Is relegation better for the future of the club?

There is help available for obsession :joy:

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This is what is needed. Forget dialogue, forget reasoning, forget being nice, this is so serious that only serious has a hope of changing anything.

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The hope has surely got to be that MOC can do a man utd and free some of these players up to raise their performances? I’m not convinced he can do it but if you look at the team from Saturday;

Roberts - confidence looks shot but maybe MOC can get some belief back
Devlin - a month ago he was receiving all round praise for his performances, third goal Saturday looked like he’d had enough. Maybe MOC can get him back to marauding down the wing when he’s a big threat
Dobson - one of our most important players on his day and just needs to be instilled with belief and freedom
Kinsella - get him back in!
Ismail - a match winner on his day so maybe MOC can draw out that level of performance
Cook - as someone else said, maybe MOC can see a way to play with cook in the side that doesn’t include hoofball
Ferrier - there’s a player there and one who, I suspect, is very glad to see the back of keates. Can MOC harness that potential?

All huge ifs and buts but it does suggest there is a glimmer of hope and something for MOC to work with

Relegation is never a good option as there is no guarantee of coming back. It might be something we say to kid ourselves when we are genuinely hurt by the situation.

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I get the point and have said it myself before as it has worked with other clubs. But the more I think about it, it only really works at clubs who drop into a league they are probably too big for, when even at their worst they still have budgets bigger than 90% of clubs in that league.

As Masi pointed out, if we go down we have a budget which is middle of the road in League Two. What kind of manager with anything about them is going to want to come into a club where (wrongly) there will be expectation to make a return as soon as possible whilst the budget is more likely to see us finishing 12th. All this whilst there are dark clouds hanging over the club as most fans hate everybody at the club at the moment and when most players are out of contract meaning a huge rebuild.

The thought of a bit of a change for a year sounds good, the thought of being stuck in that league for the next 10 years isn’t though. Soon get fed up of Morecambe bringing 12 fans on a cold wet Tuesday night.

We need to stay up and then rebuild from League One not League Two.

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There will surely be an upturn in effort as there usually is and methinks we may well be about to find out a few serious things about these players over the next few games, and may also tell us a lot about how they viewed Dean Keates.

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No way relegation is going to help us. There’s no guarantee of bouncing back any time soon and there’s no room for second chances. We need to do everything we can to stay in League 1 and see where we can get to with a new manager. Look how Hurst rebuilt Shrewsbury - they had a great season with him out of nowhere.

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Last time we went down we were fairly big ticket. We had played four of the previous six years in The Championship. We had some “names” like Martin Butler, Rhys Weston and Clayton Ince. We had some fine up and coming players like Dann, Gerrard and Fox. And as Geordie says, we had about 1,500 more Home fans and hundreds more away fans.

Having been minnows in the Championship we felt like giants in League Two.

Whereas now it feels like that’s where we belong. Years of being told that we are punching above our weight without questioning why we were losing weight is coming home to roost. We are a fourth division football club now. There has been a managed decline in all aspects of the playing side, with a view that finishing about half way in the third division is good enough.

This feels far more like the Barnwell relegation that led to a number of years festering in the lower reaches of the fourth division. I honestly think I would take a team that contained Ron Green, Chris Marsh, Dean Smith, Chris Hutchings, Charlie Ntmark, John Kelly and Stuart Rimmer over their current equivalents.

So relegation isn’t a good thing for the club but the club have made it an inevitable thing. Even if we get the snookers required this season, it’ll happen soon.

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The only way I’d ever be happy to get relegated is if it got rid of Bonser & this won’t. If we dropped to the National League South it might. So given he ain’t going anywhere, I want us to stay up.

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As ever spot on PT

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Relegation would be bad many clubs have gone down to " steady " themselves expecting a quick return and now are in non league, I think there is a very good chance we would fall straight down and out of division.
For those who think it will make Bonser get out or change anything forget it he is interested in only one thing his rent and this would still be paid by the Venue income.

Surely our number one fan will cancel the rent or reduce it significantly in league 2.

On the rent, isn’t the opinion that we would be significantly better off nil and void in light of the fact that the advertising sign income probably more than covers the rent. Surely we have been competing with the theoretical better budget for a couple of seasons now?

I’ve said this for a long time during our recent demise.
I was not there on Saturday (Thankfully it would appear) but I understand there was a degree of dissatisfaction amongst our supporters. This should be enlarged and encouraged to get our owner and board embarrassed. Though I applaud the efforts of WSFC, the approach has been far too much ‘tea and cakes’ and official passing of documents etc…they will have been lapping it up, keep the rabble quiet by appeasing a couple of the more intelligent and well behaved rabble.
Strong action and strong words are needed to rid us of this parasitic bunch of 2nd class pathetic pen pushers. Come on Chunkster, come out of retirement, your ‘forward thinking’ approach is what’s needed.
4th Division? never. The Saddlers should be better than that, but we’ll all just have to get used to it in front of crowds of 2,500 odd.

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Why are people trying to kid themselves that relegation would be better :see_no_evil: . Would be a disaster that no one truly wants in their right minds . Let’s get behind Martin O’Connor for our 5 cup finals and hopefully stay in this league . Get a good experienced manager in early to have a good pre season with them to learn the players the basics of football . Some think Keates was unable to do.

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While I appreciate the rhetoric and applaud the positivity - its not going to happen is it? If we stay up we will be right back here again next season and the season after until we do finally succumb - like PT has said this is a managed decline - an asset stripping or pure negligence is neither here nor there, the overall result is the same - so unless something drastic changes in the approach from those at the top this is just not going to happen.

Love a good positive fairytale mate but sooner or later everyone has to face up the facts infront of our faces.

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You make plenty of valid points. But I just can’t see a “rebuild” ever happening with the club’s current leadership. O’Connor keeps us up, gets the job, the club continues to operate as usual and we find ourselves having the exact same conservation in 12 months time.

To me this club has no prospect for improvement or a bright future with Bonser in charge. His leadership will lead to stagnation at best and regression at work. If we’re ever to get rid of him, I think things will have to get worse. The media can’t brush our complaints off so easily when we’re festering at the bottom end of League Two instead of League One.

We just desperately need a change of leadership and I can’t see that happening while the status quo, which is a very comfortable one for Bonser, remains.

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“Get a good experienced manager in early”.

If only it was that easy Gavin! No such manager would ever come here.

As. I have said before I want bonser out as much as anybody else . But it’s Keates who ■■■■■■ this season up with his total lack of understanding of how to manage a football club . With the right manager in charge we would not be in this mess( and I know its bonser who appointed him) but no one my self lncluded disagreed with the appointment at the time. We even paid compensation to get the bloke and gave him money to spend.

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I’m with you. I’m a patient sort which is just as well as I think it will need to get worse before a genuine re-boot can occur.