This is true. Some of them are downgrades but not massively so. We're talking about players that are 7 or 8 out of 10 being replaced by players that are 6 or 7 out of 10. Our problem this season is we have no 10s or 9s, not that we have lost our 7s and 8s for a bit of time.
The OP said:
I see that as we are not good enough to be challenging for the automatics and not that we aren't good enough to be scraping the playoffs. We are good enough to scrape the playoffs and injuries have probably set us back a bit. I still think that is a failure of the club to only be in a position where with a fully fit squad we could have scraped the playoffs when last season we were of the best 3 teams in the league. The team that wins the race to 6th rarely goes on to win promotion. It is far more likely that the team that fails to get the autos goes on to win the playoffs because they are the better team. We have fallen massively in quality because we lost all of our star players and replaced them with players that are a lower quality.
I think the injuries are a valid excuse for us not being as good as we could have been but they are not a good excuse for why this squad isn't anywhere near close to being good enough to challenge for the autos. Recruitment is the main issue and the extremely slow start to the season can be blamed on recruitment, as can the post-January slump.
There is another topic on the board today for championship team of the year. We haven't got anyone that you would even remotely say should be in contention this season. Last year Akpom was there, as the best player in the league, and you could have made a case for Giles and Archer and maybe Hackney. If we're going to have anyone in contention next year then it's probably going to come from Hackney or VDB or it will be a new signing because I really can't see anyone else being capable.
The squad is good in the sense that we have a big squad of capable players and that is why the injuries haven't affected us as badly as they could have done but we are seriously lacking star quality and that is what we need to change this summer.
I didn't think at the start of the season we'd get the autos, not through who we'd brought in (as I hadn't seen them even play together then and couldn't judge) but more to the fact that the team had had such wholesale changes right through it and would have to learn to play together in competitive fixtures which would take a bit of time to get up to speed on, which proved to be the case, worse so than I thought in fact.
There was also the fact that the teams newly in the league seemed stronger on paper than those that had left last season; the fact that FOUR of them could still very feasibly break the 90 point barrier with a handful of games left this year bears that out.
I thought before the first game kicked off that we'd probably finish around 5th due to these factors, that and the fact we would have been incredibly lucky to land a player who could replace Akpom in their first season. A squad downgrade on last season, even if not massively so, and considering the amount of essential players we had to replace perhaps unsurprising. Not that I thought we'd win the playoffs if pushed; anything can happen, but less likely with that lot up there now and as it worked out with 2 of the 4 of them missing out on the autos...not that they've been our biggest challenges in ordinary fixtures, but the playoffs are a different beast.
Looking at it logically that's where we possibly could have finished without this mother of all injury crisises, it's certainly reasonable that with a better keeper between the sticks than Glover for a fair few games, with a far stronger bench to call on to change a game, with players able to play in their most natural positions, we could be 8 or 9 points better off and fighting West Brom and Norwich, with 2 of our 3 games left at home and only Leeds to face who weren't on the beach already?
I do think the club is moving in the right direction though in steering us away from over-reliance in loans, which is what this season was about, a transitional season indeed. If stellar loans get you up, then great. If they don't...then you're in a worse position for next campaign as a result of it.
