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Boro v Wycombe  

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  1. 1. WWWTLGOTS? (Will we win the last game of the season?)

    • Yes
      15
    • No
      5
    • No, we will lose 17-1 and Wycombe will avoid relegation
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I was busy this afternoon, so I decided to avoid the results and wait for the highlights on Quest. After watching teams with far less talented players (and far less experienced managers) giving their all for the shirt, I've just watched an absolutely diabolical performance from Boro. And I think it cements the need for a change of management - yet again, Gibson has got a critically important appointment totally wrong.

I genuinely wanted Neil Warnock to succeed at this club, and I hope that the mini-plays I've written as MDTs this season reflected my affection for the man. Tonight, I'm sitting here thinking he needs to go. He's had long enough to effect change but he's not built a squad. He's not built a team. He's not even got the best out of individuals. Players he brought in and championed have contributed nothing. He said Akpom was his top choice. He made Britt his captain. He brought Mendez-Laing and Bettinelli in on loan. We're probably lucky Flint isn't back. Meanwhile he leaves raw but promising young talent on the bench until 84 minutes in a dead rubber game. For God's sake, why?

Looking at that performance today and reading through this thread, it's hard to think of any players we need to keep for next year other than Fry and Tav. It's not like changing the manager now ties his replacement's hands, or forces a particular ideology onto someone with fresh ideas. I honestly don't know what Warnock can bring to the table next season, after this absolute damp squib of a season in a fairly weak Championship. We don't appear to have any direction for next season. We don't have a strong spine to the squad. We don't have players who would walk into any other Championship squad. We have a manager who doesn't appear to have any idea how to play the modern game, or how to motivate players any more.

Most of all, tonight I'm disappointed because the season's ended with an unnecessary whimper. With some guile and craft, we could have been right up there in the playoffs, battling til the final game. And I don't see how we avoid next season becoming as much of a non-event as this season, unless the club goes in a very different direction. Quickly.

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Like, even taking this as a single game and taking it as a nothing game, this was embarrassing. I can't quite state how bad today was. The amount of times they got in behind us as a result of shamboli

I was busy this afternoon, so I decided to avoid the results and wait for the highlights on Quest. After watching teams with far less talented players (and far less experienced managers) giving their

More utter *** in the press conference - Warnock said: ““I’m not going to knock them today. We were poor today, but overall, to finish tenth after where we were when we came in, I think it’s been

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6 hours ago, Neverbefore said:

More utter *** in the press conference -

Warnock said: ““I’m not going to knock them today. We were poor today, but overall, to finish tenth after where we were when we came in, I think it’s been a fabulous achievement.

After talking all summer about how he wouldn't be here if be didn't think we could get us promoted this year is quite the climb down to claim a great achievement for not even coming close. 

“If that all goes well, we’ll have a very good chance of finishing higher than tenth next season. I don’t think you can promise anything because I don’t think anybody knows what your recruitment will be

Already setting himself up to deflect any of the blame on recruitment. Been talking all week about how he won't sign a player unless he or one of his cronies have seen them play - either you're making the decisions or the recruitment team are, you can't change your mind on a day to day basis.

We’ll need a bit of luck. I don’t think I’m being disrespectful to the lads that have been here, but we’ve finished tenth without really having a striker this season.

You've had 3 centre forwards this season, you've not managed to get a damn thing out of them. But nah, its all their fault. 

With the last 3 months or so, Warnock has overtaken pulis as my most despised manager in our history. He's a complete fraud, and he gets away with it with most of our fans. The fact he's here for another year has me utterly dejected about where this club is going. 

I won't be spending another penny on the club until he's gone. That's only the 150 odd quid I spend on match passed and 120 odd quid I spend on the two kits, but I can't just sit and complain and continue to give the club anything. I'll watch us when were on sky and continue to follow us on here, but that's it.

Just to follow up on this because I'm still fuming - he talks about not having strikers all season. One he signed and claimed he was his number one target, one he made his captain, and one he talked about offering a good new contract to.

Pure and utter propaganda. Unbelievable that anyone listens to a word he has to say with any credence. 

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I read NW take on the game and season and expectations for next season. How can any BORO fan possibly accept his analysis of last season and feel confident for next. Never have I felt so despondent over the last few seasons and so concerned for our future. Last season was a fairly weak Championship in which we did little before falling apart. Why put a manager in charge who won’t be here the season after, why! Why keep a manager who despite the crap he brought and went backwards and never give the young ones a run out even in the last game, why! 
A thumbs down from me... 

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6 minutes ago, Neverbefore said:

Just to follow up on this because I'm still fuming - he talks about not having strikers all season. One he signed and claimed he was his number one target, one he made his captain, and one he talked about offering a good new contract to.

