Bruce Sacked at last (now official)

[chrisw1]

Third highest scorers in the Second Division.  Perhaps we should add to the list of our honours.

All he is saying is lack of goals can't be used as a barometer as to whether the football was entertaining or not, given we were amongst the highest scorers in the league.

There's loads to beat the team up about from last season, but a below average goal count isn't one of them.

[chrisw1]

The only statistic that matters is that we finished 4th and didn’t get promotion.

of course, but this part of the discussion was about whether the football was entertaining or not.

[Ads]

I'd suggest being one of the highest scorers was a good thing.

Which is it, we're dull because we score a single goal so regularly (only its far more regularly than just about everybody else) or we score so much that it ought not be looked on favourably and instead draw facetious remarks.

Or scoring a higher number of goals than however many teams doesn't necessarily make the style of play exciting.

Of course, but the measure of how much you're up out your seat or going absolutely ape is for me, the measure of entertainment.

Take your namesake; two different away games, both not entirely convincing performances, but two great away games where my head absolutely pounded walking out the ground. I appreciate that's a match going experience, but that for me is entertainment.

[London Villan]

I do wonder what the reaction will be to bruce at the start of the season, even more so if we get off to a slow start again.

[john e]

I do wonder what the reaction will be to bruce at the start of the season, even more so if we get off to a slow start again.

he will have every excuse in the world if he's still here

people have stood by him when he's had the most expensive squad ever in the championship and failed
 so when he has no money and all the better players have gone they will have even more reasons to keep backing this folly

people have already said they would be happy not getting relegated, so that's the bar set right there

Bruce will love it, no pressure to get promoted and getting paid a reported 3 mill for going through the motions

[London Villan]

I think there will be a reaction to the wembley performance.

[brian green]

More precisely John, for going  through the motions and being a nice bloke.

[Malandro]

More precisely John, for going  through the motions and being a nice bloke.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

[Meanwood Villa]

Broadly speaking last season was enjoyable and we were close to achieving our aim. No Villa side in 22 years has suceeded so that's not that unusual. The nub of the issue is whether you give Bruce credit for getting us close or criticise him for coming up short. Personally I'm still undecided. All this financial apocalypse does is likely muddy the waters further going forward and we'll get into similar cyclical debates like we do on MON.

[Richard E]

It was generally an enjoyable season, but it was all overshadowed by the massive kick in the knackers on 26th May and the enduring pain arising from that.

[brian green]

Call me fickle but the kick in the knackers did not surprise me.  Fulham were always strong favourites to win the play offs and our performance against Boro set the tone for the final.

TV summed it up perfectly in the first post of the post match thread when he said the final was the perfect microcosm of the season.  A falling short through negativity and excessive caution.

[paul_e]

I don't care about the games with 1 goal, we won a fair number of those. I also don't have a problem with our form at home.

My issue is the away form, that's where we were cowardly far too regularly.

Away from home we scored 30 goals, which seems ok on paper but that includes 3 games where we scored 4 and 2 where we scored 3.  So 18 goals in 5 games and 12 in the remaining 18. 8 of those we didn't score and we took just 2 points from those games, which included utterly horrific performances at Cardiff, Fulham and Wolves where we barely made them break a sweat.

[mike]

I still think that as hopeless as Bruce is, we need to stabilise the club before we spend money getting rid of him only to find we have to choose between Paul Lambert and some other useless fucker to replace him.

[wozwebs]

Big Sam, Mad Mick and the like will all get mentioned. Better the devil you know??

[paul_e]

What does 'stabilise the club' even mean though? People keep using the term stability but what stability has he given us?  We've had, I reckon, the highest churn of players I've ever seen at the club over the last 3 summers and Bruce was no exception. We're also looking at yet another summer of massive changes on the playing side because of his choices last year so where's the stability he brings?  The club as a whole isn't going to get any either if we have a 'villa engine' playing 1 way at all levels below the first team but with no meaningful effort to bring that style at the highest level, that in itself is instability because everyone acknowledges that it needs to be addressed eventually but we want to kick it down the road over and over again so we can be 'stable'.  It's nonsense, we only get stability by setting a mid-long term plan and working towards it, Bruce isn't the person to do that.  The board needs to be sorted out but we haven't got time to let things on the playing side drift for weeks whilst we sort that out.