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Bowler was subsequently signed by Forest when they got to the PL in 2022 but he didn't get a game for them either, although he did get four games on loan at Olympiakos in the Greek Super League.
In the last decade all of the following have played in the Premier League after leaving us:
- Charlie Austin - Eberechi Eze - Luke Freeman - Joe Lumley - Ryan Manning
Asmir Begovic and Alex Smithies were with Premier League clubs after us but didn't play in the PL.
And then there's Harvey Elliott and Raheem Sterling (bit more than a decade ago in Raheem's case) who were with us as youth players but got pinched before they could turn out for us.
So far I've made all the running on this. All you do is put forward facts that don't stand up to scrutiny, so you jump to a different fact, and another, and back to where you started.
Going round in circles with someone who isn't interested in what I say gets a bit tedious after a while.
You're even trying to tell me I'm gullible for believing that Ainsworth keeping us up is a success.
So it should be a piece of cake for you to convince me that Ainsworth keeping us up was actually a failure.
So if you want to keep this going you make the running. Convince me that GA keeping us up was actually a failure.
If you compare them on their first 13 games it's GA 0.85 v 1 MF. Not such a great difference.
I will concede your point about 1 point per game being a significant improvement on 0.57. Although it wouldn't have kept us up that season as Birmingham went down with 50 points.
The reason I am labouring the point is that 1JD previously said on this thread:
"It’s not about who succeeded who. It’s about the squad available to the manager, any manager, and what you can achieve with that.
With Beale, the team hit the top heights during his reign. With Critchley and Ainsworth the team hit pretty much rock bottom.
With Cifuentes form was like top 8th. Same squad."
So it's not true that Cifuentes had us on top 8 form with the same players.
I'm not saying GA did a great job for us. But I think he is a better manager than he is given credit for and he doesn't get his due for keeping us up in 2023.
You will get no argument from me that Cifuentes did a better job for us than GA.
Not much better than GA's first 13 games which ensured our survival!
The big hole in your narrative is that Cifuentes did not do much better with the same players GA had to work with.
The big improvement came from the middle of January 2024 when the likes of Hayden, Hodge, Frey, and Andersen were added to the squad. Players who weren't available to GA but did have a big impact on their arrival.
If you want to make it all about the managers then fine that's your choice. But I am sticking with my belief that GA doesn't get enough credit for keeping us up in 2023.
And I echo your sentiments about goodwill to all. Except that lot on Fulham Broadway. And the Mancs. And Liz Truss - did you have to go there!?
On this:
"It feels like these sorts of things have become fewer and further between since those days. We could probably do the whole preview on that – is it because the sport has become sanitised, more middle class, more family friendly? Is it because there’s a greater focus on mental health? Are we just tired of all the hatred elsewhere and can’t be bothered to bring it into our little Saturday sanctuary any more? Or have the right conditions simply not been met? Let Mick Beale get another Championship job, then we’ll see. That’s your acid test right there."
You missed off - are the average matchday fans too old now and can't manage the necessary venom without a double dose of Sanatogen before the game?
I think we would have gone down if we hadn't sacked Critchley. And since no one other than GA wanted the job I don't see how we can credit anyone else with keeping us up.
But I did say in one of my earlier posts that it was probably more luck than judgement.
Looking at Ainsworth's career in the round he has a very good record with Wycombe and got off to a flier with Gillingham.
GA's style was never the right fit for us, and maybe he had become so comfortable at Wycombe after ten years that he didn't think through how hard it would be to recreate that here and whether the fans would want to go down that road.
I wrongly attributed sparkey's comments about a ten point cushion to you.
My bad!
Other than that I stick with what I said about GA not getting enough credit for keeping us up in his first season. And also that GA would almost certainly have relegated us in his second season if we hadn't sacked him.
With regards to Beale and his "flash in the pan", his only triumph since his ten game hot streak with us is getting one win in six attempts against Celtic and that was in a game where Celtic had already sewn up the title:
He failed in Glasgow and he failed again in Sunderland. Regis le Bris had never managed in this country before taking the Sunderland job and got them promoted with the squad Beale could only manage four wins with.
If you look at Beale's record with us and Sunderland in the Championship he has managed 34 games with 13 wins and 14 defeats. Forgive me if I take out my crystal ball for a moment and suggest he ain't going to be the next Carlo Ancelotti.
Beale developed a style of play for us which succeeded for a few weeks until the rest of the league worked us out. Once that happened he didn't have an answer. A similar thing happened with Jim Magilton in 2009. And even Schteeve McClaren had us looking good for a bit in 2018.
I never once said that Ainsworth produced good football. In fact I haven't even said that he did a good job for us!
What I said was that he doesn't get enough credit for keeping us up in 2022/23.
In the seventeen games before Ainsworth was appointed we had one win and six draws. 9 points in 17 games! If we had kept Critchley and that form going until the end of the season we would have gone down.
You wrongly stated that Ainsworth was appointed with a ten point cushion over the relegation places and "a handful of games left". Well you must have bloody big hands because it was thirteen games left to play, and only a seven point cushion.
Ainsworth got 11 points from those 13 games and we finished six points clear of the drop. So in effect he started with a seven points cushion and finished with a six point cushion, a net loss of one point.
Where I will agree with you is that GA completely lost his way after that and we would have gone down the following season if Marti hadn't saved us.
And since Marti is the real focal point of this thread I would suggest he deserves a respectful greeting on his return tomorrow. He did a solid if not spectacular job in very difficult circumstances.
That assumes the early December payment was in their contract and not a perk given at the discretion of the club.
The article does say that the staff are normally paid at the end of the month. So really the club are just doing what they would normally do with the payroll.
But I agree with you that the staff should have been given a reasonable amount of notice and it is poor management that they weren't told sooner.
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