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zemas tendon

WHERE AND WHEN DID THE ROT START

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People always look to Fulham away but just before that we also threw away a healthy lead (3-1) away to palace and drew and also a lead away to Saints and lost(??)

 

I agree with Saints, when we lost Safri, Ernie and Dixon.

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[quote user="nutty nigel"]

I take your point about the release clauses for Etuhu and Earnshaw but there is no reason to believe they would have taken advantage of them if Worthy had still been manager. The big players always produced for Worthy and he got them to sign for him regardless of who ultimately paid for them!

 

[/quote]Sorry Nutty, but you''re Worthy-tined specs have never been more obvious. Etuhu and Earnshaw both had release clauses negotiated specifically to ensure they could pursue their top flight ambitions, something we flatly didn''t provide in failing to even make the play-offs with our first year of parachute payments.Revise history all you like, but it was painfully clear to all and sundry that Worthington had run out of hope and ideas, including the backing of his players, during his final months. Therefore, I''d suggest the exact opposite to what you did: if the board had been more decisive in finding a high quality candidate right after the 05/06 season had finished, we would have had a better chance of retaining those particular players. Not least because it would have aligned us in terms of footballing ambition.

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I agree with a lot of points made regarding Mackay and Roberts and I can also understand nutty''s different view on the matter. For me, I blame Worthington for the situation we find ourselves in today. I believe this even more now after watching the Reading press conference last week were coppell stepped down. I think had Worthington done the same as Coppell, we could of possibly avoided a lot of the pitfalls after him. It was clear the players under worthington were suffering from a massive premiership hangover. Worthy should of done the honourable thing and stepped a side at the end of the failed season after relegation. Giving someone else a chance to take a different approach and a pre season to pick the players up. But sadly he didn''t and we all know what happened after, and unlike Worthington, coppell can leave Reading with his head held high, and the opportunity to possibly return one day, which i strongly think he will.

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Insufficient funds by buttocks!If we had one for Ashton earlier and kept Malky instead of spending half the season with the shortest centre acks in the league things might have been very differnt.[quote user="Salopian"]-when we were promoted, unexpectedly, with insufficient funds to survive in the Premiership.We scraped the barrel to fund Ashton in a vain hope, and then on there was not enough.Whatever managerial and board deficiencies there were, it has been the failure to buy good players since then.[/quote]

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[quote user="Fernando Derveld"][quote user="nutty nigel"]

I take your point about the release clauses for Etuhu and Earnshaw but there is no reason to believe they would have taken advantage of them if Worthy had still been manager. The big players always produced for Worthy and he got them to sign for him regardless of who ultimately paid for them!

 

[/quote]

Sorry Nutty, but you''re Worthy-tined specs have never been more obvious. Etuhu and Earnshaw both had release clauses negotiated specifically to ensure they could pursue their top flight ambitions, something we flatly didn''t provide in failing to even make the play-offs with our first year of parachute payments.

Revise history all you like, but it was painfully clear to all and sundry that Worthington had run out of hope and ideas, including the backing of his players, during his final months. Therefore, I''d suggest the exact opposite to what you did: if the board had been more decisive in finding a high quality candidate right after the 05/06 season had finished, we would have had a better chance of retaining those particular players. Not least because it would have aligned us in terms of footballing ambition.

[/quote]

Sorry Fernando but I don''t buy it. I never have and I never will. Worthy was hugely respected among the big players, he did after all get them here in the first place. You can highlight Carl Moore for financing the Huckerby deal but it was Worthy who made it possible. Just like Worthy managed to persuade Crouch to come on loan and consistently signed top players to keep this club competetive. He made mistakes and was unlucky in the summer of 2005 but he still managed to put that right persuading Etuhu to finally sign and then when he wasn''t backed the next summer his two signings were Croft and Dublin before he was finally sacked. Plymouth away saw Earnshaw playing for his manager to the end. I know, I was there. And Hucks came back from injury early to try and save Worthy''s neck against Burnley where Earnshaw again put in a full shift right to the end. You do not know that Earnshaw and Etuhu would have wanted away had Worthy still been there. What you do know is that Grant and Roeder alienated the big players and they couldn''t get out of the door quick enough.

I am not revising history, these are things I said at the time. And after that Burnley game there was no way back for Worthy and for that I blame the board for making no decision in the summer to either back him(preferably) or sack him. But I will say this - If they had sacked Worthy at the end of 05/06 and appointed Peter Grant I believe we would have been relegated that season. Could you imagine how we would have faired with Chris Brown and no Dublin?

 

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The rot really set in or should I say the writing was on the wall when the club asked to play the first game of the season away to get the Barclay restaurant finished and in that first week of the season sold Bellamy to pay for it.

