[Albion] Damned whatever we did apparently.....

All the outsiders and critics can **** off. One minute we are anti football and deserve to get relegated. Bloom acts and now we get battered for getting rid of him. Most comments on social media are that we should be happy with 17th and how dare we have progressive plans.
I am very sad he has gone but understand why and am excited by what the future holds. Let's do a Wolves next year and shut the clueless critics up.

bluenitsuj said:

All the outsiders and critics can **** off. One minute we are anti football and deserve to get relegated. Bloom acts and now we get battered for getting rid of him. Most comments on social media are that we should be happy with 17th and how dare we have progressive plans.
I am very sad he has gone but understand why and am excited by what the future holds. Let's do a Wolves next year and shut the clueless critics up.

Click to expand...

The last time I saw one of the most vocal critics of TB's decision on Twitter at The Amex, he spent the entire match in the press room. He didn't see a minute of the game live, and didn't bother to stroll down to the post-match interviews either, knowing that someone else would email him the quotes..

Given the budget Hughton was working with and the expectation of where we’d be in the table, ie bottom 6, we were certainly in or around where we “should” be given that factor. Throw in an FA Cup semi and it looks like a ridiculously harsh sacking. But looking under the surface I think Bloom has done this because:

1. We’ve spent around £120m since getting promoted, and have gone backwards. We’re 4 points worse off than last season, and were in effect bailed out by 3 clubs ill equipped to cope with the PL. Now you could say that happens every season for whoever stays up, but when it came down to it, Cardiff were just a home win over Palace away from sending us down. So it was, in the end, completely out of our hands. I think that was too close a call for Bloom to accept.

2. Form since Christmas. 3 wins over the remaining 60% of the season, 7 games in a row without scoring and barely looking likely to, no wins since the 2-1 at Palace back on 9th March. A whole series in 2019 of truly stupefying performances bereft of any attacking intent. Particular lowlights being a catastrophic collapse at Fulham, a total humiliation against Bournemouth, a woefully on-the-back-foot defeat to Southampton, a disastrous mental disintegration against Cardiff where we somehow found a way of plumbing all new levels of ineptitude, and a shaky draw with Newcastle where the first half was just so dire it almost defied belief. Add to that numerous standard road trips, where we basically set up with an isolated Murray, with the primary purpose of not leaving our own half. The Wolves fans chanting “How’d you watch this every week ?” probably summed it up. Given our appalling results against all the teams down there around us (except hapless Hudds), it’s actually quite surprising how we somehow stayed out of the bottom 3.

3. Jahanbakhsh and Locadia. This goes back to the point of investment, but Hughton has not managed to get a tune out of them. Injury has played a part, and I’m not blaming Hughton entirely for their dismal form. But Jahanbakhsh played predominantly through the middle when he finished top scorer in the Eredivisie last season – Hughton has played him out wide, presumably because he felt Murray was still undroppable, and he’s never going to play 2 up top in this division. Similarly Locadia, when he’s played, has been deployed on the left of a front 3. Now neither of these two have looked remotely up to it, but it’s not all that surprising when they’re being asked to play a different role. They failed, so CH of course reverted to his tried-and-trusted. I’ve no doubt this will have grated with Bloom. Not all Hughton’s fault, as I don’t know how much real input he would have had at bringing them to the club in the first place. But his cautious approach meant they never really had a chance of getting a decent run in their usual positions. I’d also have liked to have seen Andone given more of a run as he can at least stretch defences, maybe even (gulp) playing alongside Murray, certainly at home. But nope, that’s obviously too bold.

Now amongst all that there are some mitigating factors, some possibly under Hughtons control and some not, which is why I’m very torn on what Bloom has done. Personally I’d have kept Hughton on because he is a very fine manager and I think he deserved another crack at it at least into part of next season, to see if the summer recruitment would improve us. If by Nov/Dec we’re still looking every bit as terrible as we’ve been since the turn of the year then I think it’d be time to part ways and try something new. But I think Bloom has looked at how the last set of (fairly expensive for us) investments have failed to be integrated effectively into the 1st team, and he perhaps feels he doesn’t want to potentially go down that road again with Hughton with whoever is coming in this summer. It’s a massive gamble, and it could well backfire, only time will tell. I’m worried, but given the dreadful paucity of the football so far in 2019, I’m not completely shocked that in the end he pulled the trigger. Which is sad, and ruthless. But he’s writing the cheques and will view it as simply protecting his investment. Whether we agree with him or not, we know that he only has the best interests of BHA at heart.

