Absolutely agree and I am far from taken with the board’s choices in January - I think they’ve got plenty to answer for. But the way he’s gone about things in recent weeks, culminating in a pretty shameful last few days where he’s put himself in the middle of everything and suggested he might shack up with another club, which he’s been doing publicly while the team is battling and needs stability, has not been the behaviour of somebody who wants to be seen as a committed leader. It’s been bad management and he’s let himself down. Everybody already feels for him - yes, even me on a footballing level - because they can see January clearly wasn’t what it should’ve been. He already won in that regard. But sure enough, his mouth and his ego have gone wild and now he’s spent days and weeks acting like a spoilt brat with a sense of entitlement, and showing that ultimately it isn’t about the greater good with him, it’s about attention and wanting his way. Don’t spend ages positioning yourself as the brilliant and principled guy who believes in the old one team, one dream mantra, unless you can make damn sure that mask doesn’t slip. He lost any high ground he occupied with the way he went about all this, and I’m quite shocked that people (not you) who have lambasted others in the past for apparently not supporting the club well enough, or blindly enough, are seemingly happy to side with a man who from the looks of it isn’t overly interested in being here much longer, and who is putting himself in the middle of everything when the team is scrapping to achieve something, and yet he’s more worried about throwing his tits about to make sure his name is in the news. Anybody who supports Oxford United Football Club should be disappointed in his methods here.
I will never stop saying it - Appleton showed that you can be disillusioned with where things are going and disappointed that your ambitions don’t seem to be matching up with your employers, and that you can even have one eye on the exit as a result, but that you can still quietly get on with your job and conduct yourself with dignity and respect.
