A Bridge Too Far!!

Teams wanting promotion from chaampionship need to be out of both cups asap.
Far too many games otherwise.
Concentrate on the league, 46 games is enough for any squad
 
Uche & Hernandez for Balogun & Connolly

Injuries early in the season to Dijksteel, Fry, Hall & Bola cost us.

a keeper and two strikers in January would have gotten us over the line.
 
In a nutshell we lost too many games against those teams especially at the lower end of the division. The cup run while electrifying probably over stretched a very small squad which was for the most part over achieving.
 
The squad had not enough quality and quantity, certainly to maintain a FAC run ot top 6 - in 1992 and 1998 we had bigger and better squads. Early in the season Warnock could not even name a full bench for one league game. Simple things like releasing Johnson on a free and not finding a left back until November in Taylor and thinking we could survive with one left back.

Too many signings that were not good enough for this season for a top 6 side. I know there is a limited budget, but I felt we could be a bit cleverer such as not wasting money on an seriously injured player or untried player from Rennes, better to have kept Sam Mosey and most fans said this at the time.
 
Redwurzel said:
The squad had not enough quality and quantity, certainly to maintain a FAC run ot top 6 - in 1992 and 1998 we had bigger and better squads. Early in the season Warnock could not even name a full bench for one league game. Simple things like releasing Johnson on a free and not finding a left back until November in Taylor and thinking we could survive with one left back.

Too many signings that were not good enough for this season for a top 6 side. I know there is a limited budget, but I felt we could be a bit cleverer such as not wasting money on an seriously injured player or untried player from Rennes, better to have kept Sam Mosey and most fans said this at the time.
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Lennie’s squad in 1991/92 was probably smaller than the one Wilder’s been using. He used loan signings and kids to plug gaps here and there. We had two subs in those days. Falconer spent most of the season injured and he lost Mowbray really early on. He had to replace him with Jon Gittens.

It does my head when people complain about cup runs and needing massive squads TBH. You need a good, committed core of players and some good management/coaching staff. You put Wilko or Bernie or Hendrie into this team and we make the playoffs IMO. And then nobody can use cups as an excuse for anything.
 
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viv_andersons_nana said:
It does my head when people complain about cup runs and needing massive squads TBH.
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The only caveat I'd accept is that relative fitness matters - especially when there are a lot of games packed together.

If you're playing your 3rd game of the week and your opponent is only on their first then you're going to be at a disadvantage no matter how fit or committed you are.
 
I did write QUALITY and quantity.

In 1992 we had 2 Irish internationals, 2 future England Internationals (Cooper, Ripley) 4 if you count England B caps (Pears and Mowbray) and some future Premier League players in Hendrie, Phillips, Mustoe.

In 1998 our forwards were Merson, Beck, Ricard, Branca, Alan Armstrong. Enormous investment in todays money.
 
Redwurzel said:
I did write QUALITY and quantity.

In 1992 we had 2 Irish internationals, 2 future England Internationals (Cooper, Ripley) 4 if you count England B caps (Pears and Mowbray) and some future Premier League players in Hendrie, Phillips, Mustoe.

In 1998 our forwards were Merson, Beck, Ricard, Branca, Alan Armstrong. Enormous investment in todays money.
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I agree there was more quality in the 1991/92 squad, but my point is that that squad played 60 games across the season with 18 senior players.

That’s including Pollock, who was only a teenager, Ian Ironside, Falconer, who was injured in September and came back at Old Trafford in March, Andy Payton, who was injured on his debut and missed a chunk of games and Jon Gittens, signed to replace the best defender at the club in Tony Mowbray.

He used players like Ian Arnold, Michael Young and Graham Kavanagh(17 at the time) to fill the bench. Shannon, Hewitt and Marwood spent a month each on loan but they were filler for the bench, let’s be honest.

Did Lennie moan about anything? He just cracked on. The squad itself was absolute threadbare but we took it by the scruff of the neck and tried to win every competition we were in.

This squad, people say McNair or whoever never had a rest, well how many rests did Mustoe or Peake or Phillips or Fleming or Wilko or Kernaghan or Pollock need?

This season we played 51 games with a core of 20 players(including Coburn and the January signings and Taylor, not including Fisher, Ameobi, Ikpeazu, Hernandez). We had some injuries in that core group but nothing major really.

Warnock and Wilder certainly didn’t have their club captain and best defender sold from underneath them, or lose a player of Falconer’s quality for 5 or 6 months.

That we haven’t made the top six has little to do with the cup run IMO. We went out of the cups at the first hurdle last season, did it help us later on in the campaign? It didn’t. We were well off the pace, same as the year before.
 
newyddion said:
Uche & Hernandez for Balogun & Connolly

Injuries early in the season to Dijksteel, Fry, Hall & Bola cost us.

a keeper and two strikers in January would have gotten us over the line.
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Yep and I'm sure Neil would have kept both Uche and Hernandez...He wanted Keiffer Moore in the Summer and the club dilly dallied and didn't back him 100%
I firmly believe we would have been at least in the play offs 👍
 
Nobby_Barnes said:
Yep and I'm sure Neil would have kept both Uche and Hernandez...He wanted Keiffer Moore in the Summer and the club dilly dallied and didn't back him 100%
I firmly believe we would have been at least in the play offs 👍
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Stop banging on about Neil. Let it go. He's gone. When we were in 14th place.
 
TeaCider said:
Surely that was the same for every club though.

Squad sizes were much smaller in the past and fatigue is relative.
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Well surely it’s the same now? We can’t cite tiredness as a factor because others have the same issues across a season. They’d be just as tired as we are or were. We’ve played 50 games across 9 months, it’s not like we went deep into the League Cup as well and had a massive fixture pile-up.

My point is that back then we had a manager who embraced the cups and didn’t complain about footballers having to play football, or choose to play reserve teams and drop out at the earliest opportunity. Cup matches are an easy excuse for failures elsewhere IMO.
 
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