KegCity

8 minutes ago, Lordofthebling said:

Since when did he turn into a love child of Vinnie Jones and Zidane?? 

Past 3 or 4 weeks he's been a psycho  

He's got a contract to play for.

Great to see Williams in the last few weeks, his most consistent spell for the club in my view. Hope he can both keep this up and stay fit until the end of the season.

Just now, W-S-M Seagull said:

Sorry mate but there is zero chance he's on similar wages to Weimann. Weimann of course also took a pay cut which took him down to 10kish. 

I'd be incredibly surprised if Twine is on anything under 15k. 

No, you are assuming things. You can't sit here and tell me that were not paying a loan fee. In fact it would be ludicrous to suggest we are not paying a loan fee. It's an option to buy, not an obligation to buy. Football clubs don't recall a player from a loan and then loan them out to another club for free in the hope the new club will sign him in the summer. 

It’s all guesswork though isn’t it? Nobody knows what he’s earning. We don’t know our wage structure, but if we want a player good enough to string our attack together and get us into the playoffs that’s how much we’ll have to pay. 

Did I say we’re not paying a loan fee? I said it would more than likely to be taken into account in the buy option e.g when put with the buy option it comes to the value of the player. We’ve done the same with TGH by all accounts.

Just now, W-S-M Seagull said:

As a Premier league player, he's likely to be coming in as one of and if not our highest earners. 

Possibly a loan fee involved too? 

He’s a squad player for Burnley. Would probably be similar wages to Weimann at the most, and if he’s coming in to be our main creative player that’s fair enough.

Loan fee would be taken into account in the option to buy. There’s plenty to moan about with city but us properly investing in a creative midfielder, which we badly need, isn’t high up on the list! If it was the £5 million move that was initially quoted I’d be with you about the finances.

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

So we're not allowed to question things? I think you've been watching top much Robins TV, Aka North Korea state TV. 

A lot of work has gone into getting our squad to have wage parity and I hope we won't be upsetting the apple cart by spending big money on wages. 

What are you talking about? We lack creativity, Manning has worked with Twine before and £2.5 million is a fair fee. Wages won’t be astronomical. I’m glad we’re neither sitting on the Scott money nor blowing it on overpriced signings.

Reports starting to say it’s a loan with a buy option, even better.

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

Being pedantic, whilst 2.5 million is good buisness if true, his wages aren't going to be cheap! 

Can’t have it all. Do we want to bring in quality? If so we’re going to have to spend money, we can’t just be a side made up of gems from league one.

Panic over, we’re not spending 5 million.

Whilst there’s disappointment we couldn’t sign him for free, we’re addressing one of our biggest weaknesses and getting Manning’s first choice through the door. Very happy with that.

7 hours ago, WolfOfWestStreet said:

The club has lost half a million pound a week, every week, for the last 10 years. 

I very much doubt there is a huge queue of people that desperate to lose their wealth,  at such a spectacular pace.

 

Are there any football clubs that aren’t making those losses?

If a mess like Birmingham can get fresh investment we can too.

27 minutes ago, Port Said Red said:

What about the previous 25 years of poor decisions by people who didn't even put their own money on the line to make them? 

Don't act like every decision they have made has been poor either, or how many of them only seem poor in hindsight. 

What big decisions have the Lansdowns got right? Appointing Cotterill and Gary Johnson?

We need fresh ideas and we need people who know the game to run the club.

Makes sense if he’s still based in Solihull.

Hope someone else is coming in, Weimann can cover several areas and we’ll miss having that extra body.

20 minutes ago, Mr Popodopolous said:

We also don't know if TGH will be made permanent..I think he probably should be but we don't know.

Can’t see us putting down £700k for a loan and not keeping him.

8 hours ago, Stortz said:

Yeah, incredible these Saudi weirdos have such a mega hard on for Ngannou.

I thought AJ still had a bit of ambition tbh. Here's what he's happy with now for all of us to see.

I can see why he’s done it. If he takes Ngannou seriously he should be able to outbox him, making him look better than Fury who got sat down by Francis.

