Just when you think that things couldn't get any worse....

[Ads]

I'll tell you what, it makes a fucking change in the modern game to have a manager trying to sort the club out for the long term, a long term that he probably won't feature in or get credit for.

I'm not sure, if we stay up, and its looking more likely at the moment, then I think he will be here long term.

I am part way convinced that Lerner's scheme for the club was be to buckle down until the new TV deal comes in, all the while clearing the wages down. With the likes of Dunne, Bent, Given and Ireland likely to go in the summer, the wage issue will likely be sorted once and for all.

Then it will be easy to provide a manager with say £30million to spend on players due to the large increase in TV money. As long as you're not doing all your shopping in the Premier League, then you should avoid inflated prices.

[PaulWinch again]

I think you're giving Lerner too much credit Ads, I've seen nothing to suggest he has a plan beyond cutting costs.

[john e]

Can i ask your opinion on lambert and his reign so far dave , or are you reserving judgement?

Very disappointing but not without promise. At least he seems to have ideas about what he wants to do, even if he's not been very good at implementing them. For me that's better than not having the ideas in the first place (like the last bloke).

If the decision was taken to fire him then I don't think he can have too many complaints, but I would be very worried about who would be next in the door. It's like not like the people making the decision have shown much aptitude for it so far.

spot on for me

[Clampy]

I think you're giving Lerner too much credit Ads, I've seen nothing to suggest he has a plan beyond cutting costs.

I see it as him keeping the wage bill down to a manageable level. The days of paying the likes of Habib Beye and Stephen Warnock silly amounts a week are thankfully gone.

[Risso]

I think you're giving Lerner too much credit Ads, I've seen nothing to suggest he has a plan beyond cutting costs.

I see it as him keeping the wage bill down to a manageable level. The days of paying the likes of Habib Beye and Stephen Warnock silly amounts a week are thankfully gone.

Unfortunately, the days of us being a competitive Premier League team are also long gone.

[Clampy]

I think you're giving Lerner too much credit Ads, I've seen nothing to suggest he has a plan beyond cutting costs.

I see it as him keeping the wage bill down to a manageable level. The days of paying the likes of Habib Beye and Stephen Warnock silly amounts a week are thankfully gone.

Unfortunately, the days of us being a competitive Premier League team are also long gone.

At this moment in time you're right.

[Jockey Randall]

So you think that sacking McLeish was harsh? 16th was as good as we could have hoped for? Like when it happened with O'Dreary, I would argue we under-achieved and that's why both managers were given the heave-ho.

As you stated, Young and Downing were sold in summer 2011. McLeish chose to sign N'Zogbia as one replacement and failed to get the best out of him while Albrighton, after a fine season under Houllier, was meant to mitigate the loss of the other winger. Presumably there was also hope that Stephen Ireland would be brought back into the fold and that this would further lessen the impact of Young and Downing's departures. Challenging tasks, but ones McLeish believed he was cut out for. As with Zog, McLeish failed to get any consistency from Albrighton or Ireland.

The only other "host of talented players" we lost in summer 2011 were Friedel and L Young. Replaced by Given and Hutton respectively - like N'Zogbia, two more resounding successes and still chewing off the wage bill (Given for another three and a quarter years). Reo-Coker left too, but Delph was emerging and Jenas was also brought in despite his horrendous injury record. So, I'd say, largely by virtue of his dour football, failure to get the most from key and emerging players and dodgy transfer decisions, McLeish failed.

I do agree that Petrov's absence was and is a big blow. As Dave mentioned, he was beginning to add goals to his game last season and his presence over the last 12 months would have won us a fair few more points, I'm quite sure.

