Belief

Its hard RR and a very good point. It would be great to be a team like Southampton or Swansea but I feel they are very special cases because of the way they have built and organised their squads as well as Southampton having a superb academy.

If we went down and reoragnised became a team with a philosophy all through the club then that would be great but I'd rather not end up like West Brom or Sunderland and win about 10 games a season and always worry about going down

I have waited 10 years to watch top flight football.last time we where promoted we did not have the resources or facilities at the club we have now.
If we stayed a second season we could encourage better players and with an improved squad we might find we enjoy it more. rather than admitting we are playing out of our league.
I did say to my son that promotion seasons are the most enjoyable and last years was the best i have had. I said next year won't be anything like this. Never did i believe it would be as turgid as has been happy to finish 17th Yes but the only aggression we have shown for most of it has come from our hapless manager.

Unfortunately staying for a second season doesn't guarantee anything. Chesham pointed out that certain sides always worry about relegation. You ave to ask why ? The Premier as become a luxury for the privileged few. But to reiterate Saints and Swans seem to ave cracked it.

Turgid?????

I think turgid is pretty accurate, True Blue. Particularly when playing the teams around us.

Seeing us winning in the Championship is surely better than seeing us losing in the Premiership. But the whole point of the journey is to see us winning in the Premiership and battling for cups, so that's a bit of an arbitrary measure. We're talking short-term pain for long-term gain.

People thinking next season in the championship will be enjoyable are really pushing the boundaries of plausibility. It's far more (based on recent history) that we'll be languishing in the bottom half than storming to the top.

After 10 yrs down there and lower I was hoping we wouldn't have made such an hash of it.

Maybe this is a personality thing but I absolutely can't accept that being in division 2 is better than the top flight. We should have made a better fist of it and at the absolute least be level with Burnley, simple as that.

Never ceases to amaze me some of the stuff on here.....

While Pulis is a very strong character, I've yet to see any evidence of him destabilising any club. The way Mersey talks about him you would think he was worse than Billy Davies. Were Stoke really that unstable while he was in charge? Most unstable clubs tend to suffer on the pitch, yet for all Mark Hughes' improvement in the way they play, are they really that further forward under him in terms of league position and standing? Probably not.

His record at Palace speaks for itself, I don't see Palace fans moaning as they look set to enjoy a third season in the top flight. Had it not been for him, they would be in the same league we are heading to next year......

West Brom have already shown notable improvement as Aries points out. I mean isn't football a results game after all? We talk about long term future of our club well he equation to that stability is simple;

Results on the pitch = long term increased revenue due to top flight status.

Increased revenue x bigger standing x signing better players = better long term stability.

If anyone has the same logic for 10 more years of championship football I'd love to hear it......

comment by True Blue (U9486)
posted 19 hours, 54 minutes ago
You make excellent points Aries and from experience, what happens though if it all goes wrong and all your eggs are with the one man, short term may work but as Mersey points out what about the long term impact IF it doesn't work?
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That's easy to answer. I'd rather put all my eggs in the Tony Pulis basket than continue with Alan Irvine, who was taking us to the Championship without a doubt. Pulis has just over two years to go on his contract and I am confident Albion will still be a PL club then and that we will have better players than we do now. As for his record at Stoke, I can't explain why he bought some of the players he did, nor why Mark Huges has got Stoke even higher up the table, but I hope Pulis learned something about having flair players at his disposal at Palace, because he's certainly got one or two at Albion. And who knows, maybe even Mark Hughes is seeing the light and is becoming able to bring to his team the qualities he had as a player.

You also have to bear in mind what managers are available when you need them. I already had a terrible feeling about Alan Irvine, based on his record at Preston and Sheffield Wednesday (he took Wednesday down to Division One) and our underwhelming pre-season, which I acknowledge isn't always the best guide. But when a manager like Tony Pulis becomes available, and you've got Alan Irvine at the helm, it's a no-brainer.

Last word on Tony Pulis. The reasons why he left Palace aren't generally known. He left because he wasn't happy with some of the infrastructure there, mainly regarding the training facilities and the stadium. As a PL club, most head coaches or managers would expect certain minimum standards to be in place, little things such as under soil heating on a number of your training pitches, and Category A status for your academy. Palace probably hadn't had time to get all these things in place, and Albion have spent a good five years getting The Hawthorns top notch and our training grounds up to really good scratch. Any decent coach would want to come into a club and not have to spend time wondering and worrying about such things. At Palace, I don't think the chairman even had a plan to address such matters, whilst at Albion, Pulis and others like Roy Hodgson walked into a well-developed model. Some managers aren't happy with just the job, they look for other things too, and that's good, because you know then they've got certain standards.