Hard to see any progress for the forseeable future

[Ian Royal]

Nope, it's not like i've read even 70% of the thread tbh

I just dont' think you can analyse these rants word for word, completely literally as he's making a general point. And if you're going to start a thread then you have to go balls in or not at all.

If you take the basic gist as "no progress until we get a new owner" then he's right. We are still stuck in the Championship and we were still selling our best players. Cup quarters finals are nothing more than a fun day out, a sideshow to the serious business of moving the club forward.

Schards always had plenty of valid concerns, he just over-reacted like a spoilt child. The key messages in the post are the ones highlighted by Rother, which are the ones which have always been highlighted as being wrong.

You've said you can't analyse the rants word for word and then you've essentially done exactly the same as you're criticising people for by breaking down the bits which had an element of genuine and reasonable concern and completely ignoring the bits that start and end the post which are utterly misplaced and unfounded, even 3 and a half years later.

Madejski - clearly, his heart is not in it to the extent it was previously. He would love to sell out but can't find a buyer. He will keep the club sound and stable but has no intention of investing further funds or trying to push the club forwards.

100% correct

Agree to a certain extent, but he hadn't taken us backwards three and a half seasons after relegation. We weren't making big strides forward to establishing ourselves as Prem club, but we were consolidating in the Championship which has given us the platform to push forward under the right circumstances.

Coppell - if the spirit of the championship had survived, he would definately have been the right man for the job, but it hasn't. The chairman is not fully behind it anymore, many players have left to pursue their own self interest and many still here would like to leave. The golden team has long gone and we have to move on and build a new team. Coppell doesn't, IMHO, have the hunger to do this.

Correct.

Correct in that Coppell wasn't the one to build a new team, but then that's not why he was kept. He was kept to get the best out of the existing squad and right the mistakes of the previous years. Had to find fault with that when it came within 1 game of success. I would have been expecting Coppell to resign even if he'd got us promotion tbh.

there are some on here who would happily see us drift downwards whilst improving/maintaining our balance sheet in the belief that the rest of football will meltdown around us and we will emerge as one of the last men standing

Correct.

Incorrect. No one wants to see us drift downwards and backwards into obscurity on the assumption that finances will explode. There is a massive difference between that and running ourselves carefully to consolidate our position in the short-term allowing room for a big push in future if things change as they hadve done. In the mean time we still came close to promotion in two out of the three seasons. Close but no cigar maybe, but only 3 out of 24 teams can get promoted each season and it's always going to be a bit of a crap shoot no matter how much you throw at it.

Much as I admire and appreciete what Madejski has done, I don't see how the club can go forward with him at the helm and would now like to see someone new who wants to move things forward

Agreed, and surely people can see we are better equipped to challenge for promotion now (in the short term at least) than we would have been if we'd retained the status quo?

.[/quote]
We all wanted to see someone new come in who could really push us forward. But more important than that was it being the right person. And just because we couldn't make any big leaps forward doesn't mean we weren't going to be able to challenge for promotion and maybe sneak up again for some more big boy action. We are better placed now (assuming all goes well) but that doesn't mean we'll actually achieve promotion and nor does it mean we were going backwards before. We may well have done eventually if we didn't keep getting things right with player development. But that never actually happened.

[Maguire]

That really wasn't the point I was making Mags. You specifically cited his "staying strong in the face of the stick he got" and I disagreed with that - with my interpretation of events

Yep sorry I don't think I was clear - in reply to your point [about whether I was sure he'd stayed strong], I said I wasn't sure as i've ignored much of the thread. So you may well be right.

The rest of my post was a general point, not in reply to you specifically.

[Maguire]

Agree to a certain extent, but he hadn't taken us backwards three and a half seasons after relegation

Well I disagree - we were a good team post-relegation and should've got automatic promotion. Kept on big name players and had a real shot at it. Since the defeat to Burnley in the p/o we've not really looked like a league-winning side since.

And yes, of course some of Schards message was wrong (not thinking Coppell or Mr Mad would leave "any time soon" for example), but I don't think he ever claimed to be Nostradamus.

And as it happens, i'm not as negative as Schards when it comes to these things and I don't moan half as much, but for all the scorn thats been poured on him in the last fook knows how many pages, I think he can hold his little baldy head up.

[RoyalBlue]

I still dispute we were moving backwards.

It would seem that you might be in dispute with none other than McDermott then.

Freed of the shackles following the announcement of the takeover, he was unequivocal when he stated 'if you keep having to sell your best players you are only going to go in one direction'. He was equally clear that had we been in the financial situation where he had been allowed to keep Shane Long, Shane would have stayed 'because of his relationship with me'..........'and had Shane stayed, where do you think we would be now?'.

Seems to me he was stating that having had to sell some of his best players, particularly Long, we were further back than we would have been i.e. we had/were moving backwards.

[Royal With Cheese]

That really wasn't the point I was making Mags. You specifically cited his "staying strong in the face of the stick he got" and I disagreed with that - with my interpretation of events

Yep sorry I don't think I was clear - in reply to your point [about whether I was sure he'd stayed strong], I said I wasn't sure as i've ignored much of the thread. So you may well be right.

The rest of my post was a general point, not in reply to you specifically.

No problems, I guessed as much.

[Ian Royal]

I still dispute we were moving backwards.

It would seem that you might be in dispute with none other than McDermott then.

Freed of the shackles following the announcement of the takeover, he was unequivocal when he stated 'if you keep having to sell your best players you are only going to go in one direction'. He was equally clear that had we been in the financial situation where he had been allowed to keep Shane Long, Shane would have stayed 'because of his relationship with me'..........'and had Shane stayed, where do you think we would be now?'.

