HOUSTAN OUT 5-18

A replacement is not what I am discussing here, it is the terrible tactics being employed by Houston. You can not just dismiss the point being made because the people making them have not offered an alternative. All point made are valid. You are saying that you're sure we will be fine under PH this season, but how can you, in any way, be sure of that? The signs are looking very bleak just now.

You also state that you want 4-4-2 and a balanced midfield along with keeping Houston. It is not possible for all these things to happen in my opinion. He is stubborn and will not change his tactics, so unfortunately we will have to see how close that takes us to relegation this season.

We always seem to start the season slow, and this season is no differant, well even slower lets be honest, but we did lose the spine of our team in the summer. If we beat aberdeen it win be 3 wins, 1 draw and 1 defeat in the last 5 games, that is hardly crisis material. But it seems to be our home form thats letting us down, motherwell had had a poor run of form coming into the game at tannadice and i cant understand why we didnt go for the jugular, they were there for the taking in my opinion and that is houstons fault.

Right, but you're already assuming we've beat Aberdeen to make up those statistics! It's a bit "bury your head in the sand" to be honest.
In actual fact it's 2 draws, 2 defeats and 1 win in our last 5 league games. That doesn't paint as rosy a picture, and it's a far more accurate showing of Houston's actual managerial ability. Expand that to make it look it's worst and it's 1 win in the last 8 league games, 4 defeats and 3 draws.

However, it's not just the results/table that people should be looking at, but the performances. They have just been unacceptable. Even the 3-1 win against Caley was a truly dire game and an awful performance, with the same mistakes being made once again.

And for as your "we start the season slow" remark - not so, in the 09/10 season we had more than double the points at this stage of the season than we do now. Whilst we have lost a fair bit of quality, it's not been that significant to take us from 22 points in 10 games to 10 points in 10 games. We still have good players capable of challenging for 3rd, sadly we only have a manager capable of challenging for relegation.

I agree with most of what you say Hobo.

One exception is the point you make about the loss of of quality in summer not being too significant.

The loss of Goody and Conway would be a 'significant' enough loss for me, but with Prince and Gomis off too I think we have lost a hell of a lot of quality - albeit I rekon Rankin is a decent replacement for one of the departed central midfielders.

You can't take the likes of Goodie and Conway out of the team and expect us to be as good a side without replacing them with similar quality.

There does seem to be plausable arguements on both sides, but my glass still stands half full, we are only 10 games into the season and admitidly worse than we have been, but the man has to be given the chance to put things right or get us back into the top 6. We all know the players seem to like houston with the exception of maybe scott allan just now. If you sack houston right now and you get someone else in who turns out to be worse things could be very bad by xmas, if things are really bad going into mid november then fair enough, this is the 1st time we've been out the top 6 for 3 seasons, houston has to be given a chance at least or are we going to change managers the next time we slip to 7th/8th in the league, and i've still not heard a decent shout for a replacement yet.

I dont care who replaces him as long as he does not employ the same negative boring taticks. Also the new guy will be comitted to United and not swan off.

Oh yea, and learn by mistakes.

When Conway was fit he played. GMS when fit sits on the bench and hasn't made a start yet. A winger who we have been crying out for. Houston has failed to utilise the full strength and depth of his "small squad".

I think I underestimated how important David Goodwillie was to us.

Very true Ivan, I also believe Houston has fallen into that trap.