As for the timing…well, he’s not going to announce it in the run-up to the City game just so that we can all give him a sendoff, because when a team knows the manager is outgoing, it can affect the performance. Maybe if Sunday was a dead rubber it wouldn’t have mattered, but given that it was the climax of the title race, I guess Bloom didn’t want it known that we had a lame duck in the dugout. Plus he’d have known just how split the fanbase would be on this, so it could’ve led to a toxic atmosphere. Having decided he wasn’t sticking with Hughton for next season, I don’t think he could do much else about the timing tbh.

As for the shitstorm amongst fans and media - they simply haven't scratched the surface to look at the underlying reasons for this decision. So I don't give a shit what they think.

Mtoto said:

Yes, lots of games: good, bad and indifferent. I was there when we beat Manchester United for the second season running and looked very comfortable as we did it. Were you? And when we beat Palace with 10 men. How about you? Couldn't make the FA Cup semi-final sadly, most annoying as I was at the first one in 1983 but most reports suggest we played very well. Do you not agree?

I was there for Cardiff and Bournemouth too. Ugly, for sure, but it looked to me like a team suffering a collective crisis of confidence after a poor run, at least some of which was down to nothing more than bad luck, not one where the "atmosphere in the dressing [room] was clearly disintegrating". Unless you're the kit man, that's pure conjecture.

Whatever it was, though, Hughton saw it too - and responded. He went back to the team that got promoted, steadied the ship and ground out the results - including a point at both Wolves and Arsenal - that kept us in the Premier League. Crisis management is part of the job, and he did it successfully - much more so than either of us would have done, I fancy. And then got the tin tack a day after the last game with no chance to pick up the thread of what has been, overall, steady and sustained progress since the day he arrived.

There seems to be a big crossover on here between people who say it was the right decision to sack him, and those who were noisily claiming a couple of months ago that we were certain to be relegated if we didn't "get rid" and bring in A N Other manager - Big Sam? - and now hate being shown up as fickle, whiney pessimists who took all of a fortnight to lose faith in the most successful manager we've ever had. Bloom most certainly had a choice, let's hope he and we don't end up looking back on it as the worst he's ever made.

Click to expand...

Agree with this post 100%, paragraphs 3 and 4 absolutely spot on.

Willow said:

One thing I have learnt from this episode is not to comment on other teams internal affairs. So many of the comments from other fans in the BBC comments section and even some journalists on Twitter are utterly clueless.

Click to expand...

Oh go on, share some of your favourites

blockhseagull said:

Because the general public seem to think that we sacked Hughton because 17th wasn’t good enough.

Bloom sacked him because he didn’t believe he could deliver 17th next season.

Click to expand...

That’s not what Tony’s statement says. Every word explaining the decision was looking back at 2018/19. So it can’t be a huge surprise if the public think that Tony wasn’t happy with 17th (and the performances).



And yet, your assertion is the only one that actually makes any sense. So - why did the statement not say that? Perhaps because Chris’ performance was always measured (publicly at least) in terms of PL survival this season - and in that regard, he delivered.

Mtoto said:

Whatever it was, though, Hughton saw it too - and responded. He went back to the team that got promoted, steadied the ship and ground out the results - including a point at both Wolves and Arsenal - that kept us in the Premier League. Crisis management is part of the job, and he did it successfully - much more so than either of us would have done, I fancy. And then got the tin tack a day after the last game with no chance to pick up the thread of what has been, overall, steady and sustained progress since the day he arrived.

There seems to be a big crossover on here between people who say it was the right decision to sack him, and those who were noisily claiming a couple of months ago that we were certain to be relegated if we didn't "get rid" and bring in A N Other manager - Big Sam? - and now hate being shown up as fickle, whiney pessimists who took all of a fortnight to lose faith in the most successful manager we've ever had. Bloom most certainly had a choice, let's hope he and we don't end up looking back on it as the worst he's ever made.

Click to expand...

He responded? Certainly not in the games themselves.

