BUTOR

4 minutes ago, Davefevs said:

As per my OP…I posted this to show what Nige said.  There was no inference of him being moody, having a go, etc.

Purely posted along with snippets of James Piercy’s transcript to give clarity to the Qs we’ve all been asking.

In summary.

Nige didn’t set the budget, he will adhere to it as best he can.

He doesn’t know why he can’t use some of the funds generated from the Scott sale and any further questions should be directed as others, he can only front-up the football-ops stuff.

 

I don’t think there is hysteria on here, but justified annoyance at what Nige is having to deal with PLUS the lack of any noise from “above”….based on expectations from previous comments from Nige, Tins re recruitment and SL re “what football makes it can spend”

This forum isn’t unhinged at all.  If fans being annoyed at what appears to be a renege of promises from SL is unhinged, then send me to my padded cell now.

I completely understand annoyance. Especially if you’ve been witness to what people feel is now a cycle repeating itself for many years over. It must be maddening. But I’m talking about some of the more shadowy conspiratorial stuff. Inferences that the Lansdown’s are plotting NP’s downfall or have lined up his successor with a war chest ready to burn. I don’t feel that some of the things being said reflect the actual reality of the situation, or what we’ve heard from the lips of NP. I defintely don’t think I’ve ever seen a managers words be quite as hyper analysed. To me he just seems content to be getting on with the job and has faith in the players he has. Why don’t the very positive things he says in press conferences get quoted and stuck up online? Rhetorical question, but as it did yesterday a small, potentially negative snippet being plastered everywhere before the full presser is even available massively adds to the imbalance of opinion. 

What I don’t want is for us as a fan base to write off a season and squad that could yet prove positive before they’ve even had a chance. The manager has faith in them, most of us have faith in the manager, so let’s see how they develop. 

The need for clarity I fully appreciate and that would put a lot of questions to bed. That silence is really something that feeds wayward narratives too. You have to hope it’s coming. 

5 minutes ago, GrahamC said:

That’s completely fair.

I do think it isn’t unreasonable to say though that even the more cautious amongst us expected Pearson to be able to bring in more than one loan player with Scott sold & Kalas & now HNM’s futures being elsewhere.

There is some complete nonsense on here but also anger at SL’s comments & apparent desire to create this bloody “nest egg”.

At the same time, if Lansdown suddenly allocates 20% of the Scott fee towards a creative midfielder and a centre back, does some of this vitriol suddenly go away? I doubt it. The margins don’t seem that tight. It seems like it’s the result of years of frustration which again I understand.  Some of you have been supporting City a lot longer than I have and if you are a senior fan I can see how you’d be completely ground down by the prospect of another false dawn. However there has to be some perspective on the actual situation at hand, today, right now. We’ve adopted a strategy that most of us thought was necessary after the mess we found ourselves in recently and we’re sticking to it. We’ve spent money, yes not proportional with the incoming but still not insignificant amounts across the last two windows. We’ve got a manager determined to get on with the situation in hand despite what scrolling past news bites might suggest.

We’ve seen this club in crisis, it isn’t in crisis now.

I remember a thread after the West Brom Boxing Day loss last season. ‘The Lansdowns are a pox on this football club’, or something like that. Football is a results business in every way and this is what bad results do. They tint the perspective on everything and cause frantic, dramatic responses. Especially when expectation isn’t met. It’s always been the same. A couple of wins, a good performance and a result at Swansea, everything settles down. People start seeing the positives more, the players due to come back from injury, perhaps Yeobah makes an impact and all of a sudden we’re looking towards the horizon of a successful season. As it happens we have had 3 poor home performances which, in my opinion, has accounted for the overwhelming majority of this negativity. 

By the way, I called for the managers head that day against West Brom, I’m not claiming to be above the reactionary fan, I would also love to see a new addition to the midfield and think we need one. But there is a real imbalance and paranoia to some of the stuff being written on here recently that is genuinely quite bizarre. We’re four games into the league season, let’s see how things unfold and try not to let the past overwhelm what could be possible in the present. 

