The Wolves game.

[BroadstairsR 2,273]

Although he should have been ditched a while ago surely this game is AN''s very last chance of keeping his job, or at least it should be.

I don''t expect us to get much against Southampton in the cup (Redmond will probably score a few.)

A convincing performance and a good win against Wolves might give us all a glimmer of hope that he is actually capable of turning things around and we should also creep a little but closer to a play-off spot.

A poor performance and/or a loss and I feel the support will finally let their feelings out. It could turn nasty.

It will be my first visit to Carrow Road this season. I would prefer to witness a victory but should this encounter go the way of so many others recently then I shall at least enjoy joining in the inevitable "Neil Out" chants.

If we lose and he retains his position then we will all know that we are being taken for a ride by an out of touch autocrat.

[Ginja 43]

Any other club would have sacked him months ago, we''ve been more than fair with him, the defeat to Rotherham should have been the final straw but he seems to be almost impervious.  I assume because we can''t afford it.

[Fiery Zac 1,066]

Even a convincing performance won''t be enough for me.

We had that against Derby, a fantastic performance and one we should have seen more of over the season, the squad is good enough for that to be the norm.

That we haven''t seen that level enough speaks volumes. A squad full of potential (old heads and very talented youngsters) but not delivering consistently.

The buck stops at the manager in this situation. Bizarre selections, square pegs in round holes, ludicrous substitutions, shameful post match comments and a stubborn ''it''s not my fault'' attitude begs the question of how he''s still here...

[Cantiaci Canary 610]

Well, it is at the stage now where we are either:

A) Genuinely aiming to get promoted this season ... in which case Neil will be finally fired next weekend if we lose (even Hughton got the boot in the end).

B) Secretly embarking on a new road. Keep AN here for years whatever the short/medium term consequences. Rebuild around a clear philosophy and identity.

It would be nice to know if we are on path B before the new season ticket prices are confirmed!

[morty 0]

[quote user="Cantiaci Canary"]Well, it is at the stage now where we are either:

A) Genuinely aiming to get promoted this season ... in which case Neil will be finally fired next weekend if we lose (even Hughton got the boot in the end).

B) Secretly embarking on a new road. Keep AN here for years whatever the short/medium term consequences. Rebuild around a clear philosophy and identity.

It would be nice to know if we are on path B before the new season ticket prices are confirmed![/quote]Which one of those two options would you prefer?

[BroadstairsR 2,273]

A.

Rebuilding? Difficult to envisage that when the Club will be losing money every season and probably need to sell the best of the youngsters involved in the re-build to survive financially.

Even if this path is followed I would not want Alex Neil in charge of it.

[morty 0]

[quote user="BroadstairsR"]A.

Rebuilding? Difficult to envisage that when the Club will be losing money every season and probably need to sell the best of the youngsters involved in the re-build to survive financially.

Even if this path is followed I would not want Alex Neil in charge of it.[/quote]So instant short term gratification, over longer term good of the club then?I''m not criticising your choice, but there is merit to both.

[OldRobert 38]

[quote user="morty"][quote user="Cantiaci Canary"]Well, it is at the stage now where we are either:

A) Genuinely aiming to get promoted this season ... in which case Neil will be finally fired next weekend if we lose (even Hughton got the boot in the end).

B) Secretly embarking on a new road. Keep AN here for years whatever the short/medium term consequences. Rebuild around a clear philosophy and identity.

It would be nice to know if we are on path B before the new season ticket prices are confirmed![/quote]Which one of those two options would you prefer?[/quote]I think the BOD are on Plan B, but they aren''t sure themselves.What would I prefer................it''s totally irrelevant as I have no say, she will do, what she will do.

[morty 0]

[quote user="OldRobert"][quote user="morty"][quote user="Cantiaci Canary"]Well, it is at the stage now where we are either:

A) Genuinely aiming to get promoted this season ... in which case Neil will be finally fired next weekend if we lose (even Hughton got the boot in the end).

B) Secretly embarking on a new road. Keep AN here for years whatever the short/medium term consequences. Rebuild around a clear philosophy and identity.

