Quote: Bullseye "I'm well used to mediocrity and false dawns having seen a few since I started going at the beginning of the 80s. It made the success of 96-05 all the sweeter.
That said as a club we really ought to be higher up the table. In my experience over the past 30+ years we've usually been in the top 8 somewhere. Recent seasons have been poorer than the average.'"
Ah......a glory fan from the early eighties!! Won two championships and thought it would go on forever..
Funnily enough, though I obviously don't really know what anyone else was thinking back then, most folk seemed pleasantly surprised at the first and to be honest pretty shocked with the way results panned out on that final day to give us the second successive championship. What I'm trying (somewhat clumsily) to say is that no-one really thought (or certainly never said openly) that it was the start of an era, or that it was going to go on and on. Everyone was just happy to have some success without thinking it promised anything for the following year. The differences between then and now seem immense. Or was it just that we didn't have message boards in the early eighties?
Fair enough, there's a big difference between winning twice in the eighties and what we got from 1997 to 2005; I guess over the longer period the expectation got hardwired to some extent. Either that or we've got more fickle over the years, though crowds were up and down back then, so clearly many were voting with their feet in the eighties. I wish I had some answers to go with the questions........