FiNeRaIn Well, the last bit of your post is wrong. The decision wasn't put to him to chose Reading or Forest, but im sure given the chance if both clubs asked again tomorrow he'd pick them. If i was a player, so would I. Forest > Reading in just about every way im afraid.
Madejski is dragging the club back and undoing all the hard work he's done in the last decade or so. We had an opportunity to establish ourselves as either a prem team or a " yo-yo club" like west brom. A club that comes down, still has players too good for this league and bounces right back. Instead we completely wasted our premiership money on absolutely nothing and bar a handful of good players, our team is WAY short of the standard required to bounce between divisions. We are worse off than when coppell took over after Pardew. But at least we have a decent media centre and a hotel, not the fact we have poor cover in defence and no proven goalscorers up front.
When sig goes in janury or the summer for 4/5 million. Expect a story like " this will cover the 5 million loss next season, none to be invested in the team", bla bla bla. No money available, bla bla bla.
Well run clubs find a balance between whats needed to make your club successful on the pitch whilst maintaining a solid financial state off it. Reading unfortunately concentrate completely on whats off the pitch and not on it - we are not well run.
Don't know how you can say we wasted a chance to be a Yo-Yo club when we gambled quite significantly on getting back at the first attempt. After relegation the only players sold were Kitson, Sonko and Shorey all three of whom wanted out and none of whom have set the world alight since their departure. We also resisted the urge to sell Harper, Marek, Doyle, Shunt, USA, Rosie, Lita and made significant six figure signings in the shape of NHunt and Armstrong. The size/quality of squad we had in 08/09 was EASILY good enough to get out of this league but bottled it at the crunch and couldn't get over the line despite Birmingham and Wolves begging us to take it. Although if we're being totally fair it wasn't Sir Steve's fault that NHunt, Ivar, Doyler got injured, Shunt got too big for his boots and the likes of Murty, Convey etc never really found form again. Madejski even backed SSC in bringing back Little and Kitson but it still wasn't enough.
All that wage expenditure meant that there was no way the club was going to be able to sustain that quality of team for last season but Rodgers was still allowed to being in Mills, Rasiak, Howard, Cummings and Brian was allowed to bring in Griff and Kizi on loan as well.
Onto this season and the fact is Madejski wants the club to run itself and be sound financially. You could call that a 'lack of ambition' but I admire the man for making a point of refusing to continually allow the club to run itself at a loss and just sink endless money into it. Despite everyone who whines 'Madejski out!' people don't seem to realise that there actually isn't anyone else to come in and pump money into the club and then we'd be even worse off then we are now.
I want us to sign a centre back sure, but I understand that to do so we sell first, possibly by getting rid of one of the countless forward players on our books to be able to afford it. BBC Radio Berks were saying on the radio this weekend that we have 28/29 players in our squad and to me it's the manager(s) fault for building such a forward heavy club. We have Rasiak, NHunt, Church, Long, HRk, Bignall, Kebe,McAnuff and Mooney all on the books who can play up front and we have Hamer, McCarthy, Fedders and Andersen all on the club as keepers. Now that's 12 players on the books when we play a system with 1 goalkeeper and 1 striker, so is it really the chairmans fault that the resources the club does have are being poured into those areas? It's been up to Hammond alongside the managers of recent seasons to try and balance the squad and so far we haven't got there yet.
