Hells Teeth Grim .. Thats some post fellah and in many ways you've answered your own questions .. Hey Its a joy to see you posting over here because I'm CERTAIN You are feeling a bit stifled & uneasy over there ..

Thing is you'll do well to get this thread 'cooking' as its Just Too Long and You must know that .. ? .. Well anyway lets see how it goes but a Massive Dose of Culling Abbreviation is required if you ask me ..

Which you didn't .. ..

I feel that sometimes a bit of in depth analysis goes a long way in provoking debate.....

Spot on. Obviously something serious happened behind the scenes for Clark to go, especially with the mimimum requirement promotion which was still a real possibility when Clark left

A lot of truths there Grim, a good read, they will have had a right rollocking today, honeymoon period OVER! Time to get that 4th spot, beat M K over 2 legs & do United at Wembley!

'Honeymoon Period over' wetherby????

WTF I must have missed the wedding....
A few draws that we should of won...And a fluky win against Charlton is all I can remember...

All I KNOW is that we are play off bound again, our season will boil down to 3 games ( hopefully 3 ) 99% of people on here are talking like its 1st June and we have blown it, its ALL still to play for and win. Yes its sickening and gutt wrenching to see then lazy barstewards not giving 100% Grayson needs to earn his corn and tell them that they can be hero's, cos ATM they are zero's.

when clark was here we just required to be more positive..both in how we approached games and what we did to change them once they were in progress.. we didnt do it and never looked like doing it..
in my opinion with 16 games to go, lillis should have been told to go for it.. we didnt need and we dont have the players for a seed change at that point in the season..

we required some guts and the players to have a little more freedom than it appeared they had once on the pitch..

lillis will have known what the problems were, unbeaten run or not..

grayson knew about the run and must have thought that he had a chance with us to just keep the momentum of it going..
he wouldnt have known or nobody with any influence told him that it had been falling apart and was possibly about to go t-ts up.. a load of us on here knew it....

you would think that in 4th place with a game in hand grayson wouldnt have to work that hard to get them motivated for wendies at home.. on failing that test both he and the players have now seriously failed the "test" of getting back on the bike straight away with todays non event..

the run of defeats has been coming for a long time.. the luck ran out weeks ago...

we dont really have the quality to make up for the lack of effort and belief the squad has.. we dont have the "legs" to cope with pace in the opposition and we dont have enough players with the "stomach" to take it on when the results and the luck dont go your way..

more bollox on the web site..

Anton "We have to bounce back"...

maybe if he ran around a bit more, preferably with the ball towards the opponents goal it would help a bit..???


snodin..

"we were never in the game"??


why not make 3 subs at halftime at 0-0 then???

we had to win the f-cking game......

carrying on doing nothing at all apart from giving them chances wasnt the right way to go, was it???

a brave manager and staff might lead to a bit more bravery from the players????

This has been a poor season right from the very 1st day. hangover from OT, poor additions, lost 2 star players, poor form, tactics, energy whatever you want to call it...It has had a bad vibe all year, and most of us have recognised that.


Where it went wrong Grim ? All the things you mention are true, but if Deano had let LC go after OT nobody would have said a word. He could have appointed a new man to build his own team...but he didn't..he allowed emotion to get in the way of business...something I suspect he never did when he ran Card Factory..

No point dwelling on it tho'. We're not out of it yet, and if SG can get some sort of order into the team, he might end up being a hero...and we'll all be dancing down the street in relief..

Great post Grim!

My five reasons why Town are failing.

1: Lee Clark
2: His signings
3: His lack of decisiveness
4: His personality
5: His lazy, incompetent players

I just hope Mr Grayson can stop the rot! Recall Higginbotham and play him. Then play a 4-4-3 all out attacking football and I mean football and not hoofball!

Funny how people are now blaming the quality of our players in order to give Grayson an excuse for the results. However the reason people wanted Elsie out was because the quality of the squad was great, it was the tactics and motivation that were missing.

So, which one is it?

You missed one glaring reason as to why things have not gone to,plan for the last two seasons though there Grim.

The club decided to change the matchday mascot from a Terrier to a Fox.

Rattling good read Grim.

1st.
LV ! Have you got Jacko's problem ?
shoe's & socks off mate......4-4-3 the ref might have summert to say about that . Although I see your point..It might give us an edge.

