JackFox

Ah, you’re at that stage now I see… 😁

A couple of posts from the Millwall fans just before our match with them on Tuesday…thought you’d appreciate it… 😬

Looks exactly like a Russell Martin side to me. Any half-decent manager should have taken you up fairly comfortably that season, Martin very nearly screwed it all up. Players not playing to their strengths, playing suicide possession football, crowds starting to feel total apathy, home thumpings…sounds very similar to me as a Swans fan. Sure, there’ll be a 2 nil win with 90% possession at some point and there’ll be the usual small cult of people saying ‘we can see what he’s doing’…while winning 1 in 10 or something. It’s a results business and Leicester fans know they need to get rid. They’ve had more than enough warnings before these thumpings started coming in…and many knew before he even arrived. I agree with the rubber-necking though, it’s mildly entertaining (sadly for Leicester fans). Edit: here’s some home results for us during his tenure: 0-3 1-3 1-4 1-3 1-5 And there’s about 3 or 4 games where we lost 3-2 or 4-3 at home. Away from home, here are some results: 3-1 3-1 4-0 3-0 4-0 5-1 4-0 3-0 We had a decent side under him with some quality still lingering from the PL/parachute payment days. We experienced some absolute thumpings that we’ve not experienced since the old division three days, and even then there weren’t that many. It’s depressing just researching back into our results under him!

As I said before, us Swans fans are utterly staggered that he keeps getting jobs. Not just jobs but very good ones too. You would have had the pick of the litter in League One and probably could tempt some Championship managers down there too. At least with us, we only had his MK Dons tenure to go from. He was known to play extreme possession football and our fans wanted ‘The Swansea Way’ back, developed by Roberto Martinez, Brendan Rodgers and then finally Michael Laudrup. The difference with those is that we played possession with pace and attacking wingers, with Martin, it’s pass around the back 4 for ten minutes until someone inevitably gave it away. With yourselves, I just cannot fathom what your owners saw at Rangers to think he’s the man. At Southampton he got sacked after 16 PL games…we’re convinced that had he stayed there, they would have beaten Derby’s record for the worst PL season ever. They won 1 and lost 13 of those 16. I think you’ll be lucky to scrape the playoffs with him. And, rest assured, his ego will go through the roof and he will double down if you do.

Welcome to Martinball. We always had sarcastic comments on our Swans fora after every depressing draw or loss of ‘at least we won in the passing’. Even wins felt empty and it was always a struggle, such as a 3-2 or something. We rarely comfortably put a game to bed at 2-0. Even at that scoreline you always felt there was a screw up at the back coming. There were brief rumours of him returning to us a year ago and you wouldn’t believe (well, maybe you would!) the number of fans who said they wouldn’t renew their season ticket if he did. At the end of the day, football is entertainment…and Martinball is a dire, dire watch, twinned with poor results. It’s the worst of both worlds. Sure, you’ll get times where it’ll click and it’ll look sublime for 20-30 seconds, the problem is, this is once in every ten games or something. And it doesn’t get better. This is where you’ll get a strange extreme minority of fans that’ll think Russ is a diamond in the rough or something. It’s almost like a cult. There are still a couple of our fans who pine for him back, but I must stress that is a very small amount of people. If you’re lucky, he’ll dump his suicide tactics when he comes under pressure. The problem is, his ego is such that he’ll switch back to them as soon as the results come in. There’s a reason he’s known as ‘pound shop Pep’.

Swans fan in peace here. We’re all utterly staggered that Martin keeps getting jobs. He ruined us in the exact same way as he ruined Rangers and now yourselves. His only success was taking a Southampton side up to the PL, scraping it via the playoffs when they should have walked the league with that squad. It’s very entertaining (nothing personal, it’s entirely towards Martin), because he constantly trots out the same crap every game. The style of play is suicidal and boring. The only tiny bit of success he had with us was a string of a handful of games, where he was under pressure and dropped his crazy tactics and allowed players to play to their strengths…rather than trying to turn some cloggers at the back into Iniesta and Xavi. Your club deserves better. He’ll keep telling you to ‘trust the process’ but it will never get better. MK Dons warned us. You need to sack him before it’s too late. He is the biggest charlatan I’ve ever seen in football management.