If you mean deploying the narrowest of back lines with another back 4 in front of them for the two subsequent games, Wolves and Spurs, to accumulate 1 point which wouldn't have mattered anyway had Cardiff capitilised on the opportunity we handed them, then I'm not sure that gives me much inspiration. The Arsenal game was pressure off, and this team look totally different when not under it.

Look, I am a CH fan and through my posting history you will find I am a big fan of pragmatism and criticise the football purists as much as anyone, but this constant amending of history is tiresome. The fact you suggest our games vs Bournemouth and Cardiff merely seemed to be a 'confidence crisis' is telling. We completely came apart at the seams when it mattered most. If that didn't deeply trouble you then I wonder how invested you actually are.

At some point you and many others are going to have to come down from the Hughton perch, who is no longer employed by the club you support, and get on board the decision made by our lifelong fan and owner who has done so in the best interests of the football club. It could end up being a bad decision, but we will never know if keeping him would also have been a bad decision. You obviously think he would keep us up again, many others see a terminal decline and an unwillingness from our players to facilitate his approach any longer. It's going to be insufferably tedious to keep reading posts with the hindsight of "It would have been better with CH" at the first sign of a blip. Let's not make this decision define us.

He was a fantastic manager for us and will be remembered as such, he will continue to be for another lucky set of fans soon enough. We decided his time was up here, as it is for the vast majority of managers across the planet after an extended period at a football club.

Nixonator said:

He responded? Certainly not in the games themselves.

If you mean deploying the narrowest of back lines with another back 4 in front of them for the two subsequent games, Wolves and Spurs, to accumulate 1 point which wouldn't have mattered anyway had Cardiff capitilised on the opportunity we handed them, then I'm not sure that gives me much inspiration. The Arsenal game was pressure off, and this team look totally different when not under it.

Look, I am a CH fan and through my posting history you will find I am a big fan of pragmatism and criticise the football purists as much as anyone, but this constant amending of history is tiresome. The fact you suggest our games vs Bournemouth and Cardiff merely seemed to be a 'confidence crisis' is telling. We completely came apart at the seams when it mattered most. If that didn't deeply trouble you then I wonder how invested you actually are.

At some point you and many others are going to have to come down from the Hughton perch, who is no longer employed by the club you support, and get on board the decision made by our lifelong fan and owner who has done so in the best interests of the football club. It could end up being a bad decision, but we will never know if keeping him would also have been a bad decision. You obviously think he would keep us up again, many others see a terminal decline and an unwillingness from our players to facilitate his approach any longer. It's going to be insufferably tedious to keep reading posts with the hindsight of "It would have been better with CH" at the first sign of a blip. Let's not make this decision define us.

He was a fantastic manager for us and will be remembered as such, he will continue to be for another lucky set of fans soon enough. We decided his time was up here, as it is for the vast majority of managers across the planet after an extended period at a football club.

Click to expand...

I wish to affiliate myself with the gentleman's remarks.

now henry winter in the times calls the decision "cowardly",
it's all getting a little bit out of order now!

CH did not fail, he kept us up...........but I still understand why he has gone.

You have these pundits saying "what do they want?". Ummmm, to IMPROVE maybe? What's the point of starting EVERY season just wanting to survive? Imagine if we hung on again next season under CH. Would he again be unsackable in the pundits eyes because we stayed up? If so you could do that for years and years and years. Sure, there is the risk of relegation but this is competitive sport. GO FOR IT.

CH did not 'deserve' to be fired. But if the club don't think he is the man to push onto the next stage then it's kinder for all to end it now.

Some pundits seem to act as if his sacking means the club thinks he failed. I like to see it as 'seeking a new direction', however vomity that is.

Goldstone1976 said:

That’s not what Tony’s statement says. Every word explaining the decision was looking back at 2018/19. So it can’t be a huge surprise if the public think that Tony wasn’t happy with 17th (and the performances).



And yet, your assertion is the only one that actually makes any sense. So - why did the statement not say that? Perhaps because Chris’ performance was always measured (publicly at least) in terms of PL survival this season - and in that regard, he delivered.

Click to expand...

I thought the part that said the performances have put our status at significant risk.... which I read as meaning he isn’t prepared to continue risking our premier league safety under CH.

But I suppose you can read it in a variety of ways.

Nixonator said:

He responded? Certainly not in the games themselves.