I’ve just watched the full presser. After the hysteria on this thread I expected something far worse than what I saw. Pearson was jovial, much more so than usual, and reiterated time and time again that he is willing and ready to work within the parameters that have been set. And within those parameters he “absolutely” believes the ambitions set pre season haven’t shifted an inch. Focus on what was actually said and it was a fairly positive interview. 

This forum has been an unhinged read for days now. Again I quote Nige from the latest presser that a couple of poor results can tend to send people on an ‘emotional rollercoaster’ and I feel that’s what’s happened here. If we’d won a couple more, even if some of the results had happened in a different pattern, there would nothing close to the levels of paranoia seen on here recently. I also feel a lot of this noise is related to past events, pent up frustration over a number of years, rather than the actual situation at hand today. I understand that, but focus on the reality of now and it’s nowhere near a crisis. We have important players out injured which is emphasising the situation tenfold. 

1 minute ago, fisherrich said:

Agreed, reckon this will unravel over the next two weeks.

Three people have said the timing is ‘interesting’ but haven’t elaborated as to how. Unravel into what?

23 minutes ago, Curr Avon said:

The 2012/13 season should serve as a warning.

McInnes had his budget slashed by 50% and recruited poor players.

Result, he was fired in January 2013, O'Driscoll was quickly installed as manager, followed by relegation with a record 27 League defeats.

And it didn't end there! 

Remember the Five Pillars?

In fairness, the implementation of the five pillars are the reason we didn’t get relegated during the latest mess. 
 

*some of the five pillars I should say.

11 minutes ago, CrackingCheeseGromit said:

What I fail to understand is why anyone would choose to sit / stand in one corner of the Atyeo, UNLESS it was goad and antagonise away supporters. This, is reason enough to not allow it. 

I saw a rugby game in there last year and loved it. It’s so outdated compared to the rest of the ground internally it’s like walking into a Bristol City time machine. Great nostalgia trip.

54 minutes ago, W-S-M Seagull said:

SL gets a hell of a lot of crap from our fans, but the vast majority of FL clubs would love him to own them. 

We are sometimes guilty of taking his ownership for granted. 

So many clubs have dodgy owners. 

As long as SL is here we will always have a club. 

Absolutely agree. I travel a lot and speak to fans up and down the country, the amount of horror stories regarding owners is striking. Those who travel with City away regularly I’m sure will have had the same experiences. From the Championship to the amateur leagues there are supporters everywhere who have had their clubs torn to pieces.

We as a fan base are not used to being owned by someone who may not have the best interests of BCFC at heart. The very fact we can say that of our owner (despite errors of judgement) makes us the envy of hundreds of football clubs in this country and beyond. When the time comes I don’t think many are ready for the change it will bring. We are not talking about a couple of new January signings here who will ‘freshen things up’ (a quote I’ve seen regarding new ownership), we are talking about a seismic change of order and everything Bristol City has been for a long old while - for better or worse - will cease to be again. I just pray to god it works out. 

5 minutes ago, Glen hump said:

We’ve been for sale for a couple of years now, apart from some interest from the USA nobody’s overly interested.

At the same time it is to the absolute credit of our current owner that not just any interested party has been allowed to go beyond just interest. How many owners in the EFL could you say the same of? 

3 minutes ago, The Journalist said:

Yeah, he’s certainly not a natural footballer. I like him, though.

(Watkins wasn’t a footballer at all and was lucky to get in the Bath City team when I covered them in my very early BBC days!).

I always thought Watkins got a bad rap here, he popped up with goals when he played. But like Cornick just unglamorous. 

Much more like the City we all expected to see this season. Chill out everyone we are going to be just fine. 

So just write off a whole season three games in? Far, far too early for this talk. 

6 minutes ago, Harry said:

Now for the bit where it actually could make perfect sense. 
Steve Lansdown, over multiple decades now, has regularly lurched from one model to the next at the drop of a hat.

After the last 3 years of working on the latest philosophy, he’s just as likely to completely change it altogether under a new manager. So, all that behind the scenes work of attempting to align everything could very likely just be thrown up in the air again by a new managerial appointment and Steve is re-convinced that the new man is the next messiah and has the kahuna’s to get us to the promised land. 

