Yes, VERY good point

As I've written before, because of the ITV Digital fallout, we HAD to go up in 03/4, and would've been screwed if we hadn't (I actually remember reading a magazine interview with Doncaster the year before when he'd as good as admitted we had to be promoted by the end of the following season). But our success was built on sand: and what scares me is if we needed to spend so much to break out of mid-table drift and become contenders again, how exactly are we going to do it this time around without anything comparable to the ITV Digital funds suddenly becoming available?

But you're quite right: unless we had truly established ourselves in the Prem, promotion could only ever just delay things. A bit like our success in 92/3 just delayed the horrendous post-relegation fallout by a couple of years: we almost went down in 91/2, and then a whirlwind 18 months were followed by an equally fast plummet back to where, in reality, we actually were (or expected to be) just as the Premier League began in earnest.

Posted By: thebigfeller, Feb 27, 00:47:49