If you mean deploying the narrowest of back lines with another back 4 in front of them for the two subsequent games, Wolves and Spurs, to accumulate 1 point which wouldn't have mattered anyway had Cardiff capitilised on the opportunity we handed them, then I'm not sure that gives me much inspiration. The Arsenal game was pressure off, and this team look totally different when not under it.

Look, I am a CH fan and through my posting history you will find I am a big fan of pragmatism and criticise the football purists as much as anyone, but this constant amending of history is tiresome. The fact you suggest our games vs Bournemouth and Cardiff merely seemed to be a 'confidence crisis' is telling. We completely came apart at the seams when it mattered most. If that didn't deeply trouble you then I wonder how invested you actually are.

At some point you and many others are going to have to come down from the Hughton perch, who is no longer employed by the club you support, and get on board the decision made by our lifelong fan and owner who has done so in the best interests of the football club. It could end up being a bad decision, but we will never know if keeping him would also have been a bad decision. You obviously think he would keep us up again, many others see a terminal decline and an unwillingness from our players to facilitate his approach any longer. It's going to be insufferably tedious to keep reading posts with the hindsight of "It would have been better with CH" at the first sign of a blip. Let's not make this decision define us.

He was a fantastic manager for us and will be remembered as such, he will continue to be for another lucky set of fans soon enough. We decided his time was up here, as it is for the vast majority of managers across the planet after an extended period at a football club.

Click to expand...

Hear hear. The reason we're arguing amongst ourselves though is because it IS such a gamble. Although I've been annoyed by the 'ungrateful, short-sighted racists' tag that we seem to have been given, I can see the critics have a point. If at the start of the season you'd have offered me survival (guaranteed before the last game), a Wembley appearance and the double over Palace - I'd have bitten your arm off. (As I guess we all would have). However we all know that although the season's objectives were achieved, the underlying trend was downwards, and like a lot of others I'm convinced that if TB hadn't gambled that downward trend would have continued and we'd have been as near as dammit 100% guaranteed to be relegated next season.

Of course we still may be relegated, but that doesn't mean the gamble was wrong.

blockhseagull said:

I thought the part that said the performances have put our status at significant risk.... which I read as meaning he isn’t prepared to continue risking our premier league safety under CH.

But I suppose you can read it in a variety of ways.

Click to expand...

It’s a really pedantic point, I know, but Tony said “Our run of 3 wins from 23 Premier League matches put our status at significant risk.“; which I think is a considerably more backwards looking statement and, by mentioning 3/23, specifically refers to last season than “our performances HAVE (my emphasis) put...”.

But yes, still some room for ambiguity, I guess.

Brovion said:

Yeah. The view of most neutrals (exacerbated by Paul Hayward's article in the Telegraph) is that we're a bunch of greedy racist upstarts with ideas above our station. And the irony is I bet a lot of these people are the same ones who sneered at our negative tactics, called us the 'new Stoke' and hoped we got relegated.

Click to expand...

That's exactly my thoughts. We can't win. We were criticised for stinking the league out (rightly so imo) and then criticised for trying to change it - can't win when you're in the prem league media spotlight eh...

sheebo said:

That's exactly my thoughts. We can't win. We were criticised for stinking the league out (rightly so imo) and then criticised for trying to change it - can't win when you're in the prem league media spotlight eh...

Click to expand...

Yeah, I preferred it when we were 'under the radar'!

Nixonator said:

He responded? Certainly not in the games themselves.

If you mean deploying the narrowest of back lines with another back 4 in front of them for the two subsequent games, Wolves and Spurs, to accumulate 1 point which wouldn't have mattered anyway had Cardiff capitilised on the opportunity we handed them, then I'm not sure that gives me much inspiration. The Arsenal game was pressure off, and this team look totally different when not under it.

Look, I am a CH fan and through my posting history you will find I am a big fan of pragmatism and criticise the football purists as much as anyone, but this constant amending of history is tiresome. The fact you suggest our games vs Bournemouth and Cardiff merely seemed to be a 'confidence crisis' is telling. We completely came apart at the seams when it mattered most. If that didn't deeply trouble you then I wonder how invested you actually are.

