Quote: Offside Monkey "With all due respect, from the point of veiw of some one who regulary reads your posts, the difference in your stance on the two coaches has no consistancy.
A number of other posters would argue for Potter's plus points. None of us thought he was perfect, but we'd argue that he'd kept us competetive when key players had left, he'd brought through youngsters and intergrated them well without overloading them etc, etc, etc. Through said debates you would deflect any recognition of acheivement toward the players, backroom staff and the board, but never compliment the coach. Whereas, this year, through our slump, you've levelled the blame in the opposite direction at feet of the senior players, leaving very little blame with Royce. That is not consistent.
I admire that your pasionate about saints and appreciate that you think Royce is hard done to. Do I think that, come the end of the season, we'll finish up any better or worse than if we'd have kept him? Possibly not, but the coming weeks will at least see us attempt some new stuff, it willl give the players a boost in motivation (in order to prove it was the coach and not, as you have speculated the players lacking drive) but, most significantly, will chance the mood on the terrace - a poor performance will no longer be met which allegations that the coach doesn't know what he's doing, instead, we'll put it down to the two guys filling in being inexperienced and doing thier best in a bad situation, knowing that next year we'll have a shiney new coach to make everything right. Why is this so significant? Ticket sales - Like it or not, we've got Langtree park to pay for now and the mindnumbingly uninspriring attacking performances are doing nothing to attract fans, they're putting them off. The boring victories of Potter's tenure may not have had them flooding to the turnstiles, but it wouldn't have done them any harm. This was the major factor in Royce going imo and to be honest, given how annoyed I was at this point last season and how annoyed I was after the awful Hull game, I can see why people wouldn't inclined to pay for a season ticket that leaves you watching dross for 50% of the games.'"
Excellent post, in every respect.
