[Slick_Footwork]

Slick I agree with pretty much everything you've said there. What this suggests then is that TP is trying to shoehorn players into his favoured formation rather than adapting his tactics around the players he's got.

Agree entirely.

From my point of view, when Irvine was sacked last year, Pulis was the appointment I wanted simply because we needed to stay up. I think Pulis is one of the best at getting decent performances out of average players.

However, I wanted him to be pulled in just until the end of the season and then, if we stayed up for us to get a footballing manager to come in and start a fresh. Ironically, the manager I would've liked was Flores, now at Watford.

Long term the blame has to go with our board though, if they had appointed someone decent like Laudrup instead of Irvine last summer, we could've persisted as a decent Prem side playing good football. Unfortunately, after the mess Irvine created (along with our two bit scouting last summer), TP was probably the best man for the job of keeping us up. The kick back of that is what we're seeing now, a season of rigid, defence minded, counter attacking football - which is even more boring when you don't have any midfield players capable of counter attacking with any pace.