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pete

Since Paul Lambert the club has stagnated.

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[quote user="Vanwink"]morty wrote the following post at 18/04/2016 8:42 PM:

Vanwink wrote:

I'' ll be back shorty.

Seriously, that all you got?

Who said that?[/quote]Your avatar is apt, I face I''d never tire of slapping...

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DOE me a favour, the club hasn''t STAGnated......more of, it''s DEERgenerated.......

Ok, I''m just having a bit of FAWN.......

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Chill Morty my man, life is too short to go round trying to squabble with people. 😄

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[quote user="nutty nigel"]This is all well and good but I still don''t understand why Tilly and Winky are on Ricky Martin''s case?[/quote]There is a difference between on his case and asking what happened to player recruitment during the last close season when he and DM did not provide the bullets for AN to fire the gun.I have stated my views and it looks as though it is time to leave this thread as the resident pot stirrers are about to get stuck in. One has been patronising to me already and getting up front and personal with someone else.

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[quote user="Well b back"]Thought this was going to be about Lambert destroying Villa and on the way to doing the same at Blackburn lol[/quote]I get the feeling he thought those jobs were going to be like City. Sleeping ''giants'' ready to be woken up. Unfortunately for him they were actually comatose while we were having a Sunday afternoon nap.

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[quote user="Vanwink"]Chill Morty my man, life is too short to go round trying to squabble with people. 😄[/quote]You should pop down the pub for a beer, would love to meet you.

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[quote user="TIL 1010"][quote user="nutty nigel"]This is all well and good but I still don''t understand why Tilly and Winky are on Ricky Martin''s case?[/quote]There is a difference between on his case and asking what happened to player recruitment during the last close season when he and DM did not provide the bullets for AN to fire the gun.I have stated my views and it looks as though it is time to leave this thread as the resident pot stirrers are about to get stuck in. One has been patronising to me already and getting up front and personal with someone else.[/quote]

 

I can see where you''re coming from with McNally. I don''t really agree but it''s a valid point and what messageboards are for. But what''s with "The Man from Mulbarton" stuff? What is it based on? Why is the summers transfer stuff put at his door?

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The few words from Bowkett about Lambert actually had the opposite effect on me. It compounded what we''d be missing when he was gone.

An extremely driven man, totally ambitious, focused, constantly and forcefully striving for improvement. It might be uncomfortable at times, but there was a purpose, there was a constant and forceful determination to achieve.

In this respect we have suffered not just on the pitch, but also off it.

Who provides any of this now?

I think that we have now got that soft underbelly back both on and off the pitch. Accepting of mediocrity, if something is just ok, or sometimes worse then that''s fine. Some fans have also fallen into line with this.

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[quote user="morty"][quote user="nutty nigel"]Have you shrunk Morty?[/quote]Apparently so[;)][/quote]

 

Let me know the secret I could do with losing a bit from my waistline...

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[quote user="nutty nigel"]

[quote user="morty"][quote user="nutty nigel"]Have you shrunk Morty?[/quote]Apparently so[;)][/quote]

 

Let me know the secret I could do with losing a bit from my waistline...

[/quote][:D]

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[quote user="Hull Canary"]Let''s get back on topic and discuss how great Paul Lambert was for the club and how it''s all gone down hill since he left[/quote]I posted about 3 pages back about how Lambert excelled at integrating younger players, but posters seem to have wiped it from their memory. Lots of fiddling while Rome burns, and Lambert is now remembered as a lucky manager rather than a shrewd genius.

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I think everyone LOVED the Lambert years. However it''s also true that we''ve had three PL seasons and a winning trip to Wembley since he left. How is that stagnation....

 

 

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[quote user="nutty nigel"]

I think everyone LOVED the Lambert years. However it''s also true that we''ve had three PL seasons and a winning trip to Wembley since he left. How is that stagnation....[/quote]

Lambert tended to buy cheaper and younger players, Howson being the prime example, and we stopped doing this to the same extent when Lambert left. Things might have gone well in the sense of the examples you cited, but I''d be concerned about our ability to repeat this in the future, let alone become a Premier League mainstay (which has been the main aim for several years).

