I dont see what will come out of this poll, the results are clearly leaning towards more older, really loyal fans supporting rafa more, however it may mean they are too emotionally involved to see things obejectively( this is my opinion and how I explain rafa support) or it may mean newer fans are idiots, I think the poll should have included more questions, I study sociology and know a thing or two about polling .
Indeed, any result will be open to interpretation so the various agendas will continue to run riot.
Gratiude for what he has done shown after he is gone is fine. Posts like this are more like handing him his coat than showing him support.
So you are saying you can't be grateful for his work and also want a new manager? You're just plain wrong.
The only reason to sack a manager is if you have someone in mind who can do the job better.
There are any number of managers who could do the job, I honestly don't care which one we end up with so long as it's a big enough name to attract players and so long as he has a plan for us to stay at the top and not just oversee the decline. Rafa can't keep us up there, if you conclude anything from this season it should be that. Our best players are ageing and injury prone, and the manager himself now admits he can't do much without a serious cash injection. Are the players good enough to recapture top 4? I say yes, but not the way Rafa uses them.
What we need is a reason to be optimistic, we need fresh ideas and a willingness to go into matches looking to destroy the opposition rather than contain them. We clearly need some tweaks to our training methods which leave players tired and injured for whole seasons, and we need someone who will get the best out of the players here.
Even Rafa's supporters often say they want him to learn a lesson from bad matches, or change the way we set out, they want him to change, but they know in their heart of hearts he can't, Rafa is a resolute man who will not change his ways until the day he retires.
Many think of Rafa as a tactical genius, and he is, in europe, but he isn't in the league and that is where we need to focus now if we're to remain a big club. European success hinges on league success, and if Rafa can no longer compete in the league, that is the crux of the matter for me.
He isn't a canny buyer in the transfer market, and since we have drawn a complete blank in that area for a couple years now I hardly see how a new manager could do worse. At the very least they could bring in some players with established loyalty as all new managers do. If things miraculously turn around and money appears, again there are a number of managers capable of doing a superb job, can you honestly say Rafa would make us into a superb team with 50m, or 100m? Or would we all be scratching our heads again while Villa plays out on the wing ahead of a 6 man defense? (assuming Villa gets on the pitch ahead of kuyt).
Rafa was exactly what we needed after Houllier and he did a great job in his time here, he made us a force to be reckoned with in europe and cemented our status as a top 4 club until city upped the ante. Regardless of your opinion on the management situation, we should all acknowledge that.