SBR: NUFC has suffered ever since I was sacked

[9]

Sir Bobby is spot on.  Life after Bobby has been dreadful, and it was all down to us failing to quality for Champions League football.  Bobby would have likely clinched another Champ League spot if kept as manager, where instead we suffered a few years of Souness and Roeder.

 

There is a chance we could have got 4th, Everton got it that season didnt they?

[Thespence]

I am glad someone mentioned the Wolves game because after that game there were not many Bobby fans out there. But with hindsight & nostalgia we are all better judges.

 

Also noticed people on about Robert elsewhere, him & Viana were getting booed by the crowd  during the Wolves game. Of course with us being the "Loyalist football supporters the world has ever had" we do suffer a bit of amnesia.

 

[Menace]

I was there for his last game and the amount of abuse he got was sickening.

[9]

I am glad someone mentioned the Wolves game because after that game there were not many Bobby fans out there. But with hindsight & nostalgia we are all better judges.

 

Also noticed people on about Robert elsewhere, him & Viana were getting booed by the crowd at during the Wolves game. Of course with us being the "Loyalist football supporters the world has ever had" we do suffer a bit of amnesia.

 

 

I always ike to stay on and watch the lap of 'honor' if the seasons been good or bad, after the wolves game it was awful(missing out on champions league by a few points and a euro cup semi), forward a year and a bottom half finish with souness in charge and the players were pritty much cheered off the pitch was probley the most bizzare thing to happen, dont know if it was a case of we knew the likes of Robert were leaving and it was for them?

[johnnypd]

Also, we might have "suffered" in regards to league positions and results since 04/05, but surely the club itself has improved since Robson left?

 

You could also say that the fans got what they deserved after that Wolves game with what happened under Souness and Roeder. They never learn, though, which is the real tragedy.

 

i can't see any way in which the club was better off when robson left to when roeder was fired. for instance we were only one of two clubs (along with man utd) to have wages below 50% of turnover (or whatever the 'magic ratio' was), debt was controlled, we had bumper attendances  (the season where souness took over we had something like 99.99% capacity all on the back of robson's previous 3 years) we had a decent network of scouts headed by DofF Gordon Milne and so on. any improvements now have been as a result of Allardyce coming in and doing stuff behind the scenes, that we won't see any real benefit from for a while yet, and fairy godmother mike ashley coming along, getting his chequebook out and signing away the big, big problems shepherd and hall had created for us since they started publicly undermining Robson in his last season. i can't look fondly at robson's sacking, that and the so called replacement were disgraceful decisions. and it, along with shepherd's unpopularity, had nothing to do with us being taken over, which was part of a trend of rich owners getting involved, and the massive spike in TV money, and the plain fact that it was SJH who wanted out, NOT douglas hall or freddie shepherd, who had no choice in the matter. it will take a good few years to get us back to where we were under robson in say 2003. let's optimistically say 3 years from January, then that will be 2011, or 8 years since Robson at his peak, hardly "worth" his sacking then. i can't help feel that some are being a bit ungenerous towards robson, probably cos they foolishly supported his sacking at the time and are trying to make excuses for that. as i said earlier, he should've gone either at the end of 2003/04 or end of 2004/05, not at the time he did, which, along with getting the worst manager in the division to replace him was the worst possible decision to make.

[Rich]

Aye, I was just talking about the takeover by a billionaire more than anything Johnny

 

To say him getting sacked had nothing to do with Shepherd/the Halls going is utter codswallop though mate, I can't be arsed explaining it in depth because if you sit back and look at it you'll see it yourself.

 

Basically: Robson goes > Souness comes > we get shitter and sell our better players > Souness goes > Roeder comes > fans finally realise that problems lie higher up in the club and start revolting against the board/chairman rather than the managers > Shepherd is under immense pressure to go > Halls want to cut losses > club is rotten, ripe for a takeover. We might have still got bought out had events not transpired like that, but the whole thing would have been entirely different.

 

I think that any further success under Robson, or particularly under the former regime, would have been hollow. Robson was undoubtedly the best manager we'd had since Keegan, but the club still had an awful lot wrong with it from top-to-bottom, mainly because of Shepherd. "Papering over the cracks" comes to mind more than ever in this case.

 

I'm not doing Robson any disservice at all, honestly, and I'm not sure if your financial information is entirely correct. I'd imagine we were in a worse position financially when Robson went than we are now, after Ashley has paid the majority of our debt off.

[Alberto2005]

He got sacked because of his own success, he raised the expectations to title challengers and the excellent job he did ironically cost him in the end.

[Thespence]

I always ike to stay on and watch the lap of 'honor' if the seasons been good or bad, after the wolves game it was awful(missing out on champions league by a few points and a euro cup semi), forward a year and a bottom half finish with souness in charge and the players were pritty much cheered off the pitch was probley the most bizzare thing to happen, dont know if it was a case of we knew the likes of Robert were leaving and it was for them?

