[Tibby Baggie]

Tony Pulis is a manager with both strengths and flaws.

He is brilliant at defensive organisation and getting the best out of poor players.

When he's given a bit of money to spend, he's very hit and miss.

I think he was the perfect appointment to keep us up when Irvine left because our squad was pretty awful and our main priority had to be staying up. Frankly, with the new TV Deal, dropping out of the Prem simply wasn't an option and as a fan, neither was watching the likes of MK Dons etc. Tony inherited a team that couldn't buy a win at home against anyone and guided us to beat Southampton, Swansea, Chelsea and put in our best performance of the season in the 4-0 win against West Ham in the cup. A pretty much identical West Ham team that beat us at our place in the league under Irvine's regime. Darren Fletcher was signed and provided some much needed energy in the middle of the park and was the driving force behind us actually managing to attack at home. In my opinion, finishing 14th with that side was a huge success.

However, this season, we seem to be pretty much at the same level despite spending a bucket load of cash. That exposes Tony's main flaw - when given money, he's a bit of a kid in a sweet shop. I also feel he's a bit deluded about our spending power - his interviews suggest that he expected 3-4 more players to come in. Despite that, he needs to be savvy enough to realise that we're not big enough to be spending £5m, £8m and the like on 'squad players'.

I personally don't think we'll go down with Pulis in charge and even when we lose, we do seem to show a decent amount of commitment. However, there's no denying that we're never going to play sexy football regardless of how much cash he spends (The football was horrendous under Irvine too). Personally, as a purist, I'd have liked to see us bring Pulis in short term and then transition to a more 'footballing' manager like Laudrup or Flores in the summer. But with huge money coming from TV now, I think Peace has taken what he feels is the 'safest' option to just keep us in the league by keeping Pulis long term.

Hopefully that transition happens at some point in the future, because we don't want to watch this football forever. But we shouldn't lose sight of the position we were in when Pulis joined and the job he was pulled in for. Yes, there's a lot to be critical of this season, but he did an effective job last year.

Very good post Slick. Have bolded the parts that stood out when I read it.

Transfers-wise I still think we're slowly heading in the right direction. Lest we forget some of the brilliant signings made under previous regimes such as Nicolas Anelka, Victor Anichebe (the man made of Viscount biscuits, so I'm told) Markus Rosenberg, Yassine El Ghanassy, Georgios Samaras.

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It frustrates the hell out of me when fans say we havnt played good football since the Tony Brown/Cyrille Regis days
so have to accept the dross Pulis is serving up at the moment, its like everyone has forgotten we finished 8th in the
Premier League under Steve Clarke playing some decent stuff.
Most of this summers signings have been absolute crap and that Rondon looks like a reincarnation of Marc Antoine Fortune who we let go for nothing.

I don't think anyone has said we have to accept the quality of the football we're playing, from what I've read on this forum at least.

12/13 was a great season yet I don't think our football was much more than kick and rush to be honest, with Long being our main focal point with long balls (no pun intended) which he'd then chase down and attempt to either cross into the box or recycle the ball back into midfield.

Saying most of this season signings are absolute crap is hyperbole at it's best. We're 7 games into a season and it's very early for that kind of talk...