I think if Ngannou lands that big punch as he did to Fury, Joshua doesn’t get back up.

2 minutes ago, fgrsimon said:

Apparently an Ashton Gate 2024 Springsteen gig was on the cards at one point but it fell through for unknown reasons. I was told by a good source at a well known Springsteen-connected record shop in Cheltenham.

He’s playing Wembley and the Principality. Assume Ashton Gate isn’t big enough.

12 minutes ago, robinforlife2 said:

We are not on the cusp of promotion ! 

I know. Hence why I said in my original post that we need to make players believe they can get to the Premier League with us.

35 minutes ago, robinforlife2 said:

Disagree. 

Let's put it like this. You are doing a job, you are happy in that job, but another job comes along. That job is going to 3x your salary.  Now you come and speak to me, and I tell you don't worry about that fancy new job, within 2-3 years you will be in the same position here and on that money. You are not going to wait. Something could happen in a weeks time, which means that opportunity may disappear forever. 

Players don't really care who they play for, they just want to be in the top flight and on big money. The likes of Leicester are paying Premier League wages in the Championship and will be back there very soon. For that reason, the majority of players didn't wish or need to leave. We are not even close to knocking on the door, so there is no way we can say to these players, sorry we're not selling you. All you then end up with, is unhappy players, who if you stand in their way, will run a contract down and walk for nothing. If that happens, the fans would be fuming at the owners and manager! 

Plenty of clubs on the cusp of promotion have been able to keep their top players, they’ve taken them up with them.

59 minutes ago, exAtyeoMax said:

I'm not talking stadium etc, I'm talking board room/ plan/ strategy 

Exactly, if players believe they can get to the Premier League with City, rather than via City, they’re much more likely to stay.

45 minutes ago, petehinton said:

Yes heard this yesterday, found it very interesting. It was Ali saying it (George is the slightly posher one, and an Oxford fan). We speak a fair bit on OSIB DM’s, they’re both extremely good eggs. 
 

I found the man management point one that literally all City fans need to hear and take in, especially those who throw around the ‘cult of Nige’ ‘I told you so’ type comments. 
 

Would Manning have picked us up off the floor, with his personality and way of operating, in a culture that was so bad that players were hiding in the HPC to get out of training, in the way Pearson did? I wouldn’t have thought so. 
 

Would Pearson have us playing in such clear, structured, extremely detailed levels of preparation that clearly went into the Watford game? Again, I wouldn’t have thought so. 
 

There’s almost no point comparing who is ‘better’, when they are clearly both so different, with very different skill sets, who we clearly needed at the club at very different times. 

Think that summarises the situation very well. It’s easy to forget just how bad the culture within the squad was when Pearson arrived. He was what we needed at the time, Manning certainly appears to be what we need now.

Important not to get carried away though, if we get beat by Birmingham it will be a lot more doom and gloom. 

4 minutes ago, Mr Popodopolous said:

That's fair yeah. Bear in mind some are Parachute bolstered so that needs to be factored in but yes.

I generally agree with a lot of your points.

I appreciate that. I’m not one of those who expect the owner to just splash crazy amounts of money, I understand FFP etc.

I just want a clear plan and good decision making. I think we’ve lacked that for a long time.

Just now, Mr Popodopolous said:

Within the constraints of what we are allowed to spend, factoring in that a takeover won't change it (maybe the interest on debt would be cleared which helps).

How much would you like us to spend over what period and do you consider the top 2 to be a realistic goal under the current system?

I don’t consider top 2 realistic and I’m not silly enough to think we should be spending outrageous money every summer.

I’m fed up of seeing clubs with smaller budgets etc overtaking us while terrible decisions and general incompetence hold us back. We’ve seen it recently with the Pearson fiasco and player analysts conducting manager interviews.

Someone who hasn’t been in the pub all day can be far more articulate than me, but my patience for the current regime has ran out. Have seen plenty of “worse” owners get promotion etc before being outsted

The bar is so low isn’t it? Not letting the stadium fall down or us to go bust, whilst going from the championship to the championship via league one is enough for some people. All while making incompetent decisions year after year and overseeing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of losses.