 

I think the big difference was the feel good factor. We had  the pain of losing a match to a shite Wolves team, missed out on a CL place. Then as you say go forward year we beat Chelsea with 10 men & which meant we WON a Intertoto place.

[JJ7]

We were about on par with Liverpool as a team about a year before Bobby got the sack. We started to decline through that season after we failed to qualify for the Champions League then sold Solano in the January. It was bit of a stupid decision. We were as good as Liverpool, but they had clever people in charge in the board room. They could see Houllier had done as much as he could and replaced him. We hung on too long, had a terrible summer in the transfer market, then sacked Bobby at a stupid time and appointed a shocking replacement.

 

Liverpool moved years ahead of us because of better decisions at board room level. The decision to let Souness, the wrong man, spend £50million has near enough destroyed us as a force at the top of the Premiership.

[Taylor Swift]

Aye, I was just talking about the takeover by a billionaire more than anything Johnny

 

To say him getting sacked had nothing to do with Shepherd/the Halls going is utter codswallop though mate, I can't be arsed explaining it in depth because if you sit back and look at it you'll see it yourself.

 

Basically: Robson goes > Souness comes > we get shitter and sell our better players > Souness goes > Roeder comes > fans finally realise that problems lie higher up in the club and start revolting against the board/chairman rather than the managers > Shepherd is under immense pressure to go > Halls want to cut losses > club is rotten, ripe for a takeover. We might have still got bought out had events not transpired like that, but the whole thing would have been entirely different.

 

I think that any further success under Robson, or particularly under the former regime, would have been hollow. Robson was undoubtedly the best manager we'd had since Keegan, but the club still had an awful lot wrong with it from top-to-bottom, mainly because of Shepherd. "Papering over the cracks" comes to mind more than ever in this case.

 

I'm not doing Robson any disservice at all, honestly, and I'm not sure if your financial information is entirely correct. I'd imagine we were in a worse position financially when Robson went than we are now, after Ashley has paid the majority of our debt off.

 

I hate to sound like NE5 here but if we were successful under the former regime then it wouldn't really be papering over the cracks - there wouldn't have been any cracks. If we'd got Champions League football in the year prior to SBR's sacking or if he'd had stayed and got us back into the top 4, our wage-turnover ratio would have been better, attendances would have continued to remain at the 99% thingy and of course most importantly, we would have been able to attract the best players in the world and would have been able to afford them. The success would have been sustainable because we were set up for it. We were a big spending, stadium-filling entertaining team; the only thing lacking was the geniune tangible success. There weren't any cracks until SBR left, Souness came and spunked £50m on a load of shite. That's why Ashley has had to pay off something like £30m in debt and that's why we've spent the Northern Rock money as well. Shepherd fucked up by hiring Souness but Souness was the one who set us back by 3-5 years.

[Big Geordie]

The board failed to back SBR when we finished 4th, we would always be on the decline compared to the other teams in the top 5 as they were investing in their squads.  So 5th was a correct finishing place for us when you look back at what happend.

 

To a tee. We only bought Bowyer that summer, and that was on a Bosman. We paid the price for not strengthening. I think Shepherd argued that he bought Woodgate that year, but that was back in the bloody January. Another boardroom balls-up

 

That said, the way the likes of Dyer, Jenas, etc treat SBR was very wrong. I was surprised to see Dyer say on Football Focus the other week that he still speaks to SBR everyday on the phone.

[S.S.R.]

If only we had kept him. Then we might have unearthed the next Cort, Gavilan, Bassedas, Bramble or Viana*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Who cost us a combined £26million and were sold on/gave away for less than £4million)

 

[johnnypd]

If only we had kept him. Then we might have unearthed the next Cort, Gavilan, Bassedas, Bramble or Viana*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Who cost us a combined £26million and were sold on/gave away for less than £4million)

 

 

or we couldve got alex ferguson to spend £38.5m on Veron, Kleberson and Djemba Djemba.

[Keefaz]

If only we had kept him. Then we might have unearthed the next Cort, Gavilan, Bassedas, Bramble or Viana*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Who cost us a combined £26million and were sold on/gave away for less than £4million)

 

 

Aye, lucky we got rid and brought in Souness who bought quality like Albert Luque and Boumsong.

[johnnypd]

Aye, I was just talking about the takeover by a billionaire more than anything Johnny

 

To say him getting sacked had nothing to do with Shepherd/the Halls going is utter codswallop though mate, I can't be arsed explaining it in depth because if you sit back and look at it you'll see it yourself.