We''re faced with having to replace a lot of our squad in the next

couple of seasons, a lot of spending to be done with not much coming

back from selling these older players.

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Lambert had no choice but to buy those type of players due to our severe financial constraints. We stopped doing that when we started getting a bit more cash. Maybe if he had stayed he would have changed tack.Will still give him full credit for getting the best out of that crop.

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[quote user="Herman "]Lambert had no choice but to buy those type of players due to our severe financial constraints. We stopped doing that when we started getting a bit more cash. Maybe if he had stayed he would have changed tack.Will still give him full credit for getting the best out of that crop.[/quote]I think this was a mistake. We felt rich enough to stop doing this but subsequently found it hard to compete with better financed clubs.The club should set the general transfer strategy for a manager to work within, indeed this was part of the rationale of a footballing board. But it seems that no substantial change of strategy along the lines of what I''ve previously suggested was made.You''re right that Lambert might have changed tack once the debt was repaid. But we still needed to return to something more like the transfer strategy under Chase. Not everything was rosy under him, and it was a very different era, but he made the transfer market work in our favour a lot more compared to the present setup.

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[quote user="The Walking Man "]What does/should a director of football do?[/quote]

Sit in an office drinking tea all day.

Its a job for a mate who you can''t bear to sack.

Chelsea apart, has there been a succesful team with a DOF?

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Look at teams like Stoke/Swansea/West Brom/Crystal Palace, all clubs of a similar size to us, no major levels of investment and all recently well established in the Premier League. At the point where Lambert left, we were well on the way to being debt free and you''d hope from there, making the next step towards becoming established. For me, that''s where things started to go wrong.

Look back at those teams I mentioned before us. Swansea succeeded based on the philosophy they had running throughout the club. When a manager left, they appointed one who embodied that philosophy. On the other side of the coin, until recently, Stoke had their long ball, aggressive style of play which again proved successful. Each of those clubs had an identity which worked for them and defined who they were.

I look at us as a team and see no plan similar to that. Lambert played open, attacking football and although we might have got a 5-0 tonking every so often, it was successful over the season. Since then, it just doesn''t seem like players and managers have been recruited to fit a particular mould. Are we an open, attacking team or are we a defensive team. Seems like we''ve switched between the two several times this season.

I guess what I''m saying is that we are not too far away as a club from the sides I mentioned before. We shouldn''t shrug our shoulders and accept we''re the small budget team. Lambert succeeded with a much smaller budget with a team £20-30m in debt. We should have kicked on from where we were, debt free and mid table after Hughton''s first season. Failure to do that is down to many factors (not sacking Hughton sooner/poor manager and player acqusitions amongst them).

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What I meant to say there but failed is that the player/manager acquisitions haven''t seemed to follow a "plan" rather than see who we can get and shoehorn them into the team. RVW being one example that didn''t work out. I maintain that how we bought Snodgrass then set our team up around him meant that tactically we were doomed to failure.

I could go on, time doesn''t allow!

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[quote user="93vintage"][quote user="Hull Canary"]Let''s get back on topic and discuss how great Paul Lambert was for the club and how it''s all gone down hill since he left[/quote]I posted about 3 pages back about how Lambert excelled at integrating younger players, but posters seem to have wiped it from their memory. Lots of fiddling while Rome burns, and Lambert is now remembered as a lucky manager rather than a shrewd genius.[/quote]
Lambert integrated lots of younger players purchased from the same league as the league Norwich was in at the time.
In our Premiership season, how many young players did Lambert integrate?
While we are a Premier League team, one of the downsides will be we are reluctant to give youth a chance unless truly exceptional because it is such an unforgiving league.
If we are in the Championship next season, we have lots of young players I would be excited to see integrated into our side.

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We started stagnating under Lambert towards the end of that season. I put it down to "on the beach" syndrome. I''d take that now however!

