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Neil Warnock, Steve Gibson & Long Term Vision?


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8 minutes ago, SouthernSmoggie said:

I've always thought it's telling that a young, well-connected manager who got to a play-off final then won automatic promotion (conceding about 3 goals all season) has never been in high demand. 

Having said that, I'd still take stroppy, sulky AK over any of the clowns we've had since relegation. 

We conceded 31 goals and lost 9 league games, lol. Still a pretty impressive stat, mind.

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As it's looking a virtual certainty that Warnock is going to get the job for next season, it's worth noting both the significant positives and negatives that will result from Warnock being our manager

👀Thanks for the invite, really appreciate it.

The Evening Gazette has said that Steve Gibson is against a director of football because it would add another 6 figure salary onto the wage bill. I can't help but question whether that is the true mot

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25 minutes ago, Denzel Zanzibar said:

Uh, after the Charlton game nothing of the sort happened, we won the next 6 games on the trot and drew the final 3. Hardly "limping over the line".

Actually we drew the last 4 games...against Burnley, Ipswich, Brum and Brighton. We also squeaked into 2nd place ahead of Brighton on goal difference. 😉

I think thats what he meant by "limping over the line". Especially after that impressive 6 on the bounce winning streak. Those 4 successive draws made it feel like we nearly threw automatic promotion away.

 

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12 minutes ago, AnglianRed said:

Actually we drew the last 4 games...against Burnley, Ipswich, Brum and Brighton. We also squeaked into 2nd place ahead of Brighton on goal difference. 😉

I think thats what he meant by "limping over the line". Especially after that impressive 6 on the bounce winning streak. Those 4 successive draws made it feel like we nearly threw automatic promotion away.

 

Haha yeah, for some reason I forgot the Brighton game, lol

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3 hours ago, Denzel Zanzibar said:

We conceded 31 goals and lost 9 league games, lol. Still a pretty impressive stat, mind.

Still pretty damn good. Conceded 8 at home - in a whole season! Loved it when the Riverside was a fortress... Friday night home games under the lights, teams might as well not have bothered.

Colin has nearly shipped more than 8 home goals already.

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5 hours ago, wilsoncgp said:

I thought he seemed pretty happy with the squad we had going into the season, to be honest. Don't think many clubs coming up could have signed Victor Valdes and Negredo who were both stupidly better than what we had. The only position I think we really wanted a better player than what we got was right-back, we were after Thomas Meunier and Aissa Mandi for that but those fell apart and we seemingly took Barragan on in order to sweeten the deal for Negredo with Valencia.

 

5 hours ago, Humpty said:

I don’t necessarily disagree that we could’ve spent more. Don’t forget the money we’d already invested in the summer though, that wasn’t unsubstantial. There seems to be a narrative in some elements of our support that Karanka was done the dirty on and that January window is highlighted to support that narrative. I think it’s a weak angle that ignores Karanka’s failings especially at the top level. 

 

True. I won't argue Karanka did a lot to bring about his own downfall with his poor man management skills.

However, I don't think we had a particularly strong squad, when it contained the likes of Forshaw, Guedioura, Stuani, Clayton, Leadbitter, Fry, Friend, Gestede, Fischer and a bunch of others who you'd consider solid / above average Championship players...but not really PL quality.

Think there are also some parallels with Farke and Norwich. A manager with no previous PL experience, with a squad that maybe wasn't up to scratch. 

Even for a good man-manager with great motivational skills, it would have been a tough ask. For a tactician and disciplinarian like Karanka, when things started going wrong, it was always going to end in tears.

 

Just checked Wikipedia and I may have to retract my comment about Gibson not backing him properly. If the figures are right, we had a net spend of around £20m that season.

Fischer - £3.8m 

De Roon - £12m

Barragan - £3m

Fabio - £2m

Traoré - £7.5m

Gestede - £6m

Bamford - £6m

Guedioura - £4.5m

Thats nearly £45m worth of signings. 😮 Though of that lot I only regret us losing Bamford & Traoré. 

 

We also sold several players, but the only disclosed fee was Reach for £5m.

 

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Fischer - £3.8m : Injury prone gamble that didn't pay off

De Roon - £12m : Premiership quality

Barragan - £3m : Very poor and a liability thrown in as a makeweight

Fabio - £2m : Reasonable squad player for back up decent value for the money 

Traoré - £7.5m : Long term project that didn't pay off until years later but no value at the time for a struggling club

Gestede - £6m : Injury prone donkey that was rejected by all the other sanctuaries at the time and every one since

Bamford - £6m : Great prospect with potential but was always going to be a gamble at the time

Guedioura - £4.5m : Wow, just WOW and WOW again, never remotely close to Premiership standard

 

An awful lot of money spent on Players not fit for purpose at the time. Valdes was another crock who was a liability for the first half of the season and then an attitude problem for the second half who eventually went on strike. Negredo tried in fairness but was ineffective due to the obvious weaknesses throughout the squad. As for Bad Guzan, having your own fans chant "Off, Off, Off" to the Referee in an effort to improve your sides chances by going down to 10 men says it all. Financially on paper Karanka was backed but competitively it was a shambolic mess.

