“He's been making the same mistakes for years. Dropping players after good performances, playing players out of position, taking the more productive players off and leaving the less effective ones , bringing everyone back for set pieces, not having anyone on posts, our awful attacking set pieces, there’s quite a list.
For all the good stuff he's done and he’s done a lot, he still falls at the basics for me, which is probably why we struggle to beat a team like Fulham who have struggle terribly away from home and why we couldn’t put a poor Birmingham side to the sword last week and our nearest rivals hammered them 5-1.
And then you get the defeatist crap - we get moaned at on here for being negative, yet our manager generally the most negative of all!. Throwing in the towel for games against reading for example, Birmingham last week and yesterday, saving players for this and that, it’s a deep flaw. The only time you could forgive him was in his first two years of building where the side wasn’t his and he had to reshape it.â€
The above, in my mind, was the typical belief of how some supporters construed Rafa’s failings last season – and the seasons before. Whether it be on website fora, radio phone-ins or conversations down the pub.
Any attempts to educate and highlight the problems Rafa continually faced was met with derision by those who simply could not see the bigger picture. At times the claims that I was too defensive of Rafa did make me stand back and made me wonder whether I was. Yes, I probably was. And I still am
And not without reason.
I’m certain that - had we won the league when we finished four points behind Man U with a record points tally for the club – we would have been in exactly the same position we now find ourselves in. Financially that is.
Rafa would not have been backed last summer if we had won the title. More reason to have at least backed him when we fell short by four points. Nah – no need to do that, he just needed to motivate the players and put arms round shoulders. The squad is just the same, Alonso apart.
I’m not going to go on any further about last summers “spending†because if you don’t know the point I’m making so far then you might as well just stop reading now.
Anyway, that brings me swiftly to the crux of this post because there’s no point in covering old ground.
To those of you who still believe that Rafa was a negative, ranting, stubborn, overweight dinner server – I ask you this. (You will probably remember this question to which – at the time - fanciful answers and ideas were put forward in response).
Who do you want to replace Rafa with?
I can ask this question again now with a clear conscience that I did and always have seen the bigger picture. I overly defended Rafa because I knew how long he had been fighting. For us. I knew he made mistakes. But it didn’t matter. That’s why I defended him to the hilt. I tried to explain why he bought Pennant. I tried to remind people that he had wanted Simao, Alves, Silva. But there were too many who wouldn’t listen.
All they saw were Pennant, Dossena, N’Gog, Rotation and that other fella, Zonal.
He’d failed us, Rafa. Time to move on.
None of it ever really mattered. It really didn’t. When the yanks arrived there was only one way this was going. When the only fella we had fighting our corner was undermined by not only the people above him – there was only one outcome.
And there are plenty of fickle bastards who don’t see what they surely can see now. And it is those who must hang their heads in shame. Because they have played their part in giving Purslow the ideal opportunity to rid our club of the best manager we have had since Kenny left. Rafa desperately wanted to stay. Despite earlier promises, there was no money. There is no money.
Broughton “wanted†Rafa to stay. Then came the question of money. And Rafa was forced out because of “no moneyâ€. All of a sudden, the disappointing season was cited as the reason Rafa “had to goâ€.
So well done, you fickle, head in the sand bastards…..
You got what you wanted.
So, I ask as I did many, many times.
Who do you want to replace Rafa with?
I know for a fact none of you would have come up with Roy fucking Hodgson.
