As for Risso's "how would we know" comment, how about because his friends in the press would start spouting sell-to-buy nonsense and he would strop off 5 days before the season started, you know, exactly how we knew when Lerner did put those restrictions in place.
He stropped off when he was told that he couldn't spend any more money at all (including the Milner cash) before moving on players, after years of being given an open cheque book. That is an entirely different scenario to being asked to stay within a reasonable and mutually agreed budget in the early years.
Again, you have no knowledge that those limits weren't in place. Look at the increase in turnover and improvement in results over his first 2 years, I think it's fairly clear that they planned for that increase to continue, not to plateau out so quickly. In hindsight that was clearly the wrong decision and it now looks like a huge error but at the time he was doing exactly what the fans wanted.
As for spending the milner cash, we didn't need to as such, we got a direct replacement as part of the deal. That's turned out to be an overrated pile of turd is again using hindsight to judge things. At the time there were plenty of people who thought we'd got a player who was just as good and got a sack of money as well. The rule was that we had a big enough squad but it wasn't being used correctly so he could only add bodies as replacements, not just keep stacking more on top.
From a pure player transaction point of view we've replaced the players we've sold, we've just not replaced them well, that's not lerners fault unless you want him dictating who the manager can sign.
Barry - replaced by Downing, allowing Milner to move central
Milner - replaced by Ireland
Young - replaced by Bent before he left allowing Gabby to move left
Downing - replaced by Nzogbia
As a fanbase the only 1 of those I can imagine wasn't seen as at least a reasonable replacement was Bent for Young, mainly because they played such different roles.
Where we haven't replaced at all was with the squad filler (like sidwell and NRC) who technically have been replaced from the reserves, but surely producing players to bulk out the squad is the purpose of the reserves. They don't look good enough because the big profile replacements have turned out to be shit compared to what we had before.
If Ireland and Nzogbia were playing well and Bent was scoring we'd be fine and comfortably mid table, the first 2 being shit and as a consequence the 3rd offering nothing are main reasons for us failing.
Losing our captain, and main focal point in midfield to serious illness is the final piece in that unpleasant jigsaw, for which no one can be blamed, that is just a terrible thing to have happen that cannot be accounted for in any way.
Randy is far from perfect, but he's better than the vast majority of chairmen, he had the balls to gamble but, bad news for us, he lost. He made some poor decisions whilst trying to recover but any gambler knows just after a big loss isn't the time for making important decisions.