I'm not going to say that he is out of his depth after one defeat to a team who were 5th, but it was a very poor performance and I'm looking forward to seeing how he responds. I hope his first action will be to corner McNally tonight and let him know in no uncertain terms that if the club don't bring in a couple of key signings he can't get us promoted.
I constantly hear that we've got the best squad in the league. I doubt it. We may have the highest number of big name players, perhaps even the highest number of Prem quality players. But I'd swap our back four for Brentford's back four, and I bet there aren't any teams above us who don't even have a recognised left winger above the age of 19. Don't say Lafferty, I don't care what people say, he's no winger.
How have we managed to get this far without signing a left winger? It was clear within about a month of the season starting that it was a majorly weak part of the squad. You may have a Dyson vacuum, but if it has one of its components missing it isn't going to function as well as a cheap Hitachi.
The defense situation is and has been a shambles since the start of the season. Neil has taken his first step towards remedying that by bringing Bassong back in from the cold and shipping out Hooiveld, who clearly wasn't the required standard. The fact that Neil Adams blew £1.5m of our transfer budget on Miquel who neither he nor Neil feels ready for first team football (hence why he hasn't been picked) is depressing, and I lay the blame for our defensive shambles firmly at the feet of Neil Adams. He signed three centre backs and not one of them was good enough on a consistent basis.
Michael Turner was rubbish today, but we've left ourselves without any centre back with pace. No matter which two we pick out of Martin, Turner, Cuellar and Hooiveld we're desperately short of pace at the back. Ryan Bennett has a bit of pace but he's been out for the months. We've got some serious weaknesses in our squad and I feel that it is probably time that we acknowledge that we're probably 7th in the league due to those weaknesses.
Perhaps we need to start thinking of our squad as one which needs some improvement in order to progress, instead of looking upon it as the strongest squad in the league and then judging any manager against that high expectation. I'm not saying that this means Neil Adams should have been given more time, he has in my opinion caused this problem. He's signed three centre backs, the best of whom is mediocre. He's sold all of our wingers.
Alex Neil at least deserves the opportunity to bring a few players in and ship a few players out, before we write him off. Because we are are a few players short of being able to seriously say that we're as strong as Derby County. We've got an inflated view of the standard of our squad, we aren't as good as we think we are. The fans need to admit it, Neil needs to hammer that point home to McNally, and McNally needs to admit it.
