There have been a number of threads criticising the Board both for the way they handled the departure of Curbs and the subsequent managerial appointments and I've been active on them too.
Two questions and HONEST answers please:
1) Were you happy with the appointment of Iain Dowie? Me NO
2) Were you happy with the appointment of Alan Pardew? Me YES
I guess where this may lead us is that we may well have done at least some of what the Board did so perhaps we are at the point where we say "we are where we are" and try to conjure a miracle to get out of it. If not this season then bounce straight back up next.
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2) Were you happy with the appointment of Alan Pardew? Me YES
All the time we continue to focus mainly on scrutinising, analysing the past, looking with hindsight for mistakes and turning points, we'll continue to do nothing other than twisting the screw or looking for fresh reasons to criticise.
What's done is now done, we need to concentrate our energies and thoughts on the here and now, and the future.
Oh, and the answer is No and Yes :-)
2) EXTREMELY
2) Yes, ecstatic.
To be honest, I never, ever spent a single second even thinking about the board or questioning its decisions until 12 months ago. Even then , it was more a quizzical raising of the eyebrow rather than a full-on 'they've stopped running a model club' view - and that was over the sale of Andy Reid. The second time was the failure to sack Pardew last May. Even then, I never suspected that it was because they had bottled the hard decision. I gave thme the benefit of the doubt because I thought they know so much more about running a 'model club' than me and perhaps I was just being impatient.
It's really only been in the last few months that I've lost faith in the board - once it became apparent that they wanted out and it could no longer be denied that saving money rather than what was good for the team had become their main motivation. It's their money and I'd probably do the same in their shoes. Doesn't mean I have to applaud them for it, though.
Next two question will be:
3) Does Curbs get the credit he deserves?
4) Was Kish the best player to wear the No.2 shirt at CAFC?
For the record:
1) Were you happy with the appointment of Iain Dowie? Me- Yes, and I still maintain that we would not have gone down that season if he had stayed.
2) Were you happy with the appointment of Alan Pardew? Me- Yes, very happy but to be honest he proved to be all talk and no substance. Shame.
What does this prove? Nothing.
Let's move on.
He was meant to be a promising young manager, but I've found that people say that about every young manager that has a good spell or two. The same was said about Boothroyd, now he's seen as very average after a poor season with Watford. They were saying it about Ince until he struggled at Blackburn. Just like young players can have a good run in the team and look better than they are, it's the same with managers.
Pardew - Yes, Reed just wasn't a manager, even though he was so desperate to do well for us, he had to go.
Pardew started off well, sorted out the team and played a 4-4-2 with the players organised and in the right positions. Reed was trying all sorts of formations but it was never going to work.
He then got rid of Traore and replaced him with a more solid player in Thatcher. Song came in to strengthen our poor central midfield. All fairly sensible.
Then we went down and he went a bit mad, signing all sorts of players we didn't need. Might have been cheap gambles and loans, but it all added up. Dean and Scott Sinclair, Lee Cook, Dorian Smith, Paulo Monteiro, Greg Halford, Andy Gray (can anyone argue he's worth £1.5-2m?) etc, and at the same time tried all sorts of combinations and lineups, just like Reed did.
He'd play Basey and say we missed Youga's pace, he'd play Youga and say we missed Thatcher's experience. The squad wasn't balanced, and the balance wasn't improved this season.
Parkinson has started off like Pardew did, just trying to improve weak areas of the squad (pretty much the whole squad), playing a simple 4-4-2 or 4-5-1. He's not getting the results but I feel like he can bring us back up, and I think the board didn't think they'd get anyone in that is a better manager than Parkinson.
I just get the feeling from him he won't make the mistakes Pardew made when it comes to signing players, partly because we can't afford to sign cheap gambles, and partly because he's seen it hasn't worked out. A lot of the squad will leave, and he'll get in frees and loans, mainly younger or older players to go with the young players and few others that stay here. If he gets it right it'll start to feel like a 'proper' Charlton team people talk about. Just have to be patient as it's almost impossible for him to build a team like that at the moment.
