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  • When you look at the squad laid out like that, just 12 signed on at the moment, with Bean tbc. Looks pretty light indeed.

    Hope Gaz has some good ideas lined up, as the next month will fly by.

  • Fly by? Not if you look at the gasroom every day @Malone

  • Most players are on a well earned holiday at the moment. Those who are out of contract still have one more pay packet to come so won't be too panicked into making decisions on their future. Add to that agents will be promising them they have deals in the pipeline that will see them in higher leagues at higher wages. Reality will kick in the last week of next month and then the squad will start to build.

    The more interesting part of the summer will be how early Premiership and Championship clubs look to get their loan players out. With the new system it will be interesting how our record for improving talent benefits us now.

  • If you have to commit to loanees for longer than previously, it'll be critical to make next to no mistakes.
    Liburd wasn't up to much, and although Sellars was nippy and had some skill, I can't really say that he was that full of end product. So if you'd gone for those 2 boys and had to take them for 6months to a season or whatever the rule is, that'd be a real bind.

    He has a real job on his hands.

  • Did Liburd do anything whatsoever of note during his loan spell?

  • Came in during a period when we'd basically given up for the season, when one too many injuries had dulled us in fairness.

    But the lack of knowing how to use his strength or win a header was a real worry.
    When you get a player with his build, you presume he'll be a physical star. Shows you should never presume.

    Would always prefer him to the likes of Benyon though. A player I cannot understand how he ever scored goals. Beyond the principle that anyone up front over a season by the sheer rule of averages would occasionally be there for tap ins.

  • I think Liburd and Sellars were on trial for this season. In which case we will have now seen them in training and can make a more informed decision.

  • They were brought in to try to get promotion. Saying we had given up at that point is hindsight talking - where were we in the league at the start of March?

  • We were in the playoff zone, and Ainsworth made a big thing about saying we'd hit our target.
    That and injuries to Paris and O Nien combined completely derailed us.

    In years to come Ainsworth will surely recognise it wasn't a clever thing to say.

    When you're in the play off zone with about 10 games to go, you've been there all season, and you were in the play offs the year before, there really is nothing to be gained from trying to pretend that playoffs isn't the goal.

  • We were in the play off zone but we were becalmed. The season ended in March and our position only became true over the last games when we plummeted down to mid table. If the drop had happened earlier the goodwill towards GA may have been far less. The league was very kind to him

  • edited May 2016

    Hmm I think if we reversed the first and second halves of the season then people would feel a lot more positive about Ainsworth now.

  • If the first and second halves of the season were reversed he'd be very lucky to still be in a job and probably only would have survived Xmas because of the ridiculously long contact he has.

  • @Chris in fairness, as a defence of Gaz. that's almost irrelevant. If the season ended at Christmas we'd have had a good chance of going up, but it didn't it... we finished 13th.

    I'm a fan of Ainsworth, but I wouldn't be too disappointed if someone poached him this summer, because I feel the turgid mire we've sat through for much of the year, clearly, hasn't been worth it in terms of points.

    The fact is that announcing we'd hit our 'total' was the most ludicrous thing to do. Lauding what a sensational effort it was to have done that, but insisting fans still turn up to see the '7 game season', with promises of what the team could do 'with the shackles off', returned 5 goals and 3 points.

    I'm not too disappointed by the way the season went, as our squad was nowhere near as good as last seasons, and we weren't promoted with that. It's more the club and trusts insistence that, due to finances, we should be pleased with mediocrity.

    I'd imagine he was bargaining on Paris setting the 2nd half of the season alight, which was a poor move considering his patchy, injury-plagued record.

    Having said all this, I wanted Gaz to go when we barely survived in 2014, and look what he pulled out of the bag then.

  • 14/15 season we did something very similar by confirming we'd hit our points total and 'announcing' we were going to push for promotion. We finished on our best ever pts total and had a pretty strong run in.

    So I'm not sure it has much effect on performances.

    To my mind it was more a case of injuries and poor form at the close of the season.

  • edited May 2016

    @prufrock_91 I'd also be happy for Gareth to get the opportunity to manage a bigger team this summer however I read with slight trepidation that the Port Vale chairman won't make a decision on their new boss until the third week of June. If they plump for Ainsworth then we won't realistically be in a position to appoint anyone until mid-July, by which time most of the promising free agents will have found themselves a new club. Which means we'd be fishing in the pool of McGinns again.

    Though given we've got a 13-at-best man squad at the moment, at least a new gaffer would be able to shape it in their own image pretty easily!

  • @Chris but that isn't how the season went so pretty much irrelevant

    I think there's still plenty of goodwill towards Gaz, and rightly so but we all know he needs to turn around our form since the start of the year otherwise we're going to be involved in a fight to stay up

    Player recruitment this summer is absolutely vital. He's got it right before. Let's hope he gets it right again

  • I agree it's irrelevant, I was simply disagreeing with the point made by @TheAndyGrahamFanClub that the order of results favours Ainsworth.

    I'd be gutted if Ainsworth left, but have no hard feelings - he deserves his chance at a higher division as does Pierre.

  • Port Vale have had to make huge budget cuts in the last couple of years, hence why former manager Rob Page jumped ship to the Cobblers,who you can hardly call financially stable. I cant see anyone presently employed as a manager in the Fl, resigning to take the Vale Park hotseat.

  • If we have another season of football as dull as the one we've just seen then I'd be relaxed about Gareth being poached.

    For the time being though, I like to remember (unlike many on here) the slightly agricultural but high scoring and hard working XI of the previous season and give the manager a bit of credit for that.

    Football is littered with the wreckage of clubs who shifted managers out chasing something better. That said, I possess no FA coaching badges, so what would I know.

  • @Glenactico , you're sort of ignoring that last season we should really have finished top 3 and gone up automatically.
    Instead, we did choke a bit, and end up in the play offs.

    This year, we were onyly ever going to scrape the playoffs, but 7th should have been ours.

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