It would be nice to know if we are on path B before the new season ticket prices are confirmed![/quote]Which one of those two options would you prefer?[/quote]I think the BOD are on Plan B, but they aren''t sure themselves.What would I prefer................it''s totally irrelevant as I have no say, she will do, what she will do.[/quote]Of course its relevent, its an opinion forum.Yes I think they are definitely on plan B, and have been for some time.Really, can you fault wanting a long term, stable, future for the club, if you take a step back from how shart we are right now?

[Bagster 101]

I actually dont mind either but with one caveat and that is no Alex Neil.

I don''t think it''s a workable idea trying to keep a manager for 10 years, it''s no different to a player, if he does really well he will move to a bigger club on bigger wages, it''s just the way it is.

In his first year motivating somebody else''s team AN did really well, but the more he makes it his team the worse he gets.

Basically AN won''t risk playing a team of youngsters with little experience so why should we risk sticking with a manager with very little experience. If you think about it if AN was a player in AN''s team he would be locked in the broom cupboard never to be seen again.

[Rogue Baboon 0]

[quote user="morty"][quote user="BroadstairsR"]A.

Rebuilding? Difficult to envisage that when the Club will be losing money every season and probably need to sell the best of the youngsters involved in the re-build to survive financially.

Even if this path is followed I would not want Alex Neil in charge of it.[/quote]So instant short term gratification, over longer term good of the club then?I''m not criticising your choice, but there is merit to both.[/quote]

The problem is that Broadstairs has it spot on - what is the longer term good for the club?

You start off trying to bring the youngsters through, but with the PL-Champs gulf getting bigger we will continually be battling against teams with more cash than us, from owners & parachute payments.

So we loan some players as we cannot afford to buy, then any promising youngsters we have will have to be sold to stop us going into debt as wages etc will outstrip the income, then we end up with a team full of loan players.

Its a dark worst case scenario, but the more time spent in the Championship the harder it will be to get back out of it. Leeds, Forest, Ipswich, Derby, Wednesday, Bolton to name a few all haven''t done it yet, Boro have only recently returned.

The worst bit is a lot of the teams i mentioned have outside investment, so that''s not the answer to the situation either.

So the answer isn''t A or B, but somewhere in the middle

[Dorset Canary 0]

I''d personally like plan B as I can''t really see who we could afford can do much better, wish I could see more of what''s going on as the odd game a season doesn''t paint the whole picture.

I tend to look at how you regulars comment and accept the problem is probably somewhere in between.

[Lessingham Canary 108]

Can see the visit of Wolves being a sorry day, if we don''t start well and go a goal behind, can hear Lamberts name ringing around the stadium (although I hope not, as not the answer) cant believe the club will let Alex Neil be put through this, any sense of responsibility and they would release him before hand, IMO.

[BroadstairsR 2,273]

"So instant short term gratification, over longer term good of the club then?

I''m not criticising your choice, but there is merit to both."

There is no guarantee at all that B will be in the long term good of the Club and if they have earmarked Alex Neil to be in charge of it then it becomes even more risky.

Presumably option B involves a few years in the Championship when we will be losing money and have to sell our best to survive.

All clubs at all times should be aiming for the top. Let the future take care of it''s self and with better prospects when making not losing money.

[GPs Beard 0]

morty wrote the following post at 16/01/2017 10:08 AM:

BroadstairsR wrote:

A. Rebuilding? Difficult to envisage that when the Club will be losing money every season and probably need to sell the best of the youngsters involved in the re-build to survive financially. Even if this path is followed I would not want Alex Neil in charge of it.

So instant short term gratification, over longer term good of the club then?

I''m not criticising your choice, but there is merit to both.

The third way , and probably even more unpalatable is to admit we are not going up, sell our better players, take a hit on the log jam players that we cant get rid of - to get them off the wageroll, keep AN so that we don''t have to pay him off too soon and start again in the summer with one more parachute year. Give a new manager a summer to build?

