Today’s performance was possibly the lowest point in my life supporting our club.
Truly shocking.
Our away attendances at Northampton and Crewe were as many as our home crowd today and you can’t blame fans for not attending.
Only 12 months ago we beat Cov at home and then Sunderland in round 2. Already it seems like another lifetime.
Under your tenure you have entrusted a manager to bring in players that are inept at best.
It’s painful to watch.
What are your thoughts?
This is the leftovers of the Bonser regime.
It’s not going to change overnight, and it’s going to take a lot of time to undo it.
Don’t fall into the trap of the instant success modern paradigm - this is going to take a long time and some serious effort to turn around.
9 Likes
And some serious money
4 Likes
There’s nothing I want more than for it to be worth Pomlett’s time effort and money for bothering to take over this club and release the club of Bonser and there is nothing I want more than to see Darrell Clarke make a success of it. I’ve said before he is on a level with us fans, he wants the best for all of us and doesn’t shy away from criticism which is refreshing as many others prefer to bury their heads in the sand.
I don’t want him out as in I’m not screaming Clarke out from the first whistle but I can’t see it working and there is nothing for me to suggest he deserves January. The problem is, where we find ourselves, sticking or twisting are both real risks. Get it wrong and we end up a non league side. It needs serious thought. Pomlett knows what it takes in business, let’s hope he carries that over and knows when to stick or twist at Walsall too.
8 Likes
Let’s stop using this excuse now. Bonser is gone. Yes we still pay the rent to him and yes he’s massively cut cost year after year. But he hasn’t left us in any worse position than we have been for years and we’ve managed to maintain a position in a higher league. We need to move on.
If we keep whinging about Bonser and needing x number of transfer windows and blah blah blah we’ll never turn it around and slowly become a club that accepts the position we are in now. Clarke and Pomlett have made major major errors this season and they need to be rectified sharply, starting now.
17 Likes
Correct
Perhaps, if it is allowed, we need some clarity from Pomlett in how much has been taken out of the club by Bonser regarding these loans and how much this has affected the budget. If people knew there might, and I say might, be more sympathy for the situation. However it still will not change the current situation which cannot be rectified until January so I would suggest that Clarke and co. scout around and try and find a couple of unattached players who would be willing to come and try and help us in the interim. There has to be players who are better than these strikers and could prove the missing link. Let’s face it you can only juggle them around so much ie. Gaffney, Adebayo, Gordon, Lavery are all we have to pick from and only 3 of them haven’t exactly done much and this will continue to be the case until January. Unfortunately by then we could be rock bottom with a mountain to climb. It really feels like a nowhere to turn situation at the moment. Realistically you cannot expect people will keep turning up and watching that each week and not moan. If it was any other situation like going for a meal, seeing a show, visiting a shop, etc. and each time you went the product/service was terrible then you would quite rightly complain and not go back until there were improvements. Although football loyalty is slightly different, there gets a point when enough is enough.
2 Likes
It’s not an excuse at all. It’s a fact.
We are what? Less than 6 months into Pomlett’s reign? Are we really suggesting all the damage that has been done to our club will be rectified in such a short time frame ? Come on, you’re better than that.
Unfortunately, what we are seeing is part of the Instagram instant-gratification generation not being able to wait. Yes, I want success too, but I’m a realist.
There is no way that a club in free fall, both on and off the pitch would be challenging for promotion this year. With 17 new players, new back room staff, and the shambles of a budget we clearly have. I’m not surprised at all. We still have this millstone of this 440k a year around our necks lest we forget.
I didn’t think it would be this bad… but I am in this for the long run. So should everyone else.
7 Likes
You make perfectly valid points and I, for one, am certainly prepared to give pomlett time. What can’t be explained away or accepted is the abysmal management by Clarke. Whether he got a good budget or not, whether he got his first targets or not, he’s making the very worst of a bad job. Pomlett has got a very difficult decision to make and I’m certainly not one for continually sacking managers but the current incumbent is showing all the signs of someone who’s lost the plot, is becoming increasingly desperate and is, in fact, doing damage to our future hopes.
