inckley fox

Incredibly, even when we're not successful, Top is busy lapping up the credit for things he never did. Like building our original success (that was Pearson/Walsh/Shakespeare, who were here before him, or Ranieri, who he didn't appoint - or, at a push, his father). And making Leicester City a significant Midlands club, which they were already (to a greater extent, and with a far more stable financial footing than they have now). He genuinely believes he made us. And what's staggering is that, as we went down in 2023, it was widely reported that complacency among those upstairs was the critical problem... And then we see that interview a few weeks ago, and the deranged extent of his complacency, and it's clear that, all along, the arrogance and entitlement cascaded directly down from him. For a long, long while, there's been a way back, but I don't think there is now.

Do you honestly believe that most managers in that situation would have achieved any more than the square root of **** all? The current caretaker hasn't. The three managers before him didn't. It was starting to go wrong for the manager before them, who had by a massive margin the most expensive squad the second tier had ever seen. The interim before him failed. And the previously-successful manager who preceded him endured a torrid final two seasons. There's no way on earth you can look at the weight of all this evidence and draw the conclusion that individual managers have been our problem. And if they've been a bit ropey, it's because our board have actively sought that kind of boss, instead of people who'd stand a chance of addressing the malaise.

Well I kind of agree, but either way the issue isn't the manager. If only half of your fans are turning up, your players have been half-arsed for years, you've got a points deduction and there are no funds to rebuild, then it's hard to argue that your fourth manager in little more than a year is the main problem.

What I would say is that the 1991 rebuild cost a total of about 200K at best. Allowing for inflation, they're the sorts of amounts we'll have at our disposal if we sell Fatawu, Khanouss and co. A couple of million here and there at best, depending on the division we find ourselves in. If we drop, 20-30m sales may have halve in value overnight. Not for the first time, we may have missed the moment of maximum saleability for some of our assets. The question is whether our recruitment network has adjusted to reality yet, because in the past it's looked as if we're fishing for the last tiddlers left in the big pond, rather than the low budget, lower league up-and-coming talents elsewhere. That's when you start thinking that we need a Pearson-Walsh style overhaul.

I think they probably are idiots, but you make some very interesting points.

Trust me, I'm outraged. It makes Shipman, Elsom and Mandaric look very, very competent. I've never known such neglect. The future of the club as an entity is at stake too. But if I had a young kid (I don't) who was in love with the club and wanted to get behind them no matter what, I'm not sure I'd be boycotting. Much like people who have said that they go with elderly relatives, old chums, disabled friends. There's nothing wrong with that, surely. The bigger problem, for me, isn't the fact that people attend. I watch all the games too, I miss going, and I invariably want us to win. So fair play if you still go. The real issue, as I see it, is the contingent which can't see that, no, King Power were never the biggest reason for our success and, yes, they really are in the process of destroying the club. Whether we boycott, like you and me, or don't, it's vital that we're not complicit in destroying the club. And vital that, even if the board finally make a serious concession like bringing Pearson back, or if they do go down and come straight up again, we're not fooled into thinking that this leadership has any future. I think, despite endless opportunities to rescue the situation, the game really is up for Top. I would love to be wrong, of course. If people can start making vaguely sensible decisions then I'm all for it.

I've boycotted the club since the Maresca season, but we really can't start pinning the blame on those who don't agree with us. I was among the 8000-12000 strong crowds in the Shipman years, and wasn't ever made to feel I was facilitating the club's downfall.

That's not the only reason, is it?

No Chief Exec as we face financial oblivion. No manager, three weeks after we sacked a manager that everyone knew was going to be sacked two months earlier, as we face footballing oblivion. It's predictable at this stage, isn't it? I've been nice, compared to some, about Top and Rudkin, but while they're at the forefront of our decision making, there is absolutely no hope whatsoever. This latest episode really is the crowning turd in the waterpipe.

Milne always started seasons badly! So you're spot on there. If I were to bang on about what constitutes 'decline' I'd say it were more sustained than, say, the dodgy first four months under O'Neill or a rough patch or two under Puel. We were 12th when he took over, finished 9th, dropped to 12th the next year after some poor form when he was sacked, and ended up 9th. I just don't think that classifies as decline in the same way as a relegation, or a lengthy period in the bottom half of the second tier. I'd say the same about the Great Escape, or the poor final quarter of the Maresca season. Lengthy blips rather than downward spirals!

It's a list of managers who had a sustained period of decline in their reign. I don't think that applies to O'Neill, Puel et al.

Oh yeah, of course. I was only listing the managers who'd had a spell of sustained decline during their reign. Milne was a good boss, but not a great recruiter. The narrative was always that he benefited from a young squad, assembled from youth players and budget acquisitions by Wallace, and underachieved with it. This was always a very questionable stance, coloured by fans who never wanted Milne to succeed from the off. But from the perspective of someone who was too young to go to many games under Milne (admittedly) - on paper it looks like he was the better manager.

