today
The blog is meant for random and occasional thoughts and my one for today is this:
Is Rafa a dead man walking?
I remember when Ferguson announced to much cheering that he was going to retire at the end of the season. Man Utd promptly played pish for that season. The motivation, the commitment, the effort wasn’t there. And this was from a team who adored, well, respected, their manager and wanted to play for him.
I wonder if Rafa’s authority has been so undermined by the deafening silence from our owners over measures of support for him that those players who don’t like being rotated have just given up trying to impress, and those that do like him, know they’re playing for the end of the season.
Gerrard himself has stated that Benitez isn’t the warmest of managers, and if he doesn’t have a really close personal relationship with many of the players then they are not going to bust a gut for him if they don’t want to.
This is of course, conjecture and if true, a sad indictment on the mindset of our players, but recently we have look lacklustre, non-commital, and half arsed.
At Luton, we were 2nd best to most balls, yesterday ‘Boro passed the ball around us, and since the New Year we’ve looked half the team we were last year.
Well if its the case, any fondness I may have ever had for our new owners will have gone with the morning rain, never mind not investing, never mind not understanding, the cardinal sin in football is to sling enough mud so it sticks and let the press pirahnas feast on the rest.
To undermine the main voice of authority at any club is petty, misguided and pathetic, never mind bad business sense. And that 2 successful businessmen are doing this made me question whether or not they were doing that, but now it makes me question how they got to be successful.
January 14th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Not quiet now are they? Support for Rafa?…….No we just happen to have tapped up an unproven German!!!!!!!!!!!
January 14th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
There’s 2 sides to this - the passionate side, which I see in my seven year old lad who despairs that his heroes, and the manager he loves, seem to be falling apart, and the business side, which makes me wonder just who these idiots running our club are. Where was the research? Did they not look at what they were buying into? Yankee Football, Baseball etc doesn’t have a fraction of the passion of the least well supported football clubs over here and I think they thought they could apply their “sports model” and all would go well. Now they see that didn’t work, because this is England, not bloody America, they need to make hard decisions - i.e. back their investment or get out, they haven’t got the balls to do either and are strangling our club as a result.
It’s simple: Back Rafa, give him a chance to lay out a 3 year plan, agree it, finance it and give it time. Or sack him. Personally, I favour the former, but they need to do something - doing nothing will land us with mediocrity and nothing more.