So yes, there is every chance that SL is storing up the cash for a new manager next season, but only on the assumption that he’s prepared to discard his latest blueprint for success. 
 

Watch this space…….. 

The only theory I buy when it comes to this because there is undoubtedly form there.

4 minutes ago, Superjack said:

Maybe not hoping he doesn't succeed. 

More like waiting impatiently for him to fail.

Has he not already had at least two very good opportunities to deem NP as ‘failed’? 

1. The half season before he was appointed permanently, where we showed no real signs of improvement.

2. The poor and inconsistent run last season which culminated in a fiercely toxic atmosphere, Pearson out chants and 95% of social media completely turning on the manager. If he is impatiently waiting for Nige’s head and doesn’t really like NP why on earth didn’t he fire him after that?

28 minutes ago, mozo said:

You're going to have to jog my memory because I don't recall the wage budget being mentioned publicly prior to the last week or so?

On OTIB we've discussed there being a maximum wage we would pay an individual player and that being decreased in recent years, butI don't recall any discussion about the overall wage limit or any managing of expectations that we were close to that limit despite lowering the overall wage bill? Have I just missed it?

You implied that City fans on OTIB are lauding the Luton example and therefore should be happy with a tight budget. I'm saying I don't think City on OTIB are at all pointing to Luton. It was Lansdown who did that.

I'm not sure why anyone would think Luton's achievement is replicable.

I’m sorry, I don’t really get your point. We’ve been told over a long period of time that we are adopting a cautious and sustainable approach which will not include a large budget in windows and scattergun spending sprees. As Nige explained today, it’s wrong to think of ‘budget’ strictly as transfer fees. Caution is obviously going to be applied everywhere and it’s always been safe to assume that will extend to wages, otherwise it isn’t caution. 

3 minutes ago, RedRoss said:

We have a wage structure and we're sticking to it and not going beyond that. Yes we've sold a player for £20 million but we are still heavily losing money as a club.. if we go and sign 5 more players as suggested by some fans on potentially 10 or 15 grand on 3/4 year contracts after just shifting the big wages we have what is the point. We could end up in exactly the same place in 2027/28 which would be madness.

Fans on here always reference Luton and say that should be the model to follow. Do you not think they had a very conservative wage structure compared to every other team in the Championship? Fans profess they want a sustainable club but when that finally starts happening their not happy. They don't want sustainable they only want successful by any means necessary. Unfortunately only 3 teams in this league are successful and more often than not its the parachute payment clubs that do it.

Plus we’ve had complete clarity about this strategy for about two years now. It’s not like we’ve been told as soon as we sell a player for decent money we go back to scattergun spending sprees. Nige in the Hull presser seemed as happy as he always has been to adhere. He’s said in the past challenging may not be possible with this system and he’s fully aware of that but he believes it’s the right way to sustain a football club. I don’t understand where these ideas of a tetchy relationship between board and Pearson are coming from besides reputations.

Fans talk about being fearful of throwing away our good work recently, so understand the severity of where we’ve come from, but in the same breath demand stretched funds. It all seems so dramatic and typical of our fan base after a poor performance. The conspiracies come out, everything goes so existential. 

It’s not like we’re exclusively in the free agent market either, yesterday we spent just shy of a million on a loan.

1 hour ago, RedM said:

A dodgy decision by the Ref has added a few decibels at times too. Nothing like a bit of injustice to get us going

100%. I love shit referees sometimes. They get the atmosphere going. Nothing better than charging down the stairs of the Dolman with your fellow supporters through pure indignant rage and camply throwing an arm out whilst bellowing profanities. 100% it raises the noise. 

3 hours ago, BCFCGav said:

Worth noting a win on Friday, which is far from impossible by the way, and we're 2W 1D 1L. And through in the cup. That's a strong start. 

I think we should challenge the Dickie red card, but if not we can use Naismith and Vyner centrally and hopefully get back to the strong defending of the first three matches of the season, and scrap another good away win.