Pure and utter propaganda. Unbelievable that anyone listens to a word he has to say with any credence. 

There isn't a manager in football who doesn't turn into Joseph Goebbels when trying to spin a story. There's a difference between believing it and recognising it for what it is.

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1 hour ago, Old Codger said:

I think any group of people needs a leader to coordinate them to a degree, otherwise we see aimless milling around and people trying to do their own thing...  it isn't the be all and end all, but we tend do do better with strong personalities in the team. On Wiki there is a list of Notable Players for the Boro and I think it could be said that we enjoyed our most successful spells in Riverside years under good captains beginning with Robson, Pearson and Ince. The best teams have two or three leaders/alphas and they mightn't be the best players but the right guy can make a difference 

We were relegated with Pearson as captain as well as promoted though.  Robson wasn't captain, he was our manager, unless you mean Barry Robson but I'm not sure we were all that successful while he was here.  While Bryan Robson was captain at Man Utd they were relatively unsuccessful until right at the end of his time there.  Ince was captain for three seasons I think, where we never finished higher than 12th, and one of the seasons was the one where Venables stepped in as we were terrible, and looking like certs to be relegated, so clearly his captaincy wasn't helping us much.

Captaincy means nothing in football.  It means something in cricket where the captain still makes some of the big decisions, but even there the influence is reducing as various layers of management, coaches, and analysts, take over.  Cricket captaincy now is veering a little more to captaincy by numbers.  If the Boro captaincy held any importance at all then Warnock would never have given it to Assombalonga in the first place.  He did it as a symbolic gesture in the hope that it might somehow inspire him to greater deeds, precisely because the position is next to worthless in reality so it didn't matter who had it.  Personally I'd have just spent less time punting the ball up field for him to try and win headers against defenders half a foot taller than him or to chase after, but I'm not a sophisticated football thinker like Warnock.

The importance of the captaincy in football is an example of received wisdom, something that's held to be true but really might not be.  It goes right along with 'this is the way things have always been done' as ways of thinking to be avoided if at all possible.

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I see your thinking, but the lack of a recognised leader leads to anarchy (in the UK) so there does need to be someone out there that can motivate his team mates in some fashion...  do you think we are anywhere near the total DS wants or do I need to find something else to inflate post numbers?  

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1 hour ago, Old Codger said:

I see your thinking, but the lack of a recognised leader leads to anarchy (in the UK) so there does need to be someone out there that can motivate his team mates in some fashion...  do you think we are anywhere near the total DS wants or do I need to find something else to inflate post numbers?  

The manager is the leader.

Could try a game of hangman if we still need more posts.

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3 hours ago, Neverbefore said:

Just to follow up on this because I'm still fuming - he talks about not having strikers all season. One he signed and claimed he was his number one target, one he made his captain, and one he talked about offering a good new contract to.

Pure and utter propaganda. Unbelievable that anyone listens to a word he has to say with any credence. 

This, right here!

 

The man is an absolute con artist. Unfortunately, some Boro fans lap up the absolute *** he comes out with and ignore the fact that we are going backwards with him in charge. 
 

Why doesn’t he do us all a favour and actually follow through with retiring from management? 
 

No matter how bad things have got over the last 10/15 years I’ve always looked forward to the new season with hope but I can honestly say that for the first time ever I’m absolutely dreading next season.

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4 hours ago, J.T. said:

This, right here!

 

The man is an absolute con artist. Unfortunately, some Boro fans lap up the absolute *** he comes out with and ignore the fact that we are going backwards with him in charge. 
 

Why doesn’t he do us all a favour and actually follow through with retiring from management? 
 

No matter how bad things have got over the last 10/15 years I’ve always looked forward to the new season with hope but I can honestly say that for the first time ever I’m absolutely dreading next season.

I can't say that I am dreading next season but I do have apathy towards it in much the same way as I have felt for the last eight or nine games of this season which grew in intensity to literally watching three goals go in against us today and I may just as well have been watching Rochdale versus Accrington. No disrespect to those two sides but I literally have no interest in either of their fortunes nor could I tell you where they are in the League ( or even if they are in the same League)!

Normally I would have been apoplectic and losing it but I smiled when Wycombe's first went in and when they hit a third I briefly mused if they would manage the required cricket score after all because there was nothing in response from Boro, if ever a tank was empty we were running on fumes. My only regret this afternoon was that it wasn't us who Rotherham were playing today instead of Cardiff. 

Over the coming weeks I'm expecting us to sign a bunch of low budget cut price mercenaries to bulk the squad with numbers and hope that maybe Warnock can call in one or two favours from a few useful players for this level. Given the current global financial situation most other clubs will probably be in a similar situation but if it wasn't for the quantity of misfits required in our case I may have grounds for more optimism. Finding ten players and integrating them into a combative unit is asking a lot. Expecting or even hoping for them to challenge for a top six finish is ridiculous therefore emotionally I have an air of resigned indifference to next season rather than a feeling of dread.