 

Basically: Robson goes > Souness comes > we get shitter and sell our better players > Souness goes > Roeder comes > fans finally realise that problems lie higher up in the club and start revolting against the board/chairman rather than the managers > Shepherd is under immense pressure to go > Halls want to cut losses > club is rotten, ripe for a takeover. We might have still got bought out had events not transpired like that, but the whole thing would have been entirely different.

 

I think that any further success under Robson, or particularly under the former regime, would have been hollow. Robson was undoubtedly the best manager we'd had since Keegan, but the club still had an awful lot wrong with it from top-to-bottom, mainly because of Shepherd. "Papering over the cracks" comes to mind more than ever in this case.

 

I'm not doing Robson any disservice at all, honestly, and I'm not sure if your financial information is entirely correct. I'd imagine we were in a worse position financially when Robson went than we are now, after Ashley has paid the majority of our debt off.

 

it had nowt to do with it, loads of clubs changed hands, even man utd, not all of them had unpopular boards. doug ellis was unpopular for decades at villa, why do you think villa changed hands around the same time as us? did ellis suddenly reach a nadir of unpopularity or was it more to do with the trend of rich owners investing in the premiership and the spike in TV money? shepherd couldn't be forced out because he didnt want to sell and the decision to sell to ashley wasn't his it was SJH's. there were rumours hall would sell to shepherd, and when hall sold to ashley the deal included him being life president and shepherd remaining on the board. as far as i can tell SJH wanted to sell for the money, at a time when shares had been inflated by takeover talk (showing what a good time it was to sell) & tv money increase, as well as to get out of the perilious financial situation the club was in, not because he was disillusioned with shepherd, i think that is a weird interpretation, as shepherd is not the majority shareholder, if hall wanted him out he could've forced him out of the executive role. in fact he did say he was keen on bringing in a director of football to work under Shepherd to remove him from day to day football decision. if hall's primary motivation was dillusionment with shepherd, and not desire to sell outright, then surely he would've followed through on this option rather than sell. he wasn't cutting his losses either, was would imply he was making a loss on something and wanted out to contain the damage, in fact hall originally paid about £3m for his shares and sold for £55m, and that's not including the masses of money he also raised in the flotation.

 

my financial info is correct btw. from Macbeth's site - " So for example in 2004 the payroll was £44.9m and the income was £90.8m, a ratio of just under 50% which is widely seen as an acceptable ratio. The 2005 figures were very high at 58%, the 2006 figures are exceptionally high at 68%."

 

income charts:

http://www.nufc-finances.org.uk/gates27.gif

 

http://www.nufc-finances.org.uk/gates26.gif

 

there was also an overdraft that was brought in post-robson which was over £20m when ashley came in, which was part of near £100m debt that ashley part paid off.

[tgarve]

of course we have suffered since his sacking, if he had been backed that summer rather than undermined we would be a consistent european pushing side. if he was given that season and a quality succesor brought in then thongs would be fine now. Shepherd made a big mistake sacking him and he paid with his job.

[quayside]

I always ike to stay on and watch the lap of 'honor' if the seasons been good or bad, after the wolves game it was awful(missing out on champions league by a few points and a euro cup semi), forward a year and a bottom half finish with souness in charge and the players were pritty much cheered off the pitch was probley the most bizzare thing to happen, dont know if it was a case of we knew the likes of Robert were leaving and it was for them?

 

I think the big difference was the feel good factor. We had  the pain of losing a match to a s**** Wolves team, missed out on a CL place. Then as you say go forward year we beat Chelsea with 10 men & which meant we WON a Intertoto place.

 

We drew with the s**** Wolves team, which was bad enough at the time.  Going forward a year the players were cheered off after we drew with Chelsea to finish 14th and no European football. As #9 says it was bizarre as there was nothing much to feel good about there. The Intertoto celebration was a further year after that and understandable considering we'd been in about 15th spot at the beginning of February when Souness was sacked.

[Mick]

johnnyphd,

 

The debt wasn't near £100 million it was more than £100 million.

[Thespence]

We drew with the s**** Wolves team, which was bad enough at the time.  Going forward a year the players were cheered off after we drew with Chelsea to finish 14th and no European football. As #9 says it was bizarre as there was nothing much to feel good about there. The Intertoto celebration was a further year after that and understandable considering we'd been in about 15th spot at the beginning of February when Souness was sacked.

 

HA HA HA!!! Cheers for correcting me , the memory isn't what it used to be.

[fredbob]

I dont understand why people thought that this was the correct decision to sack him. Was it the supposed lack of discipline in the dressing room? Is a sacking for supposedly losing the dressing room justifiable? I understand that missing out on CL for 2 seasons was hertbreaking but we had a great run in the UEFA cup. We were finally back on the right track. Why would anyone change a winning side on the basis of a supposed "lost dressing room".