Finally, regarding Lambert's budget last summer - while we don't know for sure, Fulham's acceptance of our bid for Clint Dempsey and this money being separate to the funds earmarked for the subsequent purchase of Benteke (don't have a quote for that but Lambert said as much according to posts I've read on here) suggests that there was more to play with than the manager spent. Conflicting reports that this money, or  approx 5m-7m, was available in January but not spent as opposed to the only hard evidence that saw us bring in two more wannabee top flight players on deadline day will mean different people will believe different things to suit their stance.

Personally, I have a bad feeling that Lambert might be far more comfortable coaching young, unproven talents and shies away from players who have more PL experience than him. The instant jettisoning of Warnock and Hutton, his difficulties involving Bent and now Ireland (some of those players you might argue are now unmanageable) and there's been enough comments from him completely downplaying the importance of experience at this level to suggest that there might be something in that.

O'Leary is a seperate issue, but I think for the points TSM achieved with the players available it was slightly harsh, although I'd agree his transfer decisions were poor on the whole. But as I never wanted him here, not because he was a nose but because his style of football bored me to tears, I think the board finally saw sense and recognised we needed to get the crowd back onside with someone trying to play a better brand of football as well as stem the slide we were on. I'm simply trying to point out the main reason we struggled was because of losing quality talent, and not even coming to close to replacing them.

As you say we lost A Young, Downing, Friedel, L Young and Reo-Coker who all played their part in the previous season, I suppose you can also count Walker in terms of his impact on our 2nd half of the season although he was a loan obviously. The key point here though, is that these guys were not just squad players, they were first XI guys getting selected for many of the games in the previous season. Delph only made 10 appearances. Albrighton did well in a side that at least had some attacking intent, but under Mcleish he struggled in a defensive system. Clearly not the only player ever to struggle in a system which didn't suit their strengths. Now his confidence appears shot to pieces. Ireland is just an enigma and looks like he'll never find the player he was at City 08-09 again and it's not just TSM that couldn't find this player. That would say to me it's more to do with issues the player has rather than coaching.

Following Mcleish's signings (which were no where near enough to make up for loss of quality we suffered), we had a poor year, but if you look at how many points we were on for roughly before the loss of Petrov, that would be about 43 points. Only 5 points lower than the 48 the team achieved in the previous season. Even when you look at the first team players lost being the 10 points we eventually were behind that total wouldn't really be a surpise would it?

I think eastie makes a good point which is probably a good way of highlighting why I think Lambert shouldn't be getting the pasting he gets by some:

My stance is that lambert has not bought badly but my problem with him has been team selections, formation and tactics rather than his signings, he has taken over 20 games to settle on his best formation and best team and even now im not sure he knows - his motivational skills also seem questionable .

That's a fair point, but it's my personal belief that the standard coaching and studying of every aspect of the game is now so high that tactics and formations are given far more substance than they are worth. It's the 11 players we send out on to the pitch that make the difference in games and their own individal quality and decision making throughout the match. The manager can only do so much. So looking at the players that have left the club and the quality of the replacements over the last few years, I don't think we've underachieved at any point. We've been where we should have been all along. The cost cutting has seen to this.

[eamonn]

McLeish had less quality to work on than Houllier, agreed. But being canny in the market was part of his remit and practically all his signings (apart from Keane on-loan) were ropey. And he may have only got 10 less points than Houllier but in terms of injuries I think the French one was far more unlucky (even accounting for Petrov and Bent's layoffs last year). Under Houllier our injury-record for his first three months or so was as bad as it has been in modern times - probably worse than this winter. He had to blood Clark, Herd, Bannan, Hogg and Delfouneso together for quite a few games (two years on, similarly inexperienced players are playing at the same time seemingly more by choice of the manager) and we were in the relegation zone at the beginning of Jan 2011. After that, when injuries cleared and we brought in Bent, Makoun and Walker, our form for the second half of the season was top-six. 