We do however have to keep in mind that the state the club is in isn't down to Warnock. These last ten or fifteen years or so has seen us lose touch with how the game has evolved and developed and whilst other similar clubs in size and resource to ourselves have moved with the times we like others are still are a club where one man writes the theme tune and sings the them tune. That is where the seat of the real problem lies and whether it is Warnock or Pulis it doesn't really matter because the managerial antibiotic is only dealing with the symptom and not the root cause of the problem. That being the case it is more likely that a dinosaur Manager will be a better fit in the the MFC organisational set up. Like Cardiff we will probably see another Big Mick type replace Warnock when he inevitably departs in the Autumn depending on who is currently available from football management's assisted accommodation shelter.

If we attracted a young vibrant up and coming Continental Coach who wanted to shake things up and radically change things he would have a far bigger task fighting with those above him in the Club's hierarchy than with the opposition coaches. That would end in only one way unless SG has a Damascene moment on the way to Hurworth. Karanka certainly had his flaws but he and his ways didn't fit with the small family business mentality (beware of SG bearing "gifts") where local lads if not openly encouraged were seemingly free to undermine the Manager. The car crash of that Iberian/Teessider dressing room split was symptomatic of other underlying issues at the club which exist to this day briefly resurfacing with the "Golden Thread" farce.

The seeming lack of an "outcome mindset" from the top of the club has meant a series of short term knee jerks. Unfortunately Football by its nature is very short term with success or failure defined over a nine month period, usually less judging by the average lifetime in a dug out. Right now we have a short term solution in Warnock as a result of another knee jerk caused by a series of previous knee jerks. 

When an organisation comes to the conclusion that they don’t want what they have, they jump out of that mess, only to inevitably move into another one that they don’t want. The lack of identifying what they want makes them go from one mess to another, repeatedly focussing on getting out of one crisis after another.

As the old saying goes "If you don’t know where you are going, then any road will take you there".

Edited by Redcar Rioja
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We are nearly there only 26 posts to go and should imagine the 500 will be reached as this will remain open for a while!

I do wonder just who NW will be sitting down with hope he starts with Howson and Saville and Johnson who contributed zip yesterday

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I can't believe Warnock came out yesterday and said "the fans won't mind today or be botherd about today" that really irked me.  If we got stuffed 3-0 but the young players were playing at least we would have seen what they were like over the course of a full 90 Malley & Coburn did get more time but Robinson & Hackney were brought on sarcastically for me.  They had there flip flops on yesterday which was frustrating we could of ended the season with a win or draw and been unbeaten going into next season. 

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1 hour ago, Redcar Rioja said:

I can't say that I am dreading next season but I do have apathy towards it in much the same way as I have felt for the last eight or nine games of this season which grew in intensity to literally watching three goals go in against us today and I may just as well have been watching Rochdale versus Accrington. No disrespect to those two sides but I literally have no interest in either of their fortunes nor could I tell you where they are in the League ( or even if they are in the same League)!

Normally I would have been apoplectic and losing it but I smiled when Wycombe's first went in and when they hit a third I briefly mused if they would manage the required cricket score after all because there was nothing in response from Boro, if ever a tank was empty we were running on fumes. My only regret this afternoon was that it wasn't us who Rotherham were playing today instead of Cardiff. 

Over the coming weeks I'm expecting us to sign a bunch of low budget cut price mercenaries to bulk the squad with numbers and hope that maybe Warnock can call in one or two favours from a few useful players for this level. Given the current global financial situation most other clubs will probably be in a similar situation but if it wasn't for the quantity of misfits required in our case I may have grounds for more optimism. Finding ten players and integrating them into a combative unit is asking a lot. Expecting or even hoping for them to challenge for a top six finish is ridiculous therefore emotionally I have an air of resigned indifference to next season rather than a feeling of dread.

We do however have to keep in mind that the state the club is in isn't down to Warnock. These last ten or fifteen years or so has seen us lose touch with how the game has evolved and developed and whilst other similar clubs in size and resource to ourselves have moved with the times we like others are still are a club where one man writes the theme tune and sings the them tune. That is where the seat of the real problem lies and whether it is Warnock or Pulis it doesn't really matter because the managerial antibiotic is only dealing with the symptom and not the root cause of the problem. That being the case it is more likely that a dinosaur Manager will be a better fit in the the MFC organisational set up. Like Cardiff we will probably see another Big Mick type replace Warnock when he inevitably departs in the Autumn depending on who is currently available from football management's assisted accommodation shelter.