Pardew.Yes. Might have seen better things from him if we'd managed to stay up.His ego was a major problem though.
yes.
Pardew = qualified Yes. Given the problems with Dowie and Les, I thought he was probably a decent signing although I was very reluctant to subscribe to the hysteria that surrounded his appointment, especially those who though West Ham had got the worse deal in the so called "swap".
Big Yes
1-No- Never liked him or rated him as a manager. Said to my son upon hearing that he had been appointed that he would take us on the road to relegation!! Wish I'd put money on it now!
2- I was at first until I heard the rumours as to why West Ham really wanted him out of their club
3- Some of the time, but not enough, even though some of his substitutions used to baffle me- losing 1-0 put a defender on instead of a striker late on or another striker when the game was almost over.
4- Kish was/is one of my all time favourite players, so yes
His interview in South London Today doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t know and no matter how he tries to paint it, it is as obvious as hell Parky was a nice cheap option for a Board bereft of finance. The reasoning he gives you can swallow or not – one can pretty much make a case for anything if you try hard enough. Most impartial fans will not be too impressed by it.
For me, the key problems are to do with other factors – some of which I mentioned yesterday in my ‘Taking Stock’ thread. It is the way the finances have got out of control, the fact we paid through the nose to get rid of a useless manager (twice in fact if you include Dowie too). The fact we became a national laughing stock for giving a full-time job to a bloke who failed to win any of his eight games as caretaker.
If the finances had been handled more responsibly, we might not have had to offload so many squad players in the summer of 2007 who could have done a good job in the Championship and then, when we did bring players in, it was clear the majority had to come in on low salaries – Semedo, Moo2, McLeod, Sinclair – to name but four – rather than getting top end Championship/yo-yo type players who could have got us up and truly in contention.
Remember we sold Darren Bent for 15M (take off 2-3M for Ipswich) and Luke Young for 2.5M and got a bit for Romm too (were there any others?) – on top of the 11M parachute money….we were hardly skint, or so we thought.
Take Todorov as another example – we took a gamble because we wanted to find a prolific goal scorer for next to nothing. So, we sign a bloke who has subsequently barely started a game in 18 months really and had been largely been out injured for the previous two years before we signed him.
So, the errors made by Murray in appointing shite managers might have been surmountable if we had had more resources to fight the various crises with. But by then the club was already on the slide.
To answer the questions – initially thought Dowie would be fine but very quickly had my doubts – due, in part, to his shite transfers in the summer – and Pardew I thought would be great for getting us out of the Championship.
However Pardew wasn't a success and perhaps if we had been able to remove him last May and had been able to build again, with some investment in the squad, we might not now be staring down the barrel of a gun. This is where things have been so bad and so costly.
1) Iain Dowie? NO
2) Alan Pardew? At the time of his appointment: YES
Pardew - yes
Parkinson - yes
PS re: Bent we got £10M at most.
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Not much
Salad my old mate - think you need to read this - from the official CAFC website no less - where it reveals we will receive a MINIMUM of around 13M smackers for Darren Bent, after the 20% to Ipswich Town.
So, in fact, I underestimated my figures - mind you it would help if I had the fee, which was 16.5M as opposed to 15M as I had said, right in the first place - doh!!
Around 13M big ones for our Dazza at least
Hope the URL works.
I think you are confusing our 'profit' on him which is, I guess, in the region of 10.5M right now, an easy mistake - but that is not we are talking about, we are talking about hard cash coming into the club after relegation. The fee may be payable over a time period but that is standard practice with most deals.
Of course, we can't necessarily believe everything that comes out of the club sadly - so perhaps you are hinting you know a little more, which if so, merely proves my point even further I'm afraid to say, regarding our financial management...
Yes
a. NO (just beacuse where he came from and what he achieved with them)
b. Yes
2. Yes.