One can normally tell that the holiday season is upon us when the first major round of premier league manager sackings comes around; ready for new manager to come in and make some signing in the January transfer window.
Normally the sackings are fairly predictable; teams cut adrift in the relegation zone; teams appearing in the newspaper next to titles such as “Worst start to the season in 25 years”, etc..
This year, however, it seems pure madness the managers that have been shown the door. So far both Sam Allardyce of Blackburn and Chris Hughton of Newcastle have been fired.
Let’s examine both cases; Chris Hughton took charge of a Newcastle team which had just been relegated under a string of celebrity managers and looked as though they could easily fall off the face of the planet. Somehow Hughton managed to hang on to many key players and got them to comfortably win the Championship at the first time of asking.
Having got back into the Premier League he was given very limited resources, but still made some great transfers like Ben Arfa on loan, who looks a fantastic player but was unfortunately injured early in the season, and Tiote who is one of the best defensive midfielders I’ve seen in a while.
For any newly promoted club the main objective of the first season is to stay away from relegation. Hughton had the team sitting mid-table and looking no where near relegation candidates…
Newcastle owner Mike Ashley is either hell bent on destroying the club or has some unbelievably unrealistic expectations…does he honestly think his newly promoted team should be challenging the top 4 with almost no new investment?
In the case of Sam Allardyce we all know the kind of football he plays, it’s not pretty, involves a lot of long balls and players “putting themselves about”. And no one would be surprised if some new big spenders came in to buy the club and wanted to watch a bit of flashy one-touch passing instead.
However it seems the new Blackburn owners have absolutely no clue. They have touted their transfer budget this year of a whooping 5 million pounds…about enough to buy a bag of Carlos Tevez’ toenail clippings. Basically they will buy a few very average players and then expect these players to magically play top-4 quality football?
They need to get real. Big Sam is the best man there is at taking a bottom half of the table club, and getting them to finish mid-table or above. Which is exactly the situation at Blackburn. The fact that the new owners have been talking about finishing in the top 5 shows really how naive they are, and the club could well suffer for this.
We have just added two new EGO uniforms to our catalog for the upcoming season! Normally EGO designs are fairly plain but these latest designs are a lot more eye catching.
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