If we attracted a young vibrant up and coming Continental Coach who wanted to shake things up and radically change things he would have a far bigger task fighting with those above him in the Club's hierarchy than with the opposition coaches. That would end in only one way unless SG has a Damascene moment on the way to Hurworth. Karanka certainly had his flaws but he and his ways didn't fit with the small family business mentality (beware of SG bearing "gifts") where local lads if not openly encouraged were seemingly free to undermine the Manager. The car crash of that Iberian/Teessider dressing room split was symptomatic of other underlying issues at the club which exist to this day briefly resurfacing with the "Golden Thread" farce.

The seeming lack of an "outcome mindset" from the top of the club has meant a series of short term knee jerks. Unfortunately Football by its nature is very short term with success or failure defined over a nine month period, usually less judging by the average lifetime in a dug out. Right now we have a short term solution in Warnock as a result of another knee jerk caused by a series of previous knee jerks. 

When an organisation comes to the conclusion that they don’t want what they have, they jump out of that mess, only to inevitably move into another one that they don’t want. The lack of identifying what they want makes them go from one mess to another, repeatedly focussing on getting out of one crisis after another.

As the old saying goes "If you don’t know where you are going, then any road will take you there".

So in a nutshell, it's one dinosaur employing another. Jesus! Joseph, Mary and the wee donkey.

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30 minutes ago, Dan_Boro_Till_I_Die said:

I can't believe Warnock came out yesterday and said "the fans won't mind today or be botherd about today" that really irked me.  If we got stuffed 3-0 but the young players were playing at least we would have seen what they were like over the course of a full 90 Malley & Coburn did get more time but Robinson & Hackney were brought on sarcastically for me.  They had there flip flops on yesterday which was frustrating we could of ended the season with a win or draw and been unbeaten going into next season. 

He also came out with the comment “Good old Boris” in his press conference.
 

He thinks Johnson is doing a great job and people shouldn’t care about dodgy Tory donations.
Just when I though Warnock couldn’t sink any lower in my estimation.
 

He probably thinks that he’s doing a great job at Boro too. 

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Adding on to what people have said, and I’ve said it lots before as well. But I just feel nothing but emptiness for us as a club now. From Pulis to now it has been an absolute *** show. 
 

The football this season has been atrocious. The football since Pulis has been dull, long ball and not enjoyable. Gibson must have seen this is the case? But then doubles down on the appointment of Warnock on a long term basis.
 

It made perfect sense to bring Warnock in and keep us up. I could even see the argument of keeping Warnock for a season of nothingness to stabilise us. However, what annoys me with the Warnock appointment is that we are so short term with it. We have a manager on a short term contract, so any player who comes here (which is a hard sell anyway) knows that they might be back out the door with a change in manager when Warnock goes. 
 

Are we better off now with Warnock having an additional year of treading water? Or could we have had a manager come in and change our playing philosophy and invest a year instead? We have since the appointment of Woodgate wasted two seasons where the foundations for something new could have been laid. Instead Gibson, just like with Pulis, appoints a manager where the “results” justify the style of play. Forget about enjoyment. And if Gibson believes that Warnock and Pulis are exciting appointments, he can get ***. 
 

“Oh but Neil is the best option available at the time” *** off. 
 

Eddie Howe is literally a free manager. He has success of promotion and staying in the premier league and played good football. Why isn’t he ticking all the boxes in comparison to Warnock? Why are we entrusting a man like Warnock to get us up? Daniel Farke, was relatively unknown before he came to Norwich. But a competent club was able to find a suitable pick for them.  
 

I know it’s completely different, but the old style of man management of Warnock is so chalk and cheese to Howe but we still saddle ourselves with the old mentality. 
 

Im actually embarrassed to be associated with Warnock. I liked him when he came in. But slowly he’s just turned into a figure in my mind who will say anything and throw people under the bus to avoid it from himself. And his comments about Boris and about the fans not caring about the final game have just put the nail in the coffin for me. I’ll have my £10 back for the stream then Neil. 
 

People made some great points about his decisions to bring in players who have under performed, but then he has the cheek to say how he’s not had a striker all season? Any striker would struggle to score because we don’t create clear cut chances you ***. That’s down to you as a manager, not the players! 
 

We will likely see our young players like Spence and Coulson leave because he can’t get the best out of them. We have seen that they are good footballers on their day, but because Warnocks *** tactics don’t help, they’ll be let go. Pulis and Bamford spring to mind, they are his scapegoat and the same thing is happening here. Oh poor me, give me more money to spend my way out of trouble.

Sorry for the rant but I’m just fed up of not being able to get behind or be excited about boro anymore 😞

Edited by ManBearPig
Champions league instead of premier league lol
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