PV1973

Im not trying to say thats the managers fault, and neither can you pin injuries on the manager but all those factors don’t help the manager when he needed the recruitment team to come through for him in January.

2 ways of looking at it. Build a strong squad with league one experience (but pay more money in wages) to have a crack at coming straight back up or build a solid league two squad with players of that level and don’t pay as much.

Making claims and setting goals that the club have outwardly expressed like that comment about Grant, also being championship ready, relegation isn’t in my vocabulary, the squad is phenomenal and whatever Carol said about DMs mrs thinking we’ll stay up is like the kiss of death. There’s no need to come out with stuff like that in public because fans aren’t convinced by it.

And getting no one in during the jan window.

How bad he was or the squad we’ve assembled? Because Moore has done no better with them.

No point going on about being beaten by average or mid-table teams because we are far worse than that. This is depressing.

Didnt DMs mrs say that we’d stay up anyway?

You’re doing those teams a disservice because we are nowhere near being anywhere close to average ourselves.

At the time there was nothing wrong with his contract extension.

Exactly. How can you replace Colin garlick with Patrick?

Think his arse had fallen out. Totally knackered.

If I was a player I wouldn’t be anywhere near Facebook, forums or anything like that. Most of the time people want to moan, even when things aren’t going badly.

Whenever I listen to praise and grumble on the journey home I’ve heard Yates say the same thing on more than one occasion. He played with some of those players you mention too. Having a nasty side and a team that battles for each other is an intangible part of the game that you can’t actually quantify what players like that add to your team. A tackle, a flare up, a confrontation are all things that can lift a crowd or your team mates.

I don’t want to hear empty apologies. We just need to know that they’re going to do everything they can to put it right and get back up asap (if we go down). The only way to make a statement about that is through the recruitment and also the interaction with fans over the issues we’ve had this season.

Probably one of the worst things that happened, and we probably didn’t realise it at the time, was us getting rid of Colin Garlick. He openly said he didn’t want to go.

I’ll get one sorted for my powerleague highlights.

Was watching the highlights on itv last night and one particular game jumped out at me. Charlton v Cambridge. Charlton changed manager and got an instant response from the squad and jumped up the table, they also had Connor wickham score for them, who was a free agent and they grabbed him after the window shut. Cambridge on the other hand had a change in manager and it looks like Monk has had a response from them and I reckon they’re all but safe. Meanwhile Bonne scored their goal, another striker signed in the jan window. You could argue they’ve also been playing Gibbo regularly too and all these players brought in + changes in manager have benefitted those 2 clubs and it shows if we’d just pushed the boat out for strikers / defensive players we could have made a good fist of trying to stay up. But we’ve gone the other way, recruited a new manager and brought in some bang average signings and we’ve got worse. Absolute disaster of a year.

have we got no scouting network then? How were players being identified and brought in?

I think he’s been hamstrung by the squad. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a poorly assembled bunch. But…. He hasn’t got a response from them, nothing, which either speaks volumes about their character and quality or his managerial ability.

Well done you 👏

League one hasnt been much better this year.

📞 hello…… Connor, wozza, Gibbo, petty, TC….. It’s the Vale. We’re getting the band back together.

All that optimism and momentum we built after promotion didn’t take long to disappear. It’s been a miserable 2 seasons back in league one. We shouldn’t be throwing in kids given our situation, but it’s a sad indictment of the situation we’re in recruitment / quality wise that we’ve had to. We HAVE to win and hope that Cheltenham do us a favour. Feel like I’m clutching at straws. Let’s not try and rewrite history. We deserved that promotion. We had a bad run towards of the end of the season granted, but ended up getting there on merit. No team getting promoted should be classed as mediocre, it’s an achievement that only vale fans (if you are one) can try and dumb down. Those players have written themselves into our history and you call them mediocre. Give me that team over this one. That squad, as a whole, had more desire, quality and character than we’ve had this last 2 seasons. If you are Patrick then you’re a complete shltbag for saying the team that got us promoted that year was mediocre. Not the first in your OVF career you’ve accused players of that. It was an utterly ridiculous statement then, it’s utterly ridiculous now.

Maybe the fact we have a bigger matchday corporate operation is why 🤷‍♂️ I don’t know I’m just guessing.

So what? We still wanted him and the offer was still there. It’s a job. What would you have done? You do realise that players don’t always take the first offer on the table.