I don't know if it was just me, but I felt strangely detached watching the game yesterday. An awful performance, embarrassing, inept, but it didn't feel like it effected me quite how it would have done in the past. At first i thought it might just have been how bizarre it was, you've got to laugh or you'll cry, except i wasn't laughing or crying, after the 4th goal went in i was just resigned to it.
I think it's because i'm aware of the fact we're at a crossroads, clearly in terms of team building we have a lot to do, and making the right managerial appointment, but i'm also aware that we face some big decisions to make in the way we go about that rebuilding and where they might lead us.
We can only speculate as to why O'Neill left but it seems that there is definitely an element of belt tightening at the club and across football as a whole. Most football fans would agree that the spending of clubs at recent levels isn't stustainable and generally pretty horrible. We haven't had any success but we have spent more money than most gambling to get it. A lot of our players are on big wages, big enough for a side chasing the champions league but without the performances to match, we need to shift them but the clubs below us couldn't afford to take them off our hands if they wanted to. So we can't trade, we just need to spend.
Randy Lerner could probably afford to keep spending and keep us reasonably competitive, maybe treading water, but would it be the right thing to do? i'm not sure if it would be good for the future of the club let alone for him personally.
So where does that leave us? I couldn't blame Lerner if he tried to run us as a buisness, he's not a charity and if we don't like how man city are being run can we be happy doing the same thing on a smaller scale? I can't blame Kevin Mcdonald, a great coach, probably not a great manager. I can blame the players. But, i was struck again yesterday how much football is about momentum, during the game after the penalty, but also in the wider context of Newcastle being on an upward curve and the feeling that our players looked like the wind had been taken out of their sails.
It feels different than under Ellis, i always wanted us to spend money but didn't think too much about where it was going to come from. Strangely now that we have a rich chairman i feel less eager for us to spend it if we can't afford to. We have some obvious shortcomings on the pitch but so do a lot of teams, only the ones who can afford to do something about it can, the others just need to get used to it.
I might be having an overreaction to my underreaction but it seems like things may get worse before they can get better. Is it just us finding our place in the pecking order? Not to do with history, fan numbers, etc just how much money we are prepared to spend?
Apologies for starting a new thread, I was replying to a post by Rancid Custard i think on another thread, pressed preview then back and lost it all. Things had turned into bickering by the time i'd re-written it so it didn't seem the right place anymore.
