Rage Online

Not much total support for CW out there us there?
Puts even more pressure on right from the off next season. I'm not sure whether that is a good or bad thing.

&quotBaboo&quot wrote:Not much total support for CW out there us there?
Puts even more pressure on right from the off next season. I'm not sure whether that is a good or bad thing.

Agreed. Maybe it's only because next year will only be my 5th as a season ticket holder, and my earliest decent memories are of the last couple of years before relegation, and I wasn't around in the 80s and early 90s that I can't come on here and moan about a bad run of form in the last 6 weeks of the season (which is ultimately what's let us down). Even then I know that this is comfortably the best we've had it for about 10 years and that the trend is clearly up. Don't get me wrong, it's fair enough if your not happy with the season.
Also I can't help but feel that if this season's results had happened in reverse (assuming KT would have had the balls to keep Wilder) then people would have a much more positive out look.

As we know, in football and elsewhere, people respond differently to pressure. Most people, eg. in exam situations, benefit from a medium level of pressure - too much, and they 'stress out', too little and they may be too casual, and not try hard enough to do their best.

So when CW presents himself as his own harshest critic, as he has done recently and on previous occasions, he is indicating that he does not need additional pressure to do his best. This may or may not be true. The dilemma is that any dressing room will have a variety of attitudes, from the laid back to the naturally coiled springs. His job is to buck up the casual, and cool down the wound up.

For what it's worth, I believe that, amongst all sorts of ideas on this forum, the persistent psychological problem is our inability to impose ourselves at home, particularly against weaker opposition. So, joepoolman, those of us around in the mid eighties remember going to the Manor knowing that we were going to spank the opposition - I remember 5 - 0 against Crystal Palace, 4 - 0 against Bolton, etc. I suspect this inability comes from too high an expectation (for manager and players), not too low. So perhaps we need to vigilant for signs of ongoing weakness, but supportive in the meantime.

To me it was a disappointing season as we should have made the play offs at least.

Some mitigation was the horrendous injury list which seemed to plague the season (every team has inuries of course but we did seem to have more than our fair share in the season just gone).

The defensive frailties seem to have been improved upon this season and next the goalscoring has to be addressed. We simply do not score enought goals.

I am not sure I agree with some comments about the strength of next years teams. Rotherham under Evans have said that they will put bids in to buy players. Northampton have said that will ahve a top 6 budget and Chesterfield will apparently spend reasonably big. Fleetwood could well do a Crawley and if Southend Don't go up in the play offs they will be contenders. I doubt if anybody would be too surprised if Plymouth, Bristol Rovers or Bradford managed to get their act together. So I am not sure that next season will be any easier....

Thinking about this over the weekend, I'm still in the Wilder camp, mainly due to the fact that avoiding the playoffs is more of a hiccup than a crisis, it's not as if we were brushing with relegation is it? Twelve months time, if things are drifting downhill it might be different, but short of hitting the bottom six at Christmas then I'd give him the full season...

AS someone else said above, there is the question over the likelihood of getting someone in who will DEFINATELY do better - at the moment we dont know whether this is a hiccup that Wilder will learn from or the first signs of hitting his natural ceiling and as such I think it would be foolish to cast him aside at this point, or even have the lever poised during the season (unless it is going REALLY wrong) as even a repeat of our successful recruitment policy from last time is not guaranteed to throw up anyone clearly better placed to take us up automatically (which in effect is the only outcome which could be conceived as any proof that he'd done better than Wilder would have).

It's fine to see clubs in teh lower reaches pulling the trigger mid-season (although didnt help Wolves did it?) or straigth after the final game of an awful season (eg. Villa (hopefully) &amp possibly Blackburn), but it seems a very risky manouvre for a top ten (even fifteen) side mid-season as that is as likely to write teh season off with the club losing ground as the new guy finds his feet. as it is to prompt a sudden upwards surge...