 

To this day I still can't see any justification for the sacking or any logic in it for that manner. Ipersonally believe that SBR would of stepped down in his own time and would of helped in gettin a new manager as well.

 

You obviously weren't watching us play, then. 

 

We were not on the right track, we had been on the right track but had left it 18 months earlier, which is when Robson should have been nicely moved to one side. He was sacked too late.

 

We werent playing to the high standard we'd become climatized to for the previous 2 seasons, convieniently forgetting the 3-4 season of insipid perfomrnace we'd had with the previous regimes. Which is fine, but EVERY single manager out there has had poor seasons, where it has looked like they were going down the wrong track every one, Fergie, Houllier, Wenger....i could name loads thoroughout the entire of Europe as well. But none were sacked after there supposed first poor season.

 

If the football was so poor, how the hell did we finish 5th? Thats a good season in my book. He was a victim of his own age if you ask me.

 

The bottom line is that irrespective of the performances, SBR had, for those 3-4 seasons, got us into a situation where we had the means to reestabilish ourselves as a big club in Enlgand. And instead of sticking with him until there were footballing reasons to get rid, i.e poor finishing position, we sack him for 1 and his first season of lower standard football.

 

The real litmus test is would you sack Allardyce under the exact same circumstances?  i mean, if he built us up for the next 2 season, then fininshed 4, 3, then 5th playuing good football, would you sack Allardyce?  The situations are similar from when they took over, except for the estabilishment of the top 4.

 

 

[2sheds]

The last season SBR in charge was the maximum limit he can bring the team, we can't go higher. And his maximum limit wasn't good enough.

 

In his last season Sir Bobby Robson got 5th and a Uefa Cup Semi Final that was the maximum that "wasn't good enough"?

 

Dear me how many many more utterly useless arguments are there that agree to a sacking of a man 16 days and 4 games into a new season after getting us 3rd, 4th, 5th playing Champions League football and consistently qualifying for European competition?

 

How long will this club have to wait till we hit the heights of Sir Bobby Robson's 3rd, 4th, 5th and Champions League football again? a very very very long time but such is the reality when you get rid of something special you get exactly what you deserve.

 

We sacked a man who had got us 3rd, 4th, 5th and Champions League football, a man who had won 10 major trophies as a manager, a man who is the most successful British manager to manager abroad winning 7 trophies in 3 different top leagues in Europe (Spain, Holland, Portugal) managing the likes of Barcelona to European Cup glory, a man who took England's national team the furthest its ever been in a World Cup abroad in history we lost a great man but a even greater manager.

 

Don't worry lads Sam Allardyce is the answer just like Greame Souness was "the disciplinarian will sort that dressing room out" and Glenn Roeder was dear me only at Newcastle United.

Absolutely spot on.

I see the 'Robson had lost the dressing room' line has been trotted out regarding players like Dyer.

Thats the same Dyer who was rewarded with a big fat juicy improved contract after Robson left, the lad obviously had friends in high places.

[fredbob]

The general consensus of those who believe that SBR was right to be sacked is that the cracks started to appear we were going down the wrong track so he needed to be 'got rid of' as soon as possible. Is that correct?

 

For those who thought that it was the right dcision to sack him.....who do you think would of come to a club that sacks there legendary manager for fininshing 5th after 4 years of insipid football? All this without any trophies or titles for god knows how many years to justify the sacking? Who were you hoping to get?

[Guest fraser]

The decision to sack SBR was reprehensible in the extreme.  FFS caved in to the Halls. The fact is that they were looking for an excuse to sack him; the 4-2 loss at Villa provided it. I sometimes wonder where we would be now if Sorensen had been sent off for handball when Bellamy (from whom SBR got the best) was through on goal and we'd won that match.

[Guest Knightrider]

Should read: SBR has suffered ever since he was sacked

 

 

I firmly belief his sacking and the manner in which it was brought about has had an impact on his health, if not physically, certainly mentally.

[Wullie]

The decision to sack SBR was reprehensible in the extreme.  FFS caved in to the Halls. The fact is that they were looking for an excuse to sack him; the 4-2 loss at Villa provided it. I sometimes wonder where we would be now if Sorensen had been sent off for handball when Bellamy (from whom SBR got the best) was through on goal and we'd won that match.

 

Or if Jenas hadn't missed an open goal at Boro about two minutes before they equalised. Or if the officials had been halfway competent and seen that equaliser was scored with a hand. Or if Shay hadn't made a totally uncharacteristic error to let Norwich back into the game at SJP. Or if we'd put away one of the shedful of chances we had against Spurs. That's without mentioning the Dyer shit.

 

We had an incredible amount of bad luck in those four games, which was what made it even more sickening when the fat mong started mashing the panic button.