I can only really speak first hand from the Hamilton era onwards, but I love reading up on the club's history, and when you look back over our fifty managers (interims included, and caretakers excluded) there are a bunch of them who stick out for presiding over periods of decline and/or poor performance at some stage or other. To give an exhaustive list (without AI, so sorry if I miss someone out!), Gardner, Johnson, Bartlett, Ford, Linney, Orr, Lochhead, Womack, Bromilow, Mather, Duncan, Bullock, Gillies, O'Farrell, McLintock, Wallace, Hamilton, Pleat, Lee, Little, McGhee, Taylor, Bassett, Adams, Levein, Kelly, Allen, Megson, Holloway, Sousa, Ranieri, Rodgers, Cooper, Van Nistelrooy and Cifuentes - they each had some kind of serious blot on their copybooks. But you can make a case for pretty for the defence with pretty much all of them. Gardner was perhaps the main player in establishing us as a club. Johnson, Womack, Bullock, O'Farrell, Wallace, Little and Adams all won promotions to go with the relegations they were involved in, and McGhee also had a big role in a promotion in 95/96. Lee did his job and kept us up. Bromilow won a wartime league. Bartlett and Kelly kept us in the second tier in tough eras. Even Pleat turned our season around in 87/88, before we stalled due to a combination of budget restrictions and his own ineptitude. Orr pushed for the title before things went south, as did Gillies, who won us our first trophy and nearly won us three more. Ranieri won us the league and thus became arguably our greatest ever manager before it started to go wrong. Rodgers won the Cup and two top five finishes, so in spite of his criminal negligence towards the end there's always going to be an argument for him being one of our best, rather than worst, managers. Even Taylor had a 13th place top flight finish, making him one of only fourteen bosses to have kept us up in the top flight for a season, and only twelve if we're talking full seasons. And many of those bosses I listed had to deal with dire circumstances, from Linney to Lochhead to Bassett to Cifuentes. The point being, there are very few managers in our history who were exclusively bad. They'd be Ford, Linney, Mather, McLintock, Hamilton, Bassett, Levein, Allen, Megson, Holloway, Sousa, Van Nistelrooy, Cifuentes. Some of them weren't in charge for long enough to make a judgement, and others were dealing with a horrendous mess at the club. Some, like Ford and Sousa, were bad but in an ultimately inconsequential manner, in that we were either re-elected or stayed up. So I'd have to go for Holloway as the outright worst, because the consequences were the gravest, but even then you could say he was having to deal with Mandaric's mess, and the aftermath of Allen and Megson. I don't think you can argue a serious case for Rodgers being our worst boss. What he and Taylor were, on the hand, were two of our most damaging bosses, in that they turned periods of success into an extended period of failure. Taylor being the worst on that score, because his achievements aren't a significant counterbalance. So, for me, Holloway was the worst, and Taylor the most detrimental.

Honestly, if we're still silly enough to think that Cooper or Cifuentes have had any particularly detrimental impact on the club, other than doing Top and Rudkin's bidding, then there's no hope! They're irrelevances, and never had any serious chance of success (even if they had been the right people for the job, which they weren't). Also, Hamilton, Holloway and Sousa should be on this list. And, if I were to try to get clever (Fossils and Foxes / Foxestalk History in hand), Louis Ford and Tom Mather.

Years ago a kid at school asked to use my computer. He was a nice kid so I naively let him. I came back a minute or two later, max, to find a whole bunch of them watching that. I called the IT guy to make it go away from my computer, got a telling off for letting kids use my account (never happened again), and then two minutes later heard this howl of laughter, because he'd obviously decided to have a look too. So yes, point taken. And being a Leicester fan is a bit like being that cup nowadays.

