is as fit as they should be

 

[ReeceofBDTBL]

1. Thanks to the horrific injury record, no cracks have been papered over re: the squad and potentially going into next season with the ‘ahh he’ll be orate in that league’ for half the squad like we did with Oli Burke et al the last time we went down.

In other words, we won’t be starting Osula, Bennie Traore only to find out 6 games in that they’re just nowhere near good enough.

We also won’t be getting sucked in to hoping the likes of Brewster or Tom Davies will suddenly be ever present

2. There’ll be no protests from the fans over selling Anel and Souza, because we’ve learnt just how unreliable they are when things get tough.

3. We’ve learnt just how much we miss Egan. If he re signs and stays fit for next season you’ve basically got the huge bonus of a top defender at the kingpin of your defence.

4. Performances like last night give hope that Bogle could find the kind of form he showed a couple years ago, and that we could hopefully get at least some use out of trusty next season.

5. We’ve learnt how much basic pride matters to the fans regardless of how much tv money we’re getting. Fans don’t want us in this league if we’re just getting humiliated

Means there won’t be too much pressure from the fans to get promoted, a good chunk of the fan base don’t even want us back in the prem at this point

 

[Grecian2000]

Don't throw your lucky pants away because they're no longer lucky.

Been fucking commando since before Christmas!

 

[cooperblade]

It’s not just the standard of players at our disposal that lets us down. Nor is it necessarily about when we signed them. Admittedly, both factors have contributed to our shit show of a season. And we were never gonna embark on Florist levels of expenditure to buy the quality we need to stay up.

But, for me, our lack of fitness and athleticism is unforgivable. It’s been a problem a long time in the making. Many of us were saying it the last time we got relegated from this division.

It’s ridiculous that we run out of steam at the end of every game. We are, by some way, the least fit team in the PL. Hardly anyone can last a full 90 minutes.

Conceding late goals has been a consistent and consequent feature of our lack of fitness.

So, for next season, as a starting point, we have to get everyone fit enough to play in the PL…and we have to maintain that. You never know, we might not pick up so many injuries if everyone is as fit as they should be

Agree with you re: the lack of athleticism.

I think there are some mitigating factors with fitness though. The main one is that our possession is so low - last night TNT put some distance covered stats up and Arblaster and Souza were both in the top 3. Our players are capable of putting the miles in but the intensity of constantly chasing and defending is proving hard on them. I think our fitness would probably be fine if we were in the Championship and having 50-55% possession but it's hard for any team (particularly one with a small-ish squad) when we're regularly having less than 30%. That's not to say it couldn't / shouldn't be improved - just that I think circumstances are making it look worse than it maybe is.