[bluepooch]

He's trying to play Champagne football with lemonade players.
I do like his football philosophy and I think patience is required but unfortunately patience is a non existent word in football.
Second half was better but we were 3-0 down so you could argue they had taken their foot of the gas.It was definitely not a 3-0 game at that time but the goals were really poor .
It was literally men against boys , their team was much more experienced with the likes of Richards ,Smith and O Toole up against our kids.
All is not lost in my view as I believe Caldwell will get these players to improve but we really do need to start games on the front foot ,we just looked sluggish first half .
Positives were Faupala ,who showed some nice touches and took his goal well and Grimshaw ,who grew into the game after a poor start.
Other observations,Dennis hardly had a touch and was replaced by the equally ineffective Evans.Allinson should have saved their 3rd and gave us a few hairy moments ,not sure what was up with Fulton.Nolan was better than of late but Donohue contines to frustrate me .
Tuesdays game is massive now ,Caldwell has to start getting his ideas across sharpish.

[Dancingwilldoit]

Wrong appointment, wrong loanees Blue. I know you still think there's hope but in all honesty you need to face facts. Usually a new manager boosts a teams performances for a few games, in our case nothing has changed. Maybe its all down to the players, maybe its the manager but either way we are down.

[spireitematt]

Like I said on the other forum tonight. Dancing and Devon are right. We're virtually relegated now. Will Caldwell walk at the end of the season? Will we be competing in the Football League next season?

We've lost good players brought in loanees who aren't as good as the players we've lost. We're 2nd from bottom, 5pts from safety and all the teams above us are starting to put results together.

Next 5 games are:

Gillingham
Bury
Millwall
Oxford United
Walsall

I can only see us getting maybe 3-4 pts from those games.

The way things are going Coventry and ourselves could be relegated by end of March, start of April.

[bluepooch]

Some managers do make a gradual rather than immediate impact and they are the ones who generally last.
Caldwell himself took some time at Wigan to get things right ,another example is a guy called Alex Ferguson ,ex Manchester United manager who during his early years, struggled and was famously one game away from the sack .
Caldwell may not be the answer but to write him off after two games is ridiculous.

[Dancingwilldoit]

Not writing him off after 2 games Blue. I wrote him off before his first game.
All he achieved at Wigan was with a massive budget. He had no proven record managing on a shoe string and was not what we needed at the time. We needed a hard task master who was going to stand no nonsense and make the players get stuck in, fight and grind out results.
You said the same thing in your opening post. The last thing we need is pretty football, it wont do us any favours..
I am not saying get rid of him, what I'm saying is that he was the wrong appointment to keep us in league 1. We may well bounce back up under his leadership and only time will tell. In the meantime I am not looking forward to our remaining home games one bit.

[Devongone]

Like Dancing I suspect Mr Caldwell was the wrong appointment, but what is certain it was made at a pretty impossible time for the guy. The club is in chaos and he is expected to make the playing side miraculously ordered and successful.

He has chosen to fight experience with youth. Unfortunately it is youth he has brought in from other clubs. And it is his choice to try for a kind of football apparently beyond his players; so it's his fault not theirs.

My opinion is we'll go down by a country mile. Like Coventry we are begging for it. Tuesday is irrelevant, so we'll probably win that one.

These three games have strengthened my opinion that we should have gone with The Hump and Danny, but we have to be fair with Mr Caldwell. If he doesn't walk away he should be our manager next season. He's done nothing to deserve having his career wrecked by our idiocy.

The real worry is not relegation, but that Mr Allen will play the same game with us as The Oystons at Blackpool, or The Chicken Factory at Blackburn. As everyone says, he'll have to drop his price to sell, but that pre-supposes selling will be more rewarding to him than orchestrating the chaos into which the club has been plunged. We are told he has the good of the club at heart, but we need to recognise that he has more money than he could ever need whether or not he sells us. Our true position is not that our current lack of a team might take us down, but that our former Chairman might have his finger on our self-destruct button. By pricing us so high he might just be making sure we never leave the shop window.

[spireitematt]

Whoever came in as manager I think would have had a difficult job but to lose so many players in one transfer window and then replace them with loans. Unless something changes very very soon I can't see us staying in this division. There is 16 games left 48 pts on offer and we need at least 26 pts to stay up that means we need to win at least 9 of the remaining 16 games.

[bluepooch]

Just looked at the table and it wouldn't take much to get us out of the bottom four ,we have a game in hand over those above us.
We just need a win to kick start our season .

[spireitematt]

The game in hand is the Millwall game and we won't be winning that. It would take two wins and hope results go in our favour but the problem is majority of teams above us are playing teams who are in the bottom four, so it only takes Oldham, Port Vale and Gillingham to get a few wins under there belt and there will be a marginal gap between the bottom four and those just above it.

We've scored 29 goals this season and let in 49 (the most in the league) we've won 2 out of the last 10 and scored 5 goals in the last 10 games. Our top goalscorer so far has gone on loan to Sheffield United.

[Devongone]

I agree Matt, our position is extraordinarily difficult. Hurst seems to have got Shrewsbury going, either him, or ditching SEB, Oldham have started to win and are even scoring occasionally, Bury have broken their losing run. The fact is only Swindon of the teams immediately above us is matching our level of disorganisation and they've adopted exactly the same policy as us of filling their side with academy about-to-be-rejects on loan, and they've got Tim Sherwood playing Chris Turner with almost equal insincerity.

Gillingham away on a Tuesday night, congratulations to the fixture program on that piece of digital bollocks! At least Caldwell will have plenty of time for team-building and bonding on the road. Even if we win it isn't all going to look promising on Wednesday morning.

Assuming we won't have the sense just to discard all our loanees AND recall our loan-outs, we are stuck with these boys for the rest of our excursion into Division Two. Now I don't give a fkuc what kind of fantasy football Mr Caldwell thinks he can impose, but if I were building us a team I'd start by saying FIRST: names for the future ..... so Maguire plays centre back. He needs a bigger man alongside, who'll help, choose between Evatt and Anderson. Right back is our Libyan international, on the left we need Dan Jones - to get forward. Midfield, first name on the sheet is Martinez, our only controlling midfielder, then we choose Nolan or Mr Grim and we need whoever is best equipped to attack down the right, to balance Jones attacking from left back. Further forward - well Ched has been just as successful as Jamie Vardy this season, everybody knows we've got him and as he's our only threat he's never going to score ........ so. My solution is to play two players in front of him and have him coming from deeper. If Josh Morris can score bucketloads for Scunny I'm convinced one step back might set Ched free. Up front, well Dennis doesn't appear to have the weight to be effective beyond the fifth tier, so I'd play to young lads to see if they'd cause defences more problems. I'd stick Faupala and German together to see what happens, because in some way we need either to kickstart or kick out Ched Evans ....... because he's our only proven source of goals. Dennis would sub Evans, Simons one of the front men .......

Almost anything would be better than the screw-loose idea that a bunch of raw recruits is likely to pass teams of hardened pros into oblivion and save us in a feast of skills straight from the coaching manual ..... that incidentally every other coach will have read in any case.