I genuinely wish I could be content with that. I want more, I want a genuine promotion charge. I must be ungrateful.

On 22/12/2023 at 23:43, Davefevs said:

Mr Boring here. One game at a time for me. Bah humbug

On the radio interview he explained that we were building momentum so felt he didn’t want to break that up. 

We got ragged around the half hour. And I know it’s stupid but I blame “bounce around”. It’s cringy. And I think the players lose concentration. It has happened too many times now that we concede on or after the chant. If I’m being honest it boils my piss. It’s also a Johnson thing, those days are over.

Bah humbug again!!

As for the game itself I really enjoyed it. We never let Hull suck the life out of the second half.

We often build our territory from Matty James in these games. But today he had an off day (could he have been one suffering from illness) and it showed that others can drive us.

We thoroughly deserved the win.

 

 

What is it about that particular chant that makes the players lose concentration? 

2 minutes ago, ExiledAjax said:

Personally I celebrate the trophy wins and I celebrate the fact that our club exists.

2014/15 we won two trophies. Including a league title. For me that's a bigger achievement than the Liverpool and Man Utd Cup wins. People will say they are tinpot trophies - to that I say they are the competitions that we qualified for that season, and we won them. It should be celebrated.

I also, and I know not everyone will agree with this, I don't think we have to be in the premier league to be considered "successful". I don't think winning, and climbing the pyramid, are the be all and end all of a football club. Is it the aim? Maybe yes. Is it the sole measure of achievement? Not for me.

But I absolutely agree with you that wishing happy birthday to active ex-players is a bit unnecessary.

What else is a measure of achievement? Amount of academy players in the first team? Community outreach?

Both great of course but not the same as winning, or at least progressing, on the pitch.

4 hours ago, transfer reader said:

As wa said to you, we had a better average finishing position than most of out history in that time.

You asked about silverware and we got that too.

You seem to want it both ways.

No I just don’t particularly value silverware that we won after getting relegated. We could have another run of consecutive relegations, but winning the national league wouldn’t make up for the initial failure.

3 hours ago, richwwtk said:

It included our first league chamionshop for 60 years....

From a league we shouldn’t have dropped into in the first place! We were in the championship when Lansdown took over, took a backwards step getting relegated, recovered by getting back into the championship and have got nowhere since. I’ll be the first to admit we recovered in style, it would be better if we hadn’t filled the squad with overpaid journeymen and not got relegated in the first place.

Not letting the stadium fall down to me is the bare minimum from the owner. I appreciate not every owner can say they’ve done that but it’s not a massive ask. Lansdown bailing himself out after losing big chunks of money isn’t much of an achievement to me either. We could of course be in a much worse position, but we could be in a much better one. We’ve seen enough “smaller” clubs not have to have a fire sale every summer just to tread water shoot past us into the Premier League.

43 minutes ago, transfer reader said:

They might not be prestigious, but I believe we've won 3 trophies in that time.

All won at league one level? Huge achievement for the club that’s been trying and failing to finish in the play offs of the championship for nearly 20 years.

35 minutes ago, Red-Robbo said:

No, but he's got a point. It means gates about 80% up or more on the period immediately preceding it, and away trips to places like Elland Road and the Stadium of Light, rather than the Broadhall Way or the New Meadow.  Consistent second tier football has allowed the infrastructure to expand and improve.

It's just the Lansdowns haven't a clue how to make that final step to achieve their ultimate stated goals. 

Exactly. Which is why “consistent championship football” should be the bare minimum. 

18 minutes ago, richwwtk said:

How is it 25 years of under achieving? You would be hard pushed to find a 25 year period in our history where our average league placing was higher.

We haven't been wildly successful, I will grant you that but seeing as most of our time has been spent as a yoyo between Championship and League 1 level we are now firmly established as a mid table Championship club with a better platform than we have ever had to push on.

Be careful what you wish for when the Lansdowns move on. You might think there is disconnect between the club and the fans now, it will only get worse...

Is there a trophy for that?