I would put Pring centrally, Roberts LB and utilise Naismith in midfield but apart from that I completely agree. This level of meltdown should come out when it’s really warranted. I know we’re all beaten down at the prospect of another lower mid table boring season but I’ve never known such negativity this early into a campaign. From now to Christmas we will find out whether the Pearson era has legs to run, we will have our answers re reinforcements in the next week. In that sense there’s more certainty than there has been for a while, the expectations are set, we know where we’re aiming. Let’s just get behind the team see how it plays out. 

3 hours ago, weepywall said:

I think the club have done well in attracting new fans our home gates of 20k+ prove that, highest since the Div 1 days, unfortunately many of the "new" fans don't sing, create an atmosphere etc. I have plenty of new fans around me and they just happily drink their coffee and eat pasties and politely clap if we score and spend most of the game on their phones. Not sure of the attendance yesterday but the atmosphere wouldn't have been any worse if there was only 6k home fans there. I've been in crowds of 4 to 6k at AG and the atmosphere has been far better than yesterday and the Preston game...its a shame as when people are on it AG is as good as many grounds..mind you the football on display at the moment certainly doesn't help.

I relish the evening games when we aren’t doing so well, 12k will show up and we get one of the best atmospheres of the season.

“They’re my players and they’ll get my absolute support because I know, and we know internally, what the situation is”

I don’t want to be overly negative but let’s be honest here, is there a team with worse home support in the league in terms of noise? Cardiff maybe at a push?

That has never been us so it begs the question what on earth has happened? 

1 minute ago, ChrisBW said:

You clearly don’t understand the difference between “spending some money” and “splashing the cash”. 

We’ve spent money. I’m not supporting the strategy or promoting its merits but whether we like it or not this is the new reality. We won’t be spending anything like we have in the past regardless of who we sell. It’s sustainability above everything else. And on the whole we have had complete clarity about that so my question is why the outrage now? Mostly fans have been supportive of the noises coming out of the club regarding transfer strategy. Is it the Scott sale that has shifted things? Or is it simply reactionary negativity after a poor performance? 

Have we not been told for the past two and a bit years that this is the new reality at BCFC? Why the surprise/outrage now? 

Pearson has regularly reiterated on a number of occasions ‘those days are gone’ in regards to splashing the cash on marquee names and bringing in players with big wage demands. 

He has also been quoted as saying that promotion this way ‘might not be possible’, but he has always backed the idea of sustainability. It has consistently appeared that, despite some healthy confrontation, the board and Pearson have seen eye to eye on the overall strategy to this point. 

If something has changed recently, as I have seen many suggesting today, then why? I don’t believe it has. I don’t believe things are as frosty as is being made out. NP himself has talked of challenging as a minimum this season. 
 

There is a new reality at Bristol City, and if you have listened to anything coming out of the club the last two and a half seasons I fail to see how you would be surprised by that. 

I don’t believe SL has it in for Pearson, he’s had ample opportunity to get rid of him before. He also had very good reason not to appoint him permanently in the first place. I believe, with injuries taken into account, he’ll be given time to get to at least a natural conclusion and hopefully some sort of backing to enable a creative signing in the next week. 

We are not leaking for fun. We look better at the back than we have done for many seasons first goal aside. Clearly more is needed from an attacking point of view and, of course, the club need to stare the fact in the face that we’ve lost an outstanding creative footballer. Scott was often the outlet that prevented such blunt performances. There is no like for like replacement but the clear hole he has left needs to be dealt with immediately. 

Besides that, whilst games are as finely balanced as the first three have been we can begin turning them in our favour as the season goes on. If we haven’t began to do so by Christmas or more games are going against us than is reasonable we will have to look at management, but I think it would be such a shame to cut this project short before we really know how its going to turn out. A new manager won’t simply be a case of picking up on Pearson’s foundations and kicking on, it doesn’t work like that, not least with this club’s record of appointments. 

In the meantime, this level of reactionary negativity feels a little pointless.

I must admit this whole thread is making me laugh somewhat after the below was a game I attended in Gdańsk, Poland recently, where they were firing hundreds of flares at the roof for about 10 minutes whilst the rest of the stadium applauded and sang along imagine the reaction on here 

Great to hear. Is this a result of the donation push towards the back of last season? Thanks for the ongoing efforts. 

My only hope is that it’s not related to recent farewells but supportive of the squad we’ll be getting behind this season!