All I would say is that the people spending their money on keeping us in business won’t keep doing that if all we end up with is bad starts followed by purple patches in the new year, every season. There are more reasons to be concerned with what’s happening on the pitch than merely points on the board. There needs to be more than just, “Oh, God, Karl’s lost the plot again... hopefully we can have a go at finishing in the top half if it gets ironed out quickly enough, and he gets bored of people not rushing to kiss his a**e.” Even billionaires won’t keep throwing a few million quid a year at Groundhog Day.
This is three seasons on the spin that we’ve started poorly - that isn’t a coincidence. It can’t keep being bad luck over that long of a period. That is a flaw in the design and in the process, and I think at this point that even the staunchest of apologists should really be able to at least go, “Fair enough, he’s doing something wrong repeatedly and should sort that, clearly at least some of it is his fault.” If we had even a bang average opening 8/9 games last season we would’ve gone up automatically with how everything went, cruelly. Given there is legislation in place this season regarding what happens if the calendar can’t be completed, this is definitely not the season to mess about at the start. This season of all seasons there should be no taking for granted that we have 46 games, and that there’s loads of time dawdle along. We can’t keep dropping to the back of the pack and expecting a late surge every single time, because the day will come when the legs and the lungs just can’t get going. A lot of gambling goes on under the current regime. Let’s gamble on being able to pull out of a tailspin if idealism fails early on; let’s gamble on not having more than five or six defenders so we can have loads of attacking players; let’s gamble on being able to use players in unfamiliar positions because they’re good enough to simply adapt; let’s gamble on having enough technical ability that a lack of experience or grit doesn’t become an issue... it’s just endless betting on red. It’s all very exciting when it comes in, but sooner or later it won’t come in enough.
For context of how bad this season’s start is - in 18/19 we had 13 points after 15 games. We currently have 14 from 14 with the league leaders up next. We are almost matching that pain storm of a start stride for stride, and it made the entire season thoroughly unenjoyable. This time, though, we’ve stacked it after a playoff final when we’ve had a manager in place for nearly three years, who gets to do basically whatever he wants and has had more contracts than he’s had full years of service, rather than coming off the back of a rather strange takeover and Pep’s six months of chaos. Comparatively this is arguably the worst start of them all, particularly when you consider that we’ve humiliated ourselves against the scum for good measure. It’s been a massive, massive failure of an opening third.
I said a while ago that I didn’t think we would get relegated this season and I stick by that, but that isn’t really good enough even if it comes true. If we get to January and there’s more a**e wiggling, and lots of “Oooooh, the board need to show me they’re serious and have ambition” then we really are in trouble, because that suggests nothing will change.
Over to Karl.