If

a) Ronaldo

b) Kenwyne Jones

 

The bad thing is that MAF has the scratch to get players in a higher talent echelon than Murphy, Baird, etc.

1) If we has Champions League dinero and someone who was available, Thierry Henry. He does like London, after all.

2) More reasonably, 2 players from relegated teams last year, Darren Bent, who I think would have fared better than he has, and our favorite Cheesehead from Watford would have looked good on our backline

This discussion is based on the (likely) assumption we are going down. Frankly, it stinks.

 

Does this mean that we should now be courting Micheal Bradley for next year?

 

MAF

I read this a lot and I don't think that's fair to MAF. He has taken this club from near the bottom to the EPL. He has spent a lot of his own money on the club, money he'll never recoup. He gave the club a decent amount money to spend last summer (which was mostly wasted--see below). He doesn't owe it to us to do that.

We're a smaller club historically than many clubs that are now in the CCC and even League One. We don't have the deepest fan base in the league. We're in London, which on one hand is great but we also have a world power (obnoxious) club a short walk from our grounds, other world-class clubs a Tube ride away. Being in the big city, football fans have a lot of choices on whom to support. I'm guessing the '90s did not do much for building our support.

However, I can fault MAF for poor hires. I'm not generally impressed with the management of the club, especially from what I read on the Voy TIFF page, and not let's even get started with LS. The thing that killed us this season was not hiring LS as an caretaker manager--it was keeping him, especially without doing an extensive search for the best manager we could get (which would have shown how lacking LS was). That I can blame MAF for. That bad decision meant the money MAF was willing to spend last summer was mostly wasted.

As a Detroit Tiger fan, I can say that the time the club started righting the ship was when Mike Ilitch took control of the club back from the kids (who have never really done anything in the business world on their own) and started paying attention again. MAF is a smart businessman, and I think Fulham would start to turn it around if MAF paid more attention to the club, or at least made sure that the right people were running the club from top to bottom. (This is just my impression from an ocean away, if other people more knowledgable about the situation disagree with this assesment, though, please comment!)

Note that we could be in a worse situations. MAF could have given LS even more money to waste, so we'd have even more mediocre players on the club to get rid of...

 

Re: MAF

You went a different way with this than I expected. I don't think it's fair to MAF because merely having enough money to sign better players doesn't mean those players want to come play for you. Yes, Darren Bent was available, but if we had offered him exactly the same contract as Spurs had, he still would've signed with Spurs. It's not JUST about the money, some players actually DO want to play for a team that has a shot to win something. (An Arsenal fan I know would wisecrack here, "So what does that have to do with Spurs?")

All that being said, my answers to Don's questions are A) Fernando Torres and B) Bent.

 

RE: Re: MAF

Good call on Torres, I may even argue that he was in our price range...that being said I would go with

A) David Bentley or Ashley Young

B) Fernando Torres

 

Re: MAF

Dang, tough day for me on the boards!

That comment about MAF came out rougher than I intended -- I know that he provided the funds that brought the team up from 91st position to where they are now. I also realize that this is a team without the financial resources of someone like Spurs, let alone the Big 4. I was just reading a few days ago on the "Manchester United of the South" dreams put forth a few years ago and I guess I was wondering what happened along the line.

So that wasn't to cast MAF in the same light that ManU fans view the Glazers or 'Pool fans view Hicks, I just wish things could have been done differently. The fact that I am posting these here instead of actually running the team should indicate how capable I would be of making things turn out better -- in other words, in that scenario we would be getting thumped by Bury and Hartlepool

Also, I am sad about my team's impending relegation. What am I going to be like, jumping up and down like I'm on The Price is Right? If we would have done this, if we could have done that, if the ref at 'Boro saw that the ball went over the danged line... what are you going to do, ultimately it falls on what happens on the green grass in between the white lines