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34 minutes ago, Redcar Rioja said:

Fischer - £3.8m : Injury prone gamble that didn't pay off

De Roon - £12m : Premiership quality

Barragan - £3m : Very poor and a liability thrown in as a makeweight

Fabio - £2m : Reasonable squad player for back up decent value for the money 

Traoré - £7.5m : Long term project that didn't pay off until years later but no value at the time for a struggling club

Gestede - £6m : Injury prone donkey that was rejected by all the other sanctuaries at the time and every one since

Bamford - £6m : Great prospect with potential but was always going to be a gamble at the time

Guedioura - £4.5m : Wow, just WOW and WOW again, never remotely close to Premiership standard

 

An awful lot of money spent on Players not fit for purpose at the time. Valdes was another crock who was a liability for the first half of the season and then an attitude problem for the second half who eventually went on strike. Negredo tried in fairness but was ineffective due to the obvious weaknesses throughout the squad. As for Bad Guzan, having your own fans chant "Off, Off, Off" to the Referee in an effort to improve your sides chances by going down to 10 men says it all. Financially on paper Karanka was backed but competitively it was a shambolic mess.

Good analysis.

We spent a lot of money but still ended up with just a handful of genuine PL-quality players. I think even with a better man manager we'd still have been relegated.

With Karanka being the type of person he is, it just meant we imploded fairly spectacularly.

 

 

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25 minutes ago, AnglianRed said:

Good analysis.

We spent a lot of money but still ended up with just a handful of genuine PL-quality players. I think even with a better man manager we'd still have been relegated.

With Karanka being the type of person he is, it just meant we imploded fairly spectacularly.

As bad as our final tally looks, we were still well within reach of safety for a long time.

We sacked Karanka and bizarrely had Agnew in charge, assuming a better manager I fully think we could have got wins in the Swansea and Hull matches. 

Win those and we'd have been out of the relegation zone on 28 points, with a game in hand on the teams around us and 8 games left to play.

There were plenty of matches when Karanka was in charge that we could have won on another day too.

Both Leicester matches, the West Brom matches, the Burnley matches, etc.

Even with Agnew, we should have beaten Man City the second time.

I don't think there was anything unjust about us going down, but I also don't think it needed that much of a flip to have us stay up by the skin of our teeth.

If that Huddersfield side could stay up the season after, we definitely could have.

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2 hours ago, Redcar Rioja said:

Fischer - £3.8m : Injury prone gamble that didn't pay off

De Roon - £12m : Premiership quality

Barragan - £3m : Very poor and a liability thrown in as a makeweight

Fabio - £2m : Reasonable squad player for back up decent value for the money 

Traoré - £7.5m : Long term project that didn't pay off until years later but no value at the time for a struggling club

Gestede - £6m : Injury prone donkey that was rejected by all the other sanctuaries at the time and every one since

Bamford - £6m : Great prospect with potential but was always going to be a gamble at the time

Guedioura - £4.5m : Wow, just WOW and WOW again, never remotely close to Premiership standard

 

An awful lot of money spent on Players not fit for purpose at the time. Valdes was another crock who was a liability for the first half of the season and then an attitude problem for the second half who eventually went on strike. Negredo tried in fairness but was ineffective due to the obvious weaknesses throughout the squad. As for Bad Guzan, having your own fans chant "Off, Off, Off" to the Referee in an effort to improve your sides chances by going down to 10 men says it all. Financially on paper Karanka was backed but competitively it was a shambolic mess.

Don't forget the phantoms known as Chambers and Espinosa...  never seem to be mentioned but distinctly remember seeing them in Boro shirts ..  occasionally

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16 minutes ago, Old Codger said:

Don't forget the phantoms known as Chambers and Espinosa...  never seem to be mentioned but distinctly remember seeing them in Boro shirts ..  occasionally

Chambers had potential but wasn't there yet while Espinosa was clearly out of his depth at Premiership level. We bought and borrowed cheap and paid several times over for it and are still paying for it, or at least SG is.

We should have made stepped improvements rather than radical ones with the intention of trying to stay up or worse case coming down but with a stronger squad than we went up with so we could bounce back. We went daft when we went up and went even dafter splashing the cash when we came back down and consequently just cleared the last of those excesses out this summer.

Hopefully the arrival of Scott heralds in a more pragmatic approach in the future.

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2 hours ago, GrimsbyBoro said:

Not sure De Roon was premier quality I know fans like him but at the time was a bit of a headless chicken. Has gone on to do well 

Fair point, I probably agree more than I disagree with that but I tried hard to be balanced. He was the only one I could say something really positive about but agree he didn't set the heather alight when he was here but I guess its hard to shine when you are up to your neck in brown stuff. He has played at a consistently high level since he left so clearly had more than most of the others at that time so gave him a positive review. 

I almost forgot! We did get our money back on him which is at least a neutral if not a positive.

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De Roon has gone from strength to strength since, which is disappointing knowing the level of player we had. Although he seems to be infinitely more comfortable in Italy so maybe we wouldn't have ever seen that rise. Playing in the Champions League probably helps...

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Looking back it was two terrible transfer windows that set us up to fail, with too many players not good enough to help in a relegation scrap in the Prem or simply didn't care. The recruitment was well off and seemed badly planned.

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