Grim.
If, as was told at the time, Clark had secured a start at L666s for the start of the following season, with a 'gentleman's handshake' with Bates, &.
Hoyle found out. (how is irrelevant), What else could he do.
He had to sack him.
Clarks behavior prior to this was whacky to say the least.
The timing suited. NO ONE.

We are now in the hideous situation where we are all opinionated & it would seem divided as to Where we claim Town would be now had Clark still been in charge, as opposed to where they are now under Grayson .

We'll never know.
a pointless argument.

Grayson will be desperate to win the last four games & gain the available 12 points.
Attainable for sure.
But the attitude of the team, on any given day, their spirit, or lack of.. again, We just don't know.
And that has been the frustration all season...we never knew what we were going to get, Gumps Chocolates,
& under Grayson, up to now, nothings changed.

Wednesday on the other hand...
They have turned things around haven't they.
What is it ! last 8 games under the new manager, won 7 & drawn 1. & pulled an 8 point gap on Town.
Who's responsible for that ?
They looked like they wanted to win yesterday. not pretty at times, But 3-0 is a damn sight better than our 0-2 result.

We're in the play offs.
I wish we could have gone up Auto'
Good luck Simon, You've a task on your hands.

Darn

Whoops! Do you think the ref would notice? Probably not, the odd player does go missing for Town, even things up again!

Darn unda, you say nothing has changed under Grayson. It has, we are playing even worse and have fallen further behind the top 2.

i think the fight was there under clark..the unbeaten run showed that we at least had the will to get results..problem was the tactic of holding what you had, especially away from home..this was compounded by home results where we retreated after taking the lead and ended up hanging on for a draw..
the mere fact that we have been leading in so many games over the last couple of years is not lost on me ... its what we did when in front that bothered me so much..
changing the team wasnt the main problem, changing what we did as a team during the games was..
p clark took us deep again yesterday due to the pace of the opposition, it did for us again.. we get done on the break even when nobody has gone to far forward????
why???
because the central midfielders havent pushed up and the ball is cleared to the opposition who immediately have a free run into our half and directly at our back 4 with our midfield stood in line with them.. this has become so bleeding obvious that it hurts to watch it happening..push up stand next to their midfield and bang em when the ball comes to them..in their faces competing where the ball is.. being "extra" defenders is usually too late especially against pace...

great article grim.. agree with the lot its all true. i dont think the players are particularly good enough andy be nice if SG can just get them to believe that they are then with a bit of luck we might just do it. but i cant see how at the moment we will beat dons for definate but owls will give us a right spanking in final if ts them.

another question grim off topic..

can you see mrs inter get undressed from your bedroom window?

Grayson has said he inherited a better squad here than he did at L666ds!

Why the hell is the football going even more backwards now then? Boots is harping on how calm he is in the dugout, but fails to see that calmness is not producing any kind of entertainment.

I'll answer that one Tez

Yes he can

i was very calm on saturday...its symptomatic of knowing from early on in games that you are definitely not going to win the game..once the opposition score the calmness then becomes almost coma like because you know thats it for this match..
grayson is probably the same..
once bournemouth scored yesterday, i turned the radio off and did something else, its sad knowing that there wont be any comeback or a battling attempt to get back into the game.. maybe town might do better if they only got paid up to the first goal going in???? after that we are not playing at all...

Andy..
You get my drift.

I enjoyed watching Oldham yesterday,
They were never good enough, But They tried.
Dickov might just get them into a good outfit but time is against him. (& finances no doubt)

Inter.
re-'inherited a better squad' I wonder if he meant it ?
What appears to be happening from the results is the opposition are coming out 2nd half, & 'sussing' us out if you like,
I get the feeling the opposition managers are getting one over Grayson & his tactics..after they've had a look at how we perform the 1st 45 minutes.
OR. is it the players who are incapable of adapting to his instructions ?
Who knows.

1. Transfers

Yep, 100% We lost Pilkington and Peltier - 2 of our best players and failed to replace them. Ward has been a massive failure for the amount spent on him and McDermott never got going before he was dismissed pretty sharply - neither come close to performing at the level Pilks did in his time at Town. Jack Hunt has failed to live up to the hype surrounding him and has gone backwards not forwards this season - not a patch on Pelts, even the below par Pelts of last season.

