I think we are currently miles off being ready for the Premier League and I hope that this defeat, may in time, be seen as a blessing in disguise.
I just hope this will be a catalyst for a complete review of the way the club operates. For a start, we should do so much better with our player fitness levels and hopefully we can prioritise the completion of the new training facility at Dore, which should include state of the art facilities, to improve our sports science, strength & conditioning capabilities. Currently, so many of the squad are blowing out their arses in the latter stages of games, it’s ridiculous.
I’d like to see us develop an international scouting network and a policy of recruitment something akin to Brentford or Brightons, signing the best young talent before they appear on anyone else’s radar and nurturing and developing them at our own Cat 1 Academy, competing against the best young players in the country.
The club needs a new Management team that will embrace this modernisation programme. The CWAK team are a busted flush, their achievements cannot be denied, the climb from Division 1 to ninth in the Premier league produced some of the best most exciting, innovative, football I’ve ever seen at Bramall Lane. But this season, on the whole, has been the absolute polar opposite of that fast paced, exciting up and at ‘em style, they seem devoid of fresh ideas and play the same dull possession based football adopted by so many teams, despite not possessing the quality and pace in the team to utilise it. The players in our squad were more than capable of securing promotion, yet we’ve often rode our luck and got 3 points when we really didn’t deserve them and crucially got caught out dropping daft points in the home straight and that is the managers responsibility.
I don’t know who are the ideal managerial candidates to oversee such a transformation, but when we get it right, instead of trying to limp over the line in the play offs, we need to be ten points clear at Christmas and mathematically promoted by April, if we have achievable aspirations to ever become an established Premier League side.
More Powerade and less Peroni