It's galling that plenty of clubs with less resources like West Brom, Norwich, Fulham, Swansea seem to have relatively comfortable times in staying-up while we flounder yet again with a mixture of players on huge money and young guys on far less. I don't expect us to have been in the top 6-8 over the past two years but I think most half-decent manager would have had us comfortably safe this and last season. If last season had gone on for one more game - had Scudamore's fabled "39th game" idea come to fruition, I'm pretty sure we would have got relegated as we were in freefall, failing to win any of our last ten games.

[PaulWinch again]

I think you're giving Lerner too much credit Ads, I've seen nothing to suggest he has a plan beyond cutting costs.

I see it as him keeping the wage bill down to a manageable level. The days of paying the likes of Habib Beye and Stephen Warnock silly amounts a week are thankfully gone.

Whilst I agree we should be paying the likes of Beye, because that was idiotic given how much he paid. Our wage bill has been cut beyond what is reasonable, and it's got to be very low now in comparison to most Premier League clubs. Eventually you need to speculate to accumulate and we need a better quality of player.

[eastie]

I think the five wages of dunne, given , bent , nzogbia, and ireland would probably cover the wages of maybe 8 or even 10 players at some other premier clubs.

[tomd2103]

I think the five wages of dunne, given , bent , nzogbia, and ireland would probably cover the wages of maybe 8 or even 10 players at some other premier clubs.

Based on the rumours we hear, I'd estimate that the players named above are on a combined total of over £300,000 per week.  Add the recently departed Hutton and Warnock to that list and it would be more like £400,000.  The fact that only one of those players is currently a starter in the side makes it even worse.     

[pauliewalnuts]

re the McLeish sacking.

I suspect one reason was they'd looked at the enormous fall off in numbers of ST holders renewing after his appointment, and also looked at the initial figures for what would have been his second season, and suspected they'd made a mistake.

No evidence for that (other than the actual season ticket numbers dropping so sharply - I recall MON's last season we had 28k or so, yet under McLeish, I remember them saying late on that they'd sold about 20k).

[Ads]

The renewals last May compared with 2011 had fallen by a huge margin. We had sold something like 1500.

[not3bad]

Jesus 26 pages about something that's never gonna happen.....you can tell its been 10 days since a game

The voice of reason strikes again!

[KevinGage]

Okay, we sack Lambert and we approach Easter Island Head. What tells his backers he is going to run out on West Ham mid season when they are a decent sized club who are six points better off? He won't. If the Fat Dudleyonite came at any time it would be at the end of the season. And I don't think there is any chance of him doing so if we're in the Championship which just so happens to be where many of the same people who are talking him up believe we will be.

To be honest, I'd assumed that this is when the rumour is referring to.

As sendo has pointed out, Allardyce is out of contract at the end of the season and at the moment this looks very much like a tactic by his agent to see a new contract put in front of him.

However, we get relegated, Lambert is moved on, Allardyce is out of a job, Faulkner sees a manager to whom he doesn't need to pay compensation with recent experience of getting a recently relegated side promoted.

I don't think it's particularly far-fetched.

The idea of Allardyce as a replacement doesn't hold huge appeal to me, but it would only really make sense in the context of someone who can come in now and get the results we need to get over the line.

If we get to the summer and stay up, Lambert will most likely stay (unless he himself decides to bail).   If we're down, because of his past record there's an argument to suggest PL would be as good as many candidates to get us back up (then there's the argument that we'd be rewarding failure with longevity and security of contract).

As to Fat Sam's current contract situation, because it is close to expiry and because both the West Ham board and support base seem -at best- ambivalent towards him, there might not be a huge issue regarding compensation. He's probably exceeded expectations, in all honesty. They've been comfortably mid table all season, and exiting on a high -before the fans truly turn on him- would make a degree of sense.

Would he come to Villa? West Ham are obviously doing better than us at present, but he might see us as the better long term bet.  One thing he would share with BFR (apart from the BFS abbreviation sounding similar) is a degree of arrogance, a surefire belief in himself. He has that in spades. For a job as big (and often thankless) as the Villa one is, it's not a bad quality to have.