Seems to me he was stating that having had to sell some of his best players, particularly Long, we were further back than we would have been i.e. we had/were moving backwards.

If you have to keep selling your best players then eventually you are likely to move backwards. But we haven't in the time we were doing it and we'd looked to me to have run out of big names to sell for big money so it's hard to say what would have happened next.

We may not be on a par with the team we had immediately after relegation. But no team relegated from the Prem can manage that three seasons later without having gone up in that time. Expecting to stay at that level mid-term is totally unrealistic. That was clearly a transition season. You may as well argue we've gone backwards because we got relegated from the Prem. It's meaningless.

[SLAMMED]

Bump

[SpaceCruiser]

Now what was it that Schards said? How long is "forseeable future"?

[paultheroyal]

I think we need to get used to mid table championship football at the very best until there is a sea change at this club.

Madejski - clearly, his heart is not in it to the extent it was previously. He would love to sell out but can't find a buyer. He will keep the club sound and stable but has no intention of investing further funds or trying to push the club forwards.

Coppell - if the spirit of the championship had survived, he would definately have been the right man for the job, but it hasn't. The chairman is not fully behind it anymore, many players have left to pursue their own self interest and many still here would like to leave. The golden team has long gone and we have to move on and build a new team. Coppell doesn't, IMHO, have the hunger to do this.

Whilst not being a member of the carpark squad, I applauded their actions as, at the time it was the right thing to do. Had we known that the spirit of the championship side was already totally dead, in hindsight, we should have let Coppell go and started afresh.

As for Madejski, there are some on here who would happily see us drift downwards whilst improving/maintaining our balance sheet in the belief that the rest of football will meltdown around us and we will emerge as one of the last men standing. They are rather like people who build nuclear bunkers in their back garden. Much as I admire and appreciete what Madejski has done, I don't see how the club can go forward with him at the helm and would now like to see someone new who wants to move things forward.

Can't see either leaving anytime soon so supporting Reading's going to be a whole lot duller and uninspiring than in recent years

So in summary and it pains me to say it but Schars was right!

[Arch]

Paragraphs 2, 3, 4 and to some extent 5 are correct. The first and last lines are not though. The nearest we've had to mid-table football at any time since then was the rollercoaster 09-10 season. We've flirted briefly with relegation and more consistently with promotion up to the point of a playoff final. The football may well have been uninspiring but the campaigns haven't been dull.

[Royal With Cheese]

Can't see either leaving anytime soon so supporting Reading's going to be a whole lot duller and uninspiring than in recent years
That was the whole crux of basically 104 pages of rubbish.

Broadly agreed with the rest.

His defence of it has been laughable.

[Royal Lady]

IT'S AN OPINION

[Hampshire Royal]

Yes, only an opinion - one which came after a bad season in the Premiership and was a knee-jerk reaction to a bad result. The problem was that it was written in such a way as to sound like a rock solid outline of the future and even when events proved him to be wrong he just simply refused to admit that he was. I've always thought that a sign of a real man (or woman) is the ability to admit errors.

Still, never mind - it's not my problem after all.

[Royal With Cheese]

IT'S AN OPINION

So, in your and his opinion, has supporting Reading been dull and uninspiring over the last 4 years?

[Maguire]

Schards, fair play to you m8, I can only dream of a 100+ pager

Doing it off the back of nothing more than an opinion is incredible

[Royal Lady]

Schards#2 wrote:
I think we need to get used to mid table championship football at the very best until there is a sea change at this club.


See? HE thinks - not "I am stating as fact"


Some of it has been dull and uninspiring, even this season - if you watched us week in, week out, you'd admit the same. That's not to say we haven't had some very good games but I'm afraid we have not played pretty football and, as I've already said, we've been grinding out wins - but it's not always been pretty to watch.

Yes, Schards was wrong that we haven't had midtable mediocrity - but at the time of writing his post - his opinion on that was pretty sound, imO.

[Vision]

An entrenched view refusing to accept when they're wrong V Another entrenched view refusing to admit when they're wrong. It was ever thus.

Like RL and Schards I have to say that dragging up posts from the past just to show people up when we should all just be enjoying the moment is a bit pathetic.

Within that original post are some things which were true at the time and subsequentky proved to be correct as well. Those that criticise Schards for not admitting he's wrong whilst refusing to concede that some of what he said was actually pretty spot on are being extremely hypocritical.

Problem is that the summary soundbites at the beginning and the end of the post were wrong. It's ok to have an opinion but when you predict something that turns out to be wrong you'd probably get a little less criticism if you admitted as much.

Ultimately though whether you agree with what he said or not , it's a great post for a discussion forum. It's provocative without ever being personal or disrespectful to anyone and It makes bold statements which encourage discussion. It would be a shame if people felt they couldn't post this type of thing because it will descend into a sea of personal remarks and utimately a tedious childish pissing contest.

[Uke]

Within that original post are some things which were true at the time and subsequentky proved to be correct as well.

There should be an HNA Colemanballs repository for sentences like this

[Vision]

Within that original post are some things which were true at the time and subsequentky proved to be correct as well.

There should be an HNA Colemanballs repository for sentences like this

LOL. It's a fair cop but i suspect most people know what I mean.

[Mr Angry]

Take out the bit about looking forward to dull and uninspiring mid-table Championship football for the foreseeable future, and the rest of Schards' post was exceptionally prescient.

And to be fair, most of us have been amazed by the fact that we haven't had dull and uninspiring football since Brian took over as Manager, as it was on the cards post-relegation, to be that way.