I really don''t know and am clutching at straws. We have 37 points. The range to finish 6th in the last five years is wide from 68 pts (Leicester in 2012-13) to last year 78 pts. The odds of us now coming into auto promotion form of 2 pts from the last 20 games - (I''m going to guess we need 75 points this year ) are slim.

Have a fire sale, cut our cloth , stay up, off load the log jammers. Could this be in their minds?

Who knows.

[alex_ncfc 686]

So are we still at a stage where fans are thinking, if we get a result in the Wolves game (and we will, because I know how things like this work - see Worthy, see Hughton) that suddenly all will be well and we will start winning games again? It simply isn''t going to happen.

As for this 10 year long term plan thing...screw that. So we have to risk being absolutely sh!te for the long term under a clueless manager who clearly isn''t going to turn this around, and 10 years later when we are in the National League say ''maybe we got it wrong''? No, it''s not how the game works. As someone mentioned above, if a manager is any good, he will move on to a bigger club. It''s always been the way at Norwich, if we have a successful manager he will always be poached from us. Can you honestly see that ever happening to Alex Neil? Face it, we are the biggest and best club he will ever have the opportunity to work for - hence his absolute stubbornness and unwillingness to resign

[morty 0]

[quote user="GPs Beard"]morty wrote the following post at 16/01/2017 10:08 AM:

BroadstairsR wrote:

A. Rebuilding? Difficult to envisage that when the Club will be losing money every season and probably need to sell the best of the youngsters involved in the re-build to survive financially. Even if this path is followed I would not want Alex Neil in charge of it.

So instant short term gratification, over longer term good of the club then?

I''m not criticising your choice, but there is merit to both.

The third way , and probably even more unpalatable is to admit we are not going up, sell our better players, take a hit on the log jam players that we cant get rid of - to get them off the wageroll, keep AN so that we don''t have to pay him off too soon and start again in the summer with one more parachute year. Give a new manager a summer to build?

I really don''t know and am clutching at straws. We have 37 points. The range to finish 6th in the last five years is wide from 68 pts (Leicester in 2012-13) to last year 78 pts. The odds of us now coming into auto promotion form of 2 pts from the last 20 games - (I''m going to guess we need 75 points this year ) are slim.

Have a fire sale, cut our cloth , stay up, off load the log jammers. Could this be in their minds?

Who knows.[/quote]There are a fair few players out of contract at the end of the season, so you may not be far away, with the suggestion.

[Cantiaci Canary 610]

Morty,

I think plan B is something we can all get behind as it could create something more sustainable and give us the most success with the modest financial model we have for the forseeable future.

However, with the squad we have now I feel that we should throw the kitchen sink at promotion THIS season by replacing AN and hoping for a repeat of 2015 with a fresh voice in the dressing room. Shrewder recruitment with subsequent Premier TV funds could see us survive and slowly evolve with that level of impressive external funding.

If we cut our losses with promotion this season I fear that our rebuilding programme on diminished resources could equally flop and leave us regretting the decision not to squeeze the last drop of opportunity from the position we were in in early 2017. It is too early to retreat to that.

In short ... plan B is my preference but only if we fail to go up this season.

[It's Character Forming 1,204]

I don''t see how it can be a cost issue, given there is no sign that AN is ever going to be able to turn it around, it would be better to sell Brady and use that the pay off AN, if we really don''t have the money.

Also I don''t see how its a short term/long term thing.  Unless the long term plan is based on making sure we don''t get promoted next season, in which case AN is perfect for the job IMO.

 

Seriously though I am struggling to see why Wolves is any more make or break than Rotherham.  We''re now at the position where even making the playoffs is a pretty optimistic outcome, even if we get a new manager in right now.   Given we have no real risk of relegation, are they seriously going to keep AN for the rest of the season even based on the current pattern of results (which have been consistently worse than Neil Adams for several months now).  The answer seems to be yes, which is just unbelievable.

 

Very sad times for the club.

[canarydan23 4,761]

I would be quite happy with Option B, as long as the philosophy was correct.