We had a touch of Bournemouth about us that season, on paper our team was poor, championship plodders, the cream of League 1 combined, but by hook or by crook, it produced the goods just when it needed to. Probably a mentality thing.

I look at the table this season and see Bournemouth above Everton despite their goal difference being like 20 odd out.

I''d put this down to a bit of luck, strong game management and a killer instinct. They can pull 1-0''s from 0-0s and it means the days they get pumped 5-0 by the big boys don''t matter.

Under Hughton, he filled his original remit, he steadied the ship, kept us in the league with the help of a well organised defence but then floundered when we needed a plan b and when he needed to develop a decent team going forwards.

I''d say Alex Neil found that momentum again and managed to make our strong championship squad more ruthless but both his inexperience and our failure to recruit suitable players in the main this season are why we''re down there again.

To answer the original title though, we''ve stagnated, revived, stagnated again, revived and are now stagnating again. A hell of a lot has happened since Lambert left! What i''d give for spring on the beach in the sunny reaches of mid table mediocrity in the Premiership, dreaming what buys we''ll make in summer!

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Recruitment is key to success for a club like us on a limited budget Wazza. The football executive board that we have has not been hugely successful in this respect.

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Isn''t the truth of the matter that the way things have gone since Lambert walked out on the club almost four years ago (June 2012) is pretty much what anyone could reasonably have expected? Indeed, the fact that we have spent three of the intervening four years in the EPL should IMO be seen as exceeding reasonable expectation. What people fail to take into account is that the very success of the Lambert years, which catapulted us from League One to the EPL in just three seasons, is a large part of why we are now where we are. Facile comparisons between us and Swansea, Southampton, WBA, Stoke, Watford, Bournemouth, et. al. ignore the time it took those clubs to build club and team sufficiently to achieve what they have (and in virtually every case with the aid of more resources than we have at our disposal). People need to look not just as those who have done better than us, but also those who have done markedly worse -- QPR, Wigan, Bolton, Blackpool, Blackburn, Cardiff and more. If we have "stagnated", I wager that those six clubs wish they had been able to stagnate as successfully.

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[quote user="BarclayWazza"]Look at teams like Stoke/Swansea/West Brom/Crystal Palace, all clubs of a similar size to us, no major levels of investment and all recently well established in the Premier League. [/quote]
Are they well established though? Crystal Palace only really deemed safe after a win against us a couple weeks back. West Brom safe but fans think they''ve been terrible and have scraped though most of their games. Swansea have had to sack a manager and get another one in to keep them up - can''t be too established if that''s the case. Stoke are the only one you can really apply it too.
And the reality is it wouldn''t surprise me if at least one of them got relegated next season.

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''''Isn''t the truth of the matter that the way things have gone since Lambert walked out on the club almost four years ago (June 2012) is pretty much what anyone could reasonably have expected? Indeed, the fact that we have spent three of the intervening four years in the EPL should IMO be seen as exceeding reasonable expectation. What people fail to take into account is that the very success of the Lambert years, which catapulted us from League One to the EPL in just three seasons, is a large part of why we are now where we are. Facile comparisons between us and Swansea, Southampton, WBA, Stoke, Watford, Bournemouth, et. al. ignore the time it took those clubs to build club and team sufficiently to achieve what they have (and in virtually every case with the aid of more resources than we have at our disposal). People need to look not just as those who have done better than us, but also those who have done markedly worse -- QPR, Wigan, Bolton, Blackpool, Blackburn, Cardiff and more. If we have "stagnated", I wager that those six clubs wish they had been able to stagnate as successfully '''' ...........the other WCC

That''s about spot on WCC, Heard on Irish radio yesterday that ALL 20 clubs in EPL are in the worlds 30 richest clubs, on a debts v assets/income basis.

Prudence, with ambition.

Rome wasnt built in a day.

Today isnt the last day most of us will see.

And we aint down yet.

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I think the only thing that has stagnated has been the quality of football, and the running through brick walls giving 100% every game. Since Lambert left no manager has managed to include all these elements in their team.

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