 

FOOTBALL MUST COME FIRST

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[quote user="Tumbleweed"]There were mistakes before as folks have mentioned but the biggest one to me was the appointment of Peter Grant. He brought in too much deadwood, had no managerial experience and was exactly the opposite of what we needed when Worthy finally left. We needed a guy who could regalvanise the club and who had experience of developing players from an academy. That was acatastrophic mistake, Roeder stripped out even more and our reliance on loan players and the appointment of a blok who has run corporate hospitality were the finals nail in a flat pack coffin made by the club itself.[/quote]

Absolutely agree with this. Appointing Peter Grant as boss was where things really went wrong. His pathetic transfer dealings resulted in strong players being replaced with gambles (few of which paid off) and his ridiculous man management (chastising the players for not humiliating Barnet after leading 5-0 at HT and berating Huckerby for not tracking back enough) lost the trust and patience of the top performers and damaged morale.

Why we appointed him I never understood. Why did we have to gamble on him we were still an attractive opportunity for a quality manager at that time.

Most of the blame rests on his shoulders.

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[quote user="canary cherub "]

The club was on the slide towards League 1 before Nigel Worthington came on the scene. 

 

[/quote]

Very true. But he arrested that slide for a few years and then it picked up pace after he left.

 

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when peter grant took over and got in his players....chris brown.....mark fotheringham......

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The day Martin O''Neill was lied to be Chase, causing him to walk away. That was the day I really stopped believing anything was possible for Norwich City. We have had ups and downs since then, not too many ups, but that was the start. I am sure some would go back further still. I was tempted to say when Walker left, but I still believed we would get through that one, until Chase started selling off the players. Still, I believed.

No, it was Martin O''Neill for me, and what makes it worse is he''s gone on to prove what a great manager he would become and we lost out on that. IMO we have never recovered.

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[quote user="nutty nigel"]

Sorry Fernando but I don''t buy it. I never have and I never will. Worthy was hugely respected among the big players, he did after all get them here in the first place. You can highlight Carl Moore for financing the Huckerby deal but it was Worthy who made it possible. Just like Worthy managed to persuade Crouch to come on loan and consistently signed top players to keep this club competetive. He made mistakes and was unlucky in the summer of 2005 but he still managed to put that right persuading Etuhu to finally sign and then when he wasn''t backed the next summer his two signings were Croft and Dublin before he was finally sacked. Plymouth away saw Earnshaw playing for his manager to the end. I know, I was there. And Hucks came back from injury early to try and save Worthy''s neck against Burnley where Earnshaw again put in a full shift right to the end. You do not know that Earnshaw and Etuhu would have wanted away had Worthy still been there. What you do know is that Grant and Roeder alienated the big players and they couldn''t get out of the door quick enough.

I am not revising history, these are things I said at the time. And after that Burnley game there was no way back for Worthy and for that I blame the board for making no decision in the summer to either back him(preferably) or sack him. But I will say this - If they had sacked Worthy at the end of 05/06 and appointed Peter Grant I believe we would have been relegated that season. Could you imagine how we would have faired with Chris Brown and no Dublin?

[/quote]Sorry I couldn''t reply till now. I hear what you are saying, but you make it sound like Worthy was the only thing NCFC had going for it at the time. We were (and i fear this time has now passed, for the time being) a hugely respected club, even considered one of the 20 biggest in the country, which Worthy capitalised on by building a great squad and delivering some fanstastic years of achievement. All of this combined to make us a club consistently being viewed as one either heading toward, or likely to head back towards, the top tier. We were associated with it. All of this was a formidable package for attracting the likes of Harper, Crouch, Huckerby, Earnshaw, Etuhu and Dublin... not simply Worthy''s personal gravitas.I still maintain Worthy utterly ran out of ideas; you only had to watch the Burnley game that rightly led to his dismissal, but this "performance" was hardly the first of it''s sort (excluding Earnshaw putting himself in the "shop window" like all ambitious players on a sinking ship) and of so abject a nature that it could only suggest entrenched unrest in the dressing room. I also maintain that a footballing brain within the club would have been monitoring this deteriorating situation much more closely, and in all likelihood forced the board to act within the close season.

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Sorry, the rot really began when we sold Sutton and Fox. We still might have got away with it, if we had signed a proper keeper when Gunn got injured against Forest.Relegation killed us. We missed out on tens of millions. We have never been the same since.

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[quote user="Badger"]Sorry, the rot really began when we sold Sutton and Fox. We still might have got away with it, if we had signed a proper keeper when Gunn got injured against Forest.Relegation killed us. We missed out on tens of millions. We have never been the same since. [/quote]Yep, those two and the remainder of the Chase regime. Fire sales of Ward and Newsome and the subsequent failure to back O''Neil with a decent transfer budget were the icing on the cake that ensured we''d be a long time gone.

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[quote user="Fernando Derveld"][quote user="nutty nigel"]

Sorry Fernando but I don''t buy it. I never have and I never will. Worthy was hugely respected among the big players, he did after all get them here in the first place. You can highlight Carl Moore for financing the Huckerby deal but it was Worthy who made it possible. Just like Worthy managed to persuade Crouch to come on loan and consistently signed top players to keep this club competetive. He made mistakes and was unlucky in the summer of 2005 but he still managed to put that right persuading Etuhu to finally sign and then when he wasn''t backed the next summer his two signings were Croft and Dublin before he was finally sacked. Plymouth away saw Earnshaw playing for his manager to the end. I know, I was there. And Hucks came back from injury early to try and save Worthy''s neck against Burnley where Earnshaw again put in a full shift right to the end. You do not know that Earnshaw and Etuhu would have wanted away had Worthy still been there. What you do know is that Grant and Roeder alienated the big players and they couldn''t get out of the door quick enough.

