Writer: Frank
What is this once great club coming to?
Since February we have played 26 games in all competitions and won a grand total of eight, a disastrous run culminating in us being dumped out of the easiest competition to win, the EFL Cup, by League Two side Colchester United. A result that is an absolute disgrace for a club of our standing with our budget, and revenues, which have enabled our owners to build their collective vanity project costing apparently close to a billion pounds.
There is an old saying ‘fur coat and no knickers’, which could be a description of the relationship between the expenditure on the ground, and that on the team, in terms of player contracts and transfer fees to enable us to both attract and retain top players.
What is the next move, how do we get back to respectability, and competitiveness, before this season becomes a total horlicks, and we plunge into midtable obscurity if we are lucky. Our squad is far from the quality some of us kid ourselves it is, and this is proven by a lack of consistency and a lack of the ability to beat inferior teams. We have no spirit, no drive, no bottle, and no determination to prevail, irrespective of the opposition.
We have a coach presiding over this debacle, who seems to make excuses, blames everybody except himself, does not seem to know his best team, or able to select horses for courses, and who annoyingly claims to draw positives from the most embarrassing results.
We go through successive transfer windows without solving the squad’s problems and shortages. We have either a goalkeeper or a quiet man striker as captain, neither able to ‘kick arse’ or motivate or drive the team. All this is happening whilst rival teams in the PL are progressing.
Without changes right from the top, this gradual slide into obscurity will continue. If the form since February is continued for the rest of the season we will be looking to avoid the bottom 3 rather than achieving a top 4 finish.
Perhaps a five year stint is enough for a coach, perhaps his ideas are stale, perhaps the players have heard it all before, perhaps his ideas and philosophies are wrong after all, it should be remembered his trophy haul as coach is still zero.
It is time for the most ardent happy clapper to start asking questions, even Levy will get twitchy if he sees his cash cow THFC in serious decline which starts to reflect in reduced revenues and profits, and he might see fit to act, as he did when he removed Ramos (incidentally the last trophy winning Spurs coach), and installed Harry Redknapp to save us from a possible impending relegation.
I accept that this might be alarmist, but it is always best to be proactive to a situation than to wring hands, shed tears and have to react with a disaster plan when the worst happens. Clubs bigger than us have suffered this indignity before, in fact, we have ourselves been relegated.
Liverpool recently had a short lean time and missed top four finishes but they quickly sorted it by installing a new coach and strengthening. They chose to increase the capacity at Anfield rather than demolish it and spend a billion on a new stadium, choosing to rebuild the squad instead, culminating in winning the Champions League which of course is the objective of a football club, to win trophies, not build a property empire.
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