Then there's the midfield, where we all knew we needed reinforcements. Robinson has been nothing but dire, Gobern is not the player people thought he might be, and Miller was brought in as a squad player and has failed to even live up to that tag. If the midfield had been sorted properly then we might well have finished in the top 2 this season - it was priority number one but we made a hash of it.

I still think we needed to sign another striker as well, Novak and Lee have been decent in spells this season but neither have been brilliant. We've had to depend on Rhodes far too much whereas if we'd had another striker capable of scoring a few goals we might have managed a few more wins when we were drawing matches.

2. The Unbeaten Run

I don't know about this, I'd give anything for a few panicky draws at this moment in time!

3. Tinkering

Yep, agreed again. McCombe was in good form until his sending off against Orient and was then shipped out on loan - still the most ridiculous and petulant act I've seen from a Town manager. Arfield was playing well on the right of midfield, giving us a more balanced look, but when he had a couple of bad performances he was dropped from the matchday squad completely and hasn't looked the same since. We've been too quick to chop and change all season, but then haven't made the actual changes which were necessary. Hunt was allowed to play awful without punishment for too long, if he'd been dropped earlier for his errors maybe he could have rekindled some of his earlier season form ready for the run-in. Smithies has been allowed to cost us goal after goal without being dropped, despite the fact that Bennett made only one glaring mistake during his run between the sticks.

4. Home Form

I agree to an extent. There's no denying our home form from 09/10 would have been useful this season, but our away form from the end of last season would also have been useful. We haven't been good enough either at home or away, Charlton have proved that you don't need a great home record to go up, you just need a certain level of consistency in all your matches. We've never had that at any point this season.

5. Managerial Change

Hindsight is a great thing. Clark should have been sacked at the end of last season, that's the main mistake Dean made. The second mistake Dean made was not making the change when he first wanted to - he wanted to sack Clark much earlier but the 6-0 away win on Sky bought him some more time. Had he sacked Clark earlier then the new man would have been able to bring in some of his own players and get rid of some of the current squad. In the end we appointed Grayson, and although I still agree Clark was the right man for the job I agree just as much that Grayson wasn't the right man for the job either. The wrong man was brought in and I'd really like to see what the interview process was like, did we even speak to the likes of Jones or Davies? We needed an effect similar to the one that Wednesday have had but we've had nothing of the sort.

One point I'd like to add to your list is:

6. Luxury

The players are pampered, and at no point look like they're hardened, seasoned League One players ready for a scrap. The lack of fight in the squad, and the management, is worrying. The manager is spoiled because he has such a large squad to play with, if someone performs poorly he has the option of 2 or 3 players who could do the same job, other managers at this level have to stick with what they have and that at times is a good thing because the players know they will be playing rather than being dropped constantly. The plan journeys to matches, the ridiculously high wages, the media coverage for the unbeaten run - it's almost like the players think they've made it now and they don't need to try anymore. Nonsense, get them on the Megabus for the rest of the season and stop all the pampering, let them know they're playing in the third tier of English football and they need to start acting like they know it.

darn..
wendies played the same game as us..kick it forward and see what happens..
they just had madine chasing stuff and ranger, both quicker and stronger than rhodes and both more effective at everything than alan lee..
they have two wide players, neither are very good footballers but they have good pace...

aligned with a midfield who chased stuff, made tackles and immediately whacked it forward into areas where forwards with pace could at least challenge for it, this made them the winners in a game of attrition and seeing who could kick most of the air out of the ball first..

we then played bournemouth, who same as wendies had some pace up front and a midfield who actually try and be somewhere near where the f-cking ball is..

we have midfielders yesterday and saturday who probably didnt have more touches of the ball than smithies did....

its almost criminal...

we have been beaten at our own game..

we dont have the players to change it, we let them go..

An Ian Holloway approach .

No Ego's,
No Prima Donas.
Picking up after themselves in training .
Cleaning their own dressing rooms,
taking their own kit home & cleaning it.

A major reality check.
And I still appeal to Hoyle, Stop these huge weekly wages, Modest (by football standards) weekly averages, with huge winning bonus'
Make them strive for that WIN.