At some point you and many others are going to have to come down from the Hughton perch, who is no longer employed by the club you support, and get on board the decision made by our lifelong fan and owner who has done so in the best interests of the football club. It could end up being a bad decision, but we will never know if keeping him would also have been a bad decision. You obviously think he would keep us up again, many others see a terminal decline and an unwillingness from our players to facilitate his approach any longer. It's going to be insufferably tedious to keep reading posts with the hindsight of "It would have been better with CH" at the first sign of a blip. Let's not make this decision define us.

He was a fantastic manager for us and will be remembered as such, he will continue to be for another lucky set of fans soon enough. We decided his time was up here, as it is for the vast majority of managers across the planet after an extended period at a football club.

Click to expand...

Of course it troubled me, they were abject and looked utterly lost. But just *four days later* they got a point at Wolves. Remarkable turnaround, don't you think? Hughton gave them back something - confidence, belief, whatever - and they were able to build on it sufficiently to get over the line. That in turn contributed to the "pressure off" performance at Arsenal. You can't just pick out the results that suit your case and treat them in isolation.

Yes, I think he would keep us up and so do many more objective judges, including the odds-setters who were the basis for the falsehood about "favourites for relegation" in the original post. We are not favourites for relegation, and weren't before Hughton was sacked either. It's going to be a struggle, but the betting is very much that we would come through. I've met a few of the odds compilers - they are immersed in football from dawn to dusk as if their jobs depended on it, which of course, they do. They don't see a "terminal decline", they see a poor run of results that will revert to the mean in time, a mean that will be good enough to keep us up.

As for the bit about "his time was up", it's true that most managers are sacked in the end but generally not after achieving their main aim for the season and at the end of four-and-a-half seasons of sustained (and sustainable) progress. It was a shabby and dishonourable way to treat him, and if it comes back to haunt us, the fickle mob whose faith and support was so tissue-thin will only be getting what they deserve. They will also, as per usual, probably be the first to whine.

Pavilionaire said:

Thank God the season was only 38 games long and not the 42 of old!

Click to expand...

Because Cardiff would have overtaken us? Logically, we would then have finished 18th out of 22

Mtoto said:

As for the bit about "his time was up", it's true that most managers are sacked in the end

Click to expand...

Sacking the manager is infinitely easier than sacking 25 players. And infinitely more popular.

My pick for manager is Sir Humphrey Appelby:

"Something must be done.
This is something.
This must be done."

Nixonator said:

He responded? Certainly not in the games themselves.

If you mean deploying the narrowest of back lines with another back 4 in front of them for the two subsequent games, Wolves and Spurs, to accumulate 1 point which wouldn't have mattered anyway had Cardiff capitilised on the opportunity we handed them, then I'm not sure that gives me much inspiration. The Arsenal game was pressure off, and this team look totally different when not under it.

Look, I am a CH fan and through my posting history you will find I am a big fan of pragmatism and criticise the football purists as much as anyone, but this constant amending of history is tiresome. The fact you suggest our games vs Bournemouth and Cardiff merely seemed to be a 'confidence crisis' is telling. We completely came apart at the seams when it mattered most. If that didn't deeply trouble you then I wonder how invested you actually are.

At some point you and many others are going to have to come down from the Hughton perch, who is no longer employed by the club you support, and get on board the decision made by our lifelong fan and owner who has done so in the best interests of the football club. It could end up being a bad decision, but we will never know if keeping him would also have been a bad decision. You obviously think he would keep us up again, many others see a terminal decline and an unwillingness from our players to facilitate his approach any longer. It's going to be insufferably tedious to keep reading posts with the hindsight of "It would have been better with CH" at the first sign of a blip. Let's not make this decision define us.

He was a fantastic manager for us and will be remembered as such, he will continue to be for another lucky set of fans soon enough. We decided his time was up here, as it is for the vast majority of managers across the planet after an extended period at a football club.

Click to expand...

Thankfully TB saw it the same way and finally put sentiment to one side. The decline on the playing side, for example from Jan-May 2018 in contrast to Jan-May 2019, was stark, despite an enticing run of home games against other basement clubs. TB has far more at stake than us, he is party to behinds the scenes information and he has access to expert assessments. I respect his judgment 100%.

We can be forever thankful to CH for his unforgettable achievements with the Albion, whilst at the same time looking forward to an exciting new era, starting with this summer’s transfer business.