I am not revising history, these are things I said at the time. And after that Burnley game there was no way back for Worthy and for that I blame the board for making no decision in the summer to either back him(preferably) or sack him. But I will say this - If they had sacked Worthy at the end of 05/06 and appointed Peter Grant I believe we would have been relegated that season. Could you imagine how we would have faired with Chris Brown and no Dublin?

[/quote]

Sorry I couldn''t reply till now. I hear what you are saying, but you make it sound like Worthy was the only thing NCFC had going for it at the time. We were (and i fear this time has now passed, for the time being) a hugely respected club, even considered one of the 20 biggest in the country, which Worthy capitalised on by building a great squad and delivering some fanstastic years of achievement. All of this combined to make us a club consistently being viewed as one either heading toward, or likely to head back towards, the top tier. We were associated with it. All of this was a formidable package for attracting the likes of Harper, Crouch, Huckerby, Earnshaw, Etuhu and Dublin... not simply Worthy''s personal gravitas.

I still maintain Worthy utterly ran out of ideas; you only had to watch the Burnley game that rightly led to his dismissal, but this "performance" was hardly the first of it''s sort (excluding Earnshaw putting himself in the "shop window" like all ambitious players on a sinking ship) and of so abject a nature that it could only suggest entrenched unrest in the dressing room. I also maintain that a footballing brain within the club would have been monitoring this deteriorating situation much more closely, and in all likelihood forced the board to act within the close season.
[/quote]

It''s nice to have this chat with you Fernando and I hear what you say too. In the end we are going to probably agree to disagree which is no bad result. I felt that whilst Worthy made mistakes many of the criticisms levelled at him during that last season were totally unjustified and came from disappointment after he had raised our expectations. But Worthy is the only manager since O''Neill to raise those expectations and Worthy at least stuck around after he was let down by the board. Being let down by boards, managers and players has been a feature that has recurred constantly in my 42 years as a fan. So maybe "the rot" goes back to the sale of Ron Davies or Hugh Curran for me.

Or perhaps the rot isn''t really there at all because being a football fan of all clubs is full of ups and downs. Manchester United went 25 years between titles and during that time were relegated to the 2nd division. That was as bigger catastrophe for for their fans as our relegation this time is to ours. Their fans stood by them just like ours will us. The only real loyalty in football is a one way street from the fan to their club. And the truely big clubs retain that loyalty in adversity which is why "where were you when you were sh*t" can never be levelled at them.

 

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Little clubs can also enjoy loyalty in adversity Nutty.

Proud season ticket holder for Colchester United and Lincoln City.

Both have taken me into the Conference League but I''m still there and I still love them to bits.

Put my money in to save Lincoln from going out of existence, about the best thing I''ve done in football along with the other 14 of us.

I have a seat with my name on in the Co-op Stand at Lincoln[+o(]

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[quote user="Karl Pilkington"]

People always look to Fulham away but just before that we also threw away a healthy lead (3-1) away to palace and drew and also a lead away to Saints and lost(??)

[/quote]

Fulham was the game where it all imploded, but I agree that the signs were there in previous games such as the ones you mention.  I remember when we beat Birmingham 1-0 the week before Craven Cottage, we absolutely stank.  It was an incredibly poor, nervous, lucky victory so the warning signs were there.  Everyone looked spent, but the effort was there.  There were strange things going on at Fulham like Steve Foley getting ill before kick off and the fact that several players just blatantly stopped performing.  I remember Rick Waghorn saying in one article that we''ll never find out the full story of what went on and I wonder what he knows?

Have to agree also with other posters that the initial catalyst came from the Walker/Chase/O''Neill era, but in recent history, anything from 2005 seems to have set our downfall.

 

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When we got promoted and the club directors decided they wern''t prepared to back Worthy with the neccessary funds to keep us up. - Signing Peter Crouch for only £2M would of probably kept us up and we''d of made a load of money from selling him!

Then Worthy lost the plot by getting rid of Mackay and replacing him with a midget Charlton who was not as good. Iwan Roberts deserved another years contract where he would of done OK as a substitute.

 

Keeping Worthy a year too long.

 

Then appointing Grant and Roeder!

 

All these bad decisions are the reason where we are now!

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[quote user="ACE"]Insufficient funds by buttocks!If we had one for Ashton earlier and kept Malky instead of spending half the season with the shortest centre acks in the league things might have been very differnt.[/quote]I agree with this. But the real rot started years ago.

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[quote user="Mello Yello"]

When our major-shareholder got her chum Bruce Oldfield to design a City kit.....

 

[/quote]

Those yellow shorts should have rung alarm bells with everyone that our past now meant nothing... and that Delia was about to rewrite our entire history.......

Also the loss of a Norfolk anchor such as Geoffrey Watling meant we were set adrift from our roots and were allowed to become a fools'' plaything.....

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