AN on talksport- coming up.

[king canary 7,620]

@Morty

I agree about outsiders not having a full understanding of the situation. It is probably easy for someone who isn''t watching us play week in week out to come to the conclusion that sacking nice guy Hughton was an error.

However watching us play the way we were for such an extended run was utterly soul crushing and it is hard to explain to someone who wasn''t watching quite how bad we were at times under him.

[GPs Beard 0]

I am sure Hughton is very popular, and it is well-known that people in football tend not to attack their own, even if they are not as popular as Hughton is. The more so when there is a personal connection - Allen and Hughton played together for Spurs for some years. What else is he going to say? And the board would indeed have been more heavily criticised if they had done nothing.

You''ll be telling me that Steve Perryman played for Spurs next.

[PurpleCanary 5,566]

[quote user="GPs Beard"]I am sure Hughton is very popular, and it is well-known that people in football tend not to attack their own, even if they are not as popular as Hughton is. The more so when there is a personal connection - Allen and Hughton played together for Spurs for some years. What else is he going to say? And the board would indeed have been more heavily criticised if they had done nothing.

You''ll be telling me that Steve Perryman played for Spurs next.[/quote]Quite. Hughton and Allen were probably in the same Spurs team the last time I went to White Hart Lane, in the 1986-87 season, when Allen scored 33 League goals. With a quarter of an hour to go we were were having the better (just) of a 0-0 draw. Seven or eight minutes later we were 3-0-down to what I think was a perfect hattrick of right foot, left foot and header.

[lake district canary 4,539]

[quote user="PurpleCanary"][quote user="GPs Beard"]I am sure Hughton is very popular, and it is well-known that people in football tend not to attack their own, even if they are not as popular as Hughton is. The more so when there is a personal connection - Allen and Hughton played together for Spurs for some years. What else is he going to say? And the board would indeed have been more heavily criticised if they had done nothing.

You''ll be telling me that Steve Perryman played for Spurs next.[/quote]Quite. Hughton and Allen were probably in the same Spurs team the last time I went to White Hart Lane, in the 1986-87 season, when Allen scored 33 League goals. With a quarter of an hour to go we were were having the better (just) of a 0-0 draw. Seven or eight minutes later we were 3-0-down to what I think was a perfect hattrick of right foot, left foot and header.[/quote]

I was at that game too. A real kick in the teeth, that one, three goals right in front of us city supporters.

[GPs Beard 0]

lake district canary wrote the following post at 26/01/2017 12:36 PM:

PurpleCanary wrote:

GPs Beard wrote:

I am sure Hughton is very popular, and it is well-known that people in football tend not to attack their own, even if they are not as popular as Hughton is. The more so when there is a personal connection - Allen and Hughton played together for Spurs for some years. What else is he going to say? And the board would indeed have been more heavily criticised if they had done nothing. You''ll be telling me that Steve Perryman played for Spurs next.

Quite. Hughton and Allen were probably in the same Spurs team the last time I went to White Hart Lane, in the 1986-87 season, when Allen scored 33 League goals. With a quarter of an hour to go we were were having the better (just) of a 0-0 draw. Seven or eight minutes later we were 3-0-down to what I think was a perfect hattrick of right foot, left foot and header.

I was at that game too. A real kick in the teeth, that one, three goals right in front of us city supporters.

You both have the advantage over me on that one. My favourite Perryman memory was beating Spurs in a FA cup replay at CR, I would guess 1984 , when Spurs fancied themselves as a top Cup side. they wont it twice in the early 80''s. Perryman, I recall, took that particularly badly , and ended the match berating a portly linesman in front of me. I did go to the next round though, and we lost to Derby. We had beaten Villa and Spurs that year, and thought we would beat Derby. The pitch was the classic Baseball Ground mud bath. Happy days.

[morty 0]

As if you were at a game Lakey.

😁

[westcoastcanary 0]

[quote user="king canary"]@Westcoast

So what you''re saying is the squad was so bad that this was the only way he could play?

Then how on earth did said squad finish 11th the year before? And how did us spending our biggest transfer budget ever make it so much worse?[/quote]Rather than "so bad", a squad with serious shortcomings. The problem was less to do with Hughton being unable to produce a team playing any other way (compare his teams at Newcastle, Birmingham and now Brighton); it was more a matter of our players being limited in how they could play. So why didn''t Hughton just have them play they way they could? Same question as why Alex Neil changed direction last season after Newcastle (A). Answer: because both realised we would end up relegated unless the tactics changed. To which one might reply: "Well at least we would have been relegated entertainingly".Re. the transfer spending, "our biggest transfer budget ever" while true was nevertheless misleading (as Bowkett must have known when he said it). Because in terms of what has to be spent just to stay still in the EPL, never mind improve, it was still a relatively small amount -- not helped of course by so much of it being spent on RvW.Re. the 11th place finish, it was a combination of a long unbeaten run pre-Christmas, and a late rally (when our opponents were almost universally said to be already "on the beach"). Rather like many of our wins earlier this season, results during the unbeaten run were frequently said to misrepresent the performances, i.e. we got away with not actually playing very well. I actually thought that was somewhat unjust; what it boiled down to was an EPL season developing in the usual way, when weaker teams flatter to deceive in the first half before sinking to their proper level in the second.