playing Devil's Advocate here

if Snoddy had scored that penalty against Villa or one of Saturday's efforts had gone in rather than git the post/be cleared off the line (or substitute either of those for the ref at Hull giving us a penalty rather than the softer one he actually gave Hull) we could EASILY have 5/6 more points and be sitting in the top half.

Then there would be pretty much no-one on here wanting Hughton gone and he'd be getting praised AND YET HE WOULDN'T HAVE DONE ANYTHING DIFFERENT.

Football matches are usually decided by the odd goal and tiny margins and a huge amount of what happens is actually outside the manager's control. You can't JUST look at results, you have to deterimne the extent to which the manager is to blame. We don't look disorganised/clueless, there are no signs of player unrest and we don't seem to have bought bad players so to me there is no obvious reason at this stage to sack the manager.
Indeed the performances are starting to look considerably better than we have seen in the last couple of years in that we actually seem to have an ability to control the flow of games. We clearly need a bit of tinkering with the way things are happening in the final third, but if that can be sorted will will look a very strong team because of the excellent work that has been done elsewhere in the team.

Posted By: mr carra, Oct 28, 12:16:42