italian dave

European Son…..The Velvet Underground

?? Portishead might be doing OK too!!

Living Next Door to Alice……..Dr Hook and the Medicine Show

Good Vibrations……The Beach Boys

Alice’s Restaurant……..Arlo Guthrie.

Man in a Shed…….Nick Drake

I’m not going to debate this on here, because it’s a football thread in the football forum and I know that people dislike them straying into politics. But there’s a whole thread on this subject over in the politics forum so please join us over there to debate this……we’ve been looking for ages for someone to tell us some (even one) of the benefits of Brexit.

Even if the English side was one Bristol R*****s?

Nope…..just ours. ?

Toreador......Georges Bizet

You started it……?

Nice with some (Colin) Cramembert?

Of course that’s ridiculous. (Not that I’m aware of anyone on here who holds quite such an extreme view). It’s just as ridiculous as “LJ was a complete disaster and never did anything good in his whole time with us”. (Of which there are one or two!) LJ had his strengths and his weaknesses. He gave us good times as well as bad. Just like any manager has. Ashton had his strengths too: he was more adept at cashing in on our assets than anyone else I can remember. (Although he was a horrible toad too!) But (my view) the dynamics have to work, the competing objectives have to work, and for their last year or two together (Johnson and Ashton) they didn’t. And SL didn’t seem to be able to sort that out and (for example) be clear that ultimately LJs footballing objectives had to take priority over the financial objectives. LJ once talked about writing a book one day about what was going on behind the scenes - and there was lots of speculation about what he meant. My money is that much of it was about that conflict.

John Pelling. Now at Stoke I believe.

I think that where we also took the eye off the ball was in allowing the financial imperatives to take precedence over the footballing ones. We all knew that we were having to balance the two - making the top 6 whilst also making the club self sufficient, which meant buying players cheap, developing them and selling them at the height of their value. Early on, we did well with players like Kelly and Kodjia: we maximised value but we did so in the knowledge that we had a plan B in place on the pitch. Towards the end we failed on the footballing front. We might have maximised value from Webster and Brownhill, but we did so with no plan B in place at all. I’d love to know how we’d have got on that season if we’d kept both those players. There’s no doubt in my mind that they left massive gaps.

I’m not saying that he deserved more time: it’s more about the club than about an individual and I just wonder whether, as a club, we shot ourselves in the foot by adding to the chaos that was unfolding around us. I don’t think you can disregard non footballing factors, especially when they are as massive as the pandemic was for football. And, yes, agree that the mess around his replacement contributed…but again that could have been avoided by hanging on with him in place and getting a proper plan b in place. I’d hasten to say that I’m suggesting all this with the massive benefit of hindsight! At the time I wasn’t particularly surprised or upset - although I think I probably hoped that we had a replacement lined up. But it’s just that I’ve often wondered since where we’d have ended up if we had hung in there for a little longer.

Now there’s an idea…… Make players live in the place they play for! Prove they really do love the club whose badge they kiss!! Wonder what the league would look like then?

Would that be the Caerphilly Ram or the Pistol Pete technique? ?

But the point I’m making above is that there was a lot more (unexpectedly) going on that we seem to have taken no account of. You’ve put the decision purely in the footballing context (the run we’d been on). And I wouldn’t argue with that. But we were in the relatively early stages of the pandemic, with huge uncertainty hanging over football, and I just question whether (in hindsight) that was the right time to plunge us into even further uncertainty - especially since we clearly had no credible plan b in place. Did the pandemic not matter at all in that decision?

Didn’t we try to sign Nobby Styles once….?

It’s a good point. And the other factor was covid. I almost posted something similar earlier in response to @shelts ‘s post above. I’d agree that his sacking wasn’t a surprise, but with hindsight I often wonder whether - in the circumstances - it was the right decision. It was almost as though SL had determined that it was top 6 or the sack (and we’d actually been top 6 a few weeks earlier) and ploughed on regardless of the entirely unexpected events playing out at the time. With no plan B other than ‘appoint the assistant’, and with the devastation that covid caused, it just left us completely rudderless at the worst possible time.

Also, I haven’t followed it week by week, but didn’t they have their poorest spell (when they got back into trouble) during a period when he didn’t play (injury, suspension?)??

Goodnight Irene......Lead belly

Wouldn’t It Be Nice……Beach Boys

Yep, agree Dave. We seem to have followed the familiar path on here of having gone from ‘wonder if the move to Bristol….’ to ‘it must have affected….’. I’m not aware of any evidence that he found the move hard, felt homesick, wished he’d never come etc. He might regret the fact that he came to a club that fairly quickly descended into turmoil…three managers, all with different ideas and none of them willing or able to play him consistently in a role that suited him. I know that’s often the case in football, and he may view that as a valuable lesson too, but as you say if he’s given the chance of PL football, under an up and coming manager who’s got a clear vision for him that he can buy into, then he’ll jump at the chance. Whether it’s in London, Burnley or Wolverhampton.