by RoyalinBracknell »
16 Dec 2014 19:14
RoyallyFcuked sandman RoyallyFcuked
Interesting comment, seeing as you were one of the ones crying at McDermott's IMO deserved sacking.
His sacking was undeserved and today's news actually reinforces that.
It really does amaze me how people like yourself were so quick to defend Adkins citing ownership issues and the like yet McDermott is accused of lying about transfer budgets and interference from above. Admit it, you and your ilk chased after the oft quoted myth of "more attractive football" and it was just a pipedream dreamt up by a young owner whose real reason was he got desperate and panicked in the hope of keeping the glitz, glamour, prestige, spotlight and most of all money of the PL.
McDermott's sacking WAS justified though. He lost his way in the PL, ran out of ideas and made some poor decisions. Kept playing the same out of form players week in week out and spent his post match interviews moaning about 50/50 decisions rather than addressing the fact we'd underperformed and been outplayed in nearly every game. We wernt seeing any improvement, in fact we were getting worse. If you think Adkins sacking was deserved for those two reasons at least, then so was McDermott's.[/quote]
If the demand for a Reading manager is they get us promoted and then never make poor decisions I think we'll be sacking a lot of managers!. I don't know that he ran out of ideas; he ended up going to 4-5-1 which produced a great run of results just after Christmas and then the Pogrebynak red card slightly killed that formation. Obviously it's a bit more complex than that and it was clearly his worse season but I think the Premier League can be viewed as a mitigating factor coupled with the lack of much of a budget seemingly.
Personally I think that a 45% win percentage overall along with 2 FA Cup quarter-finals, a comfortable avoidance of relegation in his first year, a play-off final and a Championship is sufficient return from the first 2 and a half years to permit a poor season and the chance to atone.
The thing is if we'd stayed with McDermott would we be any worse now? It's difficult to see how, we'd quite possibly be better and it would at least have felt like we'd stayed very loyal to someone who had been very successful for us. I'm not really sure the Nigel Adkins reign has given us anything to build on particularly?