Agree broadly with this we must give Pomlett time to make the necessary changes this cannot be done in 6 months.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said regards the management team , I believe the budget is at least average for this level unfortunately our current manager has assembled a squad in which even the best players are average at best .
I witnessed the cringeworthy "interview " with our captain J Clarke in the Stadium suite yesterday what stood out for me was listening to his playing career it’s long list of average non league teams .
He is now our captain and presumably highest earner along with Sinclair Liddle and Guthrie non of which played yesterday probably half the budget not even on the pitch
3 Likes
I swear we have this discussion every month.
We are what a few months in. Then 4. Then 5. Now 6
I’d have thought we’d have seen some progress now. Don’t make out that it’s unreasonable to expect better than what we are seeing and experiencing. I’m not asking us to be in the playoffs at this point. I’m asking us to be better than 6 defeats in a row and home draws to national league north sides.
We had that 440K weight every year we were in the league above too. And, at this point, having free reign to put your own staff and squad in should be bearing fruit. Not still used as an excuse. And I fail to see how we were in free fall off the pitch. Maybe philosophically. But let’s not pretend we are one of those financial sob stories falling down the league
And that’s before we get to the none existent changes to the general running of the place. It’s got nothing to do with your generation bias, that’s complete nonsense. Expecting us to be better than this is not expecting the world.
We’re all in it for the long run, doesn’t mean we can’t expect better than this.
I agree we should be better than this and I think we will be in time. I also agree that mistakes have been made. The difference is that the current management and hierarchy of the club are acknowledging that is the case. You never got that with the “we know better than you” Bonser regime.
You can’t dismiss the affect of the previous regime either as it has led to us being where we are.
The fact is we’re a League Two team with lots of change and looking like we’re moving in a downward trajectory. People ask about the budget and Clarke’s signings and say it must have been misspent. They say Pomlett can’t have given the cash he says because players have not signed for us and they’ve gone elsewhere. People seem to miss the possibility that we have trouble attracting players here simply because we don’t look an attractive proposition at the moment and it’s not necessarily because the money isn’t available.
As for Pomlett himself, I believe over time he’ll restructure everything and things will get better. But financially he’s said he’s not some rich sugar daddy. And despite that he’s paid Bonser for his shares and paid off Jeff’s loans. So it’s no wonder he has little left to put in himself. I believe his main aim behind the scenes is to make us debt free and owners of the freehold. Once that happens we’ll have a lot more flexibility and better budget. It won’t happen overnight but it’s what many of us fans have been saying we needed for the last decade (a decade in which Bonser has stripped us to the bone, the leech). 
And as for Pomlett revealing Jeff’s dealings in the last decade it isn’t going to happen. That’s not necessarily because he’s covering for him but simply that he has to deal with him still in regards to rent and the eventual purchase of the freehold.
He’s not going to risk ■■■■■■■ off the leech whilst he still holds the cards and could make things difficult in completing the transaction.
5 Likes
In regards to your comment about having the 440k weight every season and still being ok, yes we did.
However the recent revelations about Bonser cutting the budget by £200k a season are in addition to that. Maybe that explains why after Smith left we then were reliant in cheap options in regards to managers, an abundance of loan signings, reliance on short contracts leading to the team being overhauled every season and no stability. It’s all led to this spiral downwards.
And given this budget cutting I’m also wondering where all the transfer fees and money from the cup run and Wembley trip has gone to.
Given Bonser’s previous form way back to the infamous “Why shouldn’t I?” interview following the Fox/Dann debacle, I think we have a pretty good idea where it’s gone!
3 Likes
But that’s Clarke and Pomletts job, to make us an attractive proposition regardless of budget. That’s always been the remit of Walsall management through realism or self imposed restrictions. That’s where they’ve both failed.