In the Sky interview he credited himself, in his first sentence, with creating our success. He went on to say that we were just a small Midlands club before they came along. I understand that their arrival both coincided with, and contributed positively to, the club's rise, but it was always clear that Pearson, Walsh, Shakespeare, Ranieri were the true builders of our success, and the rise up from the third tier was already well underway before they arrived. The entire point of our success was that it wasn't, relatively speaking, bought for us. Vichai spent amply in the second tier, but much of the funding was misused during the Sven experiment. Their first masterstroke was undoing the error of forcing Pearson out, which they may or may not have had something to do with, and the second was appointing Ranieri (the most high profile figure to say he wanted the job, publicly, after they'd been knocked back by O'Neill and co) to replace him as head of the pre-existing management structure. Beyond that, Top pumped a lot of his own money into the club, but mainly to deal with the consequences of KP's incompetence. It's nothing earth-shattering as far as boardroom involvements go. No new stadium. No blank chequebooks. No sustainable football model - it all fell apart as the Pearson Project slowly fell away under his successors. Credit where due, for sure, but the ability to pick out some of the world's best talent for peanuts was obviously the key to our emergence, and you only have to look at what happened next to know that this had little or nothing to do with Top, or Rudkin, or Vichai for that matter. Every passing week, and each new chapter of breathtaking incompetence confirms the narrative that they were never the architects of this. It's wrong, to me, to hear people saying that Top is destroying his father's legacy, firstly because it's a cruel thing to say, but secondly because our success wasn't really his father's legacy. Yet regardless of how I feel, each new disaster leads you to one of two conclusions: Top is indeed destroying his father's legacy, or the whole notion of a KP legacy was a myth in the first place, because they don't know how to run a football club. Whoever the legacy belongs to, it isn't them. That feels like another cruel thing to say, and I'd love for them to be a little less negligent, or actively self-harming, because then people could get on with believing in the KP mythology, or whatever they want to think. I don't hate Top. It's not a precondition that he sods off before I ever part with my money for them again. And for me, it's fine that Vichai has his statue, even if it is misleading. On balance he was a good chairman during a great era, and died a tragic death. It's right that there's a memorial. Even so, our story was never about the Thai King, Buddhist monks, free pies, free beers, and it certainly wasn't about their own visionary appointments or big spending. And there was quite a significant football club in existence before their arrival too. I don't recall them dismissing it as a two-bit Midlands club when they arrived. We'd won promotions, pushed for titles, won cups, been in a whole bunch of FA Cup finals before the KP era. Yes, absolutely, actually winning major honours betters that, but there was enough that went on in the 125 or so years before they turned up to deserve a little more respect. Instead, Top came across as naive and ignorant about all things football, and above all about the past - and present - of the club for which he is the current custodian. There are only three ways he can fix this. One is for things to suddenly, magically start to go right again all by themselves. Okay, even Mandaric once stumbled across the right manager, and they did on a few occasions too. So maybe they haven't ruined the club to such an extent that there's no chance of that. The second is for them to take an almighty step back, relinquish control, give Rudkin the boot and let someone else make all the big calls. That'd be a lot more likely to work out well, but they'd still need to get the right person. And the third option is just to sell up before it gets really grim. I have this awful feeling they're going for the 'magic' option.

I saw the topic and was surprised that you hadn't all agreed on 'Julius Caesar' (the end bit of course) for the lot of them, and closed the thread. Then I thought about it a bit and decided that was giving them way too much credit. Plus they would have had to betray at least three different Caesars, all of which were way crapper than Caesar was. And I'm not sure which Gods our board might qualify as. Maybe Rudkin as Erebus. It is a bit like the Second Triumvirate right now though.

It isn't fact though. His stats are awful, creatively and defensively, and we lose more frequently when he plays than when he doesn't. We can't keep looking to what happened in 23/24, when Ricardo was a far better player, when we had Hermansen, Ndidi, KDH and Vardy, when even Vestergard and Faes put in a shift, and when - in spite of all that - Winks still went massively off the boil after Xmas. He's been inconsistent at best for two years now and stands accused from all sorts of sources of being one of the most rotten of all the rotten apples. I honestly don't see anything which suggests he should be doing anything other than training with the youth team. Without wishing to condescend, I'm full of respect for you as a poster. I don't want to get all spiky just because we lost and I'm pissed off about it. But I do think you're way wide of the mark on this one.

I honestly wonder if some of us just aren't paying attention! Not only is he one of the foremost exponents of the culture issue at the club, we also have far worse results with him in the side. And he was worse than Aribo today, and lost his man for the winner. There is literally no reason to believe that he's the answer to our problems, and all of the available information clearly points towards the very opposite. Lazily saying 'oh well he's better than the alternatives' when he isn't, or 'he's a very technically gifted player' when we supposedly have loads of technically gifted players - and have seen for a long, long time that that gets you nowhere if they won't apply themselves - really helps nobody. We're in a scrap and need people who are up for it. And we, more than any other club, should understand that conviction and unity can easily trump high profile 'talent'. That should be clear from our rise to prominence, and our fall. It's the one glaringly obvious lesson from it all.

Okay, fair point there!

Aribo wasn't too bad was he? Did better than Winks, and has two further advantages: he hasn't been an absolutely central factor in our decline, and our results aren't yet demonstrably worse when he plays. It really would be a huge help if fans could understand that the lack of application by the likes of Winks is the main reason for our current predicament. Rewarding those individuals with a recall is unlikely to be the solution.

Probably Ricardo's performances this season and last rather than anything Aluko has actually done himself.

It does look like that sometimes, though I remember Maresca praising him for his pace. Every now and then he wins a foot race, but perhaps isn't the most agile of CBs.

I thought Nelson and especially Lascelles were good. They were just under intense pressure because of the full backs (among others).

Which makes it all the more astounding that people were seriously, against the full weight of statistical evidence, arguing that we're better with him in the side. Some really good posters made themselves look quite thick with those remarks. And they'll age as well as those who denounced Cooper (as wrong for the job as he always was) for not playing Alves and Pereira, for being from Forest, for being ugly, for the same poor recruitment which has blighted his predecessors and successors, and for only being 16th in the table. Higher when the likes of Harry Winks decided they couldn't be arsed to play for him any more. So you can take the point of view, as many did last week, that Winks has simply grown frustrated by a substandard manager. Then another. Then another one after that. Or you could draw the far more obvious conclusion that he's the epitome of the cultural problem at the club.