If the board want a philosophy of publicly criticising and shaming players, letting other teams make use of our prospects whilst we play shockingly poor has-beens like Whittaker in their place, a manager who appears unable to even accept the possibility that he has made a mistake, despite the fact that he makes mistakes in the majority of matches and having a majority shareholder who lambasts the Premier League for taking football fans for a ride in the papers whilst taking her own fans for a ride with their ticket pricing then yes, they should continue along this path.

If we are to enter a rebuilding phase which means swallowing a few mediocre seasons in the Championship whilst we focus on bringing through the yoofs with the end goal being establishing ourselves among the elite, I could get on board with it but we need a DECENT MANAGER to do that.

Path A or Path B both require the termination of Alex Neil''s contract.

[BroadstairsR 2,273]

Plan A+

Sack AN asap. Get a decent new man** in and give him a crack at plan A for a the rest of this season and next.

If he fails, then we will have no choice but to embark upon plan B and we will have a decent crop of youngsters, all matured, to start with.

** There must be a few around, besides nobody could be worse than Alex Neil.

He''s a total disaster.

[Jim Smith 2,610]

It should be utterly irrelevant. "Must win" games for the manager are inappropriate because as we have seen before one home win means nothing. He is not good enough period.

That said the combination of Lambert''s presence and a home defeat would I suspect be a perfect storm that would see the home fans finally rise up.

[morty 0]

[quote user="Cantiaci Canary"]Morty,

I think plan B is something we can all get behind as it could create something more sustainable and give us the most success with the modest financial model we have for the forseeable future.

However, with the squad we have now I feel that we should throw the kitchen sink at promotion THIS season by replacing AN and hoping for a repeat of 2015 with a fresh voice in the dressing room. Shrewder recruitment with subsequent Premier TV funds could see us survive and slowly evolve with that level of impressive external funding.

If we cut our losses with promotion this season I fear that our rebuilding programme on diminished resources could equally flop and leave us regretting the decision not to squeeze the last drop of opportunity from the position we were in in early 2017. It is too early to retreat to that.

In short ... plan B is my preference but only if we fail to go up this season.[/quote]Good post[Y]Changing managers costs money though, money we need for players, and doesn''t guarantee greater success, bearing in mind the quality / price we would be looking at in a new manager.Its finely balanced. Part of me thinks they should sack him today, protect him from what could likely happen this Saturday, then another part of me realises that it will cost us 2 million quid, and we may actually be no better off.I think that the BOD realise we have to be smarter with how we use our money, and are hopefully taking steps in this direction. They have already shown good judgement in investing heavily in our youth set up.

[BroadstairsR 2,273]

"It should be utterly irrelevant. "Must win" games for the manager are inappropriate because as we have seen before one home win means nothing. He is not good enough period."

Very true, but in my OP I said that a win would only give us a "glimmer of hope." We would need this because a win would mean that Delia would continue to swoon and Neil would save himself with the watershed (ie. the time when we lose any hope of a play-off place.) being passed.

[Coq au vin 0]

B with a new manager.

If we go up again this season with Alex Neil and this squad we''d have to completely overhaul which we can''t afford to do with the owners we have and I fear the youth wouldn''t see a game.

One more year of parachutes, a new manager to build on a team of promising youth - I can get behind that in the Champ if the football is good to watch.

[Jim Smith 2,610]

Option B clearly must be the fallback option. You have to have a strategy for different scenarios and clearly the strategy should we not be able to get back up within this brief parachute payment must be Option B. the recruitment of more players in the 16-12 bracket from non/lower-league, other academies and abroad with this Icelandic kid is something I presume that we all support, as is hopefully ensuring our academy is more productive. That strategy should continue to be pursued whatever level we find ourselves at.

However, don''t try and make out that "Option B" has been the boards strategy all along and it certainly should not have been. We should be doing all we can to get back up this season or next because really the best chance of long term financial sustainability is to be in the top flight with the TV monies. indeed under our ownership model its probably the only chance we have of being truly competitive such has the shift been in finances in the game. Option B and staying in the championship whilst owned by the Smiths is a huge risk because our income will drop by £42 million in 18 months time and we will thereafter have to sell any half decent youngster we produce in order to survive.

[Jim Smith 2,610]

Sorry that should say 16-21 bracket.