Why does he need to be a sugar daddy to fix the off the pitch stuff? The experience is still what it was. There’s no fresh ideas. There’s nothing to attract people to the club. Yeah they ran a ticket initiative that was similar to what weve been doing for years anyway. Big wow. That’s stuff that could have been done day one. You don’t need to wait for the bar staff or kiosk staff to gel. Go to stadiums around the country and see what they lay on. See if we can adapt some of that to what we do. It’s not difficult.
Yeah we know Bonser cut the budget, we know he had no desire to improve the club on and off the pitch. It’s time to get over and see what we can do going forward. The start of the season was a fresh start.
I don’t buy that the money isn’t there. It was reported we had a mid table league two budget last season. Pomlett stated that he would restructure the way the clubs budgets were decided to improve that and that it would be “very competitive”. He doesn’t strike me as a liar. The issues we have had are now down to poor recruitment not budget, as far as I can see. We shouldn’t be struggling this much if the above is true.
1 Like
Like I have said elsewhere on this site many times, people can wind themselves up as much as they want, this is a minimum 3 to 4 year job. Think about all the historical Premier League teams that have got relegated, generally big clubs that have a chip on their shoulder; Villa is a great example. Most of their fans were negative, bitchy and calling for the chairman and managers head every time they lost in The Championship - however it took 3 years to turn around the general downward trajectory and damage done by year after year of fighting relegation and complete and utter mismanagement from Randy Lerner.
Every single complaint the Villa fans had ‘can’t identify with these players’, ‘we shouldn’t be losing to teams like xxxxx we are Villa’, ‘I’ve given up hope, this is the worst state the club has been in’ etc etc I have seen on here. There are some realists on here that can see the real state our club is in and there are those that can’t. Unless we get an investor I personally can see us being in this league for a very long time - I don’t think we will go down - yet.
Pomlett has however made errors. The new brush that swept in should have taken Mole and Gamble and any negative connections to the Bonser regime with it - it is a ridiculous move keeping those guys there, they wind up our fans almost as much as Bonser did. He also needs to come and tell us himself what Bonser was up to - but it won’t happen - it’s almost like Bonser is still there in the background 
And you know what, that would not surprise me one bit…
7 Likes
5000 bums on seats think he had better have a word with his manager and staff one win at home and the dross that’s being served up ain’t going to entice anybody to part with good money to watch what’s being played and the fact that they can’t even beat a side two divisions below and not even full time pro’s, 5000 REALLY be lucky to get 2000 the way it’s going
I don’t ever remember Villa being 20 something and drawing to non league teams At home in the FA Cup to be honest. And the gap between PL and Cham and L1 and L2 is much much bigger.
Yes there are plenty of clubs that get relegated and struggle. There’s plenty that do very well too. We could probably trade examples all day.
Yes, but Villa were mismanaged and then asset stripped at the end by Randy Lerner, which is what makes it such a good comparison to us. All the clubs that have chairman of this ilk take years to recover.
No, they weren’t losing to non-league teams, but they lost to Luton in the League Cup - which at the time was just as bad in their fans minds. When they lost 0-3 to Brentford - again - implosion.
Great post. People seem to forget we do still have the same board which our fan base hasn’t liked for some years now. They disconnect the club with the fans as much as anybody due to their personality, the inability to take criticism, as soon as it is given they get on the defensive and the zero improvements at the club despite attending a meeting every year to address these fans concerns.
I also agree it is a 3 to 4 year job and you mention the likes of fallen giants which have taken years to rebuild, they still sack managers on their way back though. Villa would still be in the Championship if they didn’t bin Bruce off. For me, Clarke isn’t the sort of man to sort this rebuild out. His personality isn’t right, his attitude isn’t right. I really hope he proves me wrong but I can’t see it.
5 Likes
Once again EL I can only agree !!