1) Who else/coherent arguments in support of Rafa...
I've put forward a ton of coherent arguments in support of the man on this and lots of other threads. I didn't actually think I needed to regurgitate them here. I didn't pose the question of 'is he the right man?' 'Is his time up?', I was answering it, with the sort of simplest way I know to express that he is the 'right man' with the 'right fit' - look at the alternatives. The alternatives to Houllier looked compelling even when Houllier was at his best. The alternatives to Rafa, even at his lowest ebbs, have looked shite.
It's also important because the on pitch stuff isn't in a bubble, IT IS affected by off pitch crap. Name me one club that's had sustained success with a shite board?
2)Broken Home analogy - not compelling to you maybe. OK, maybe yours is better - bad job. Are you telling me that the dad doesn't come home and take his shitty job out on the wife and kids? How does it affect the players? Well, I don't know if you've been in this situation, but if not, try to imagine:
You have worked for some time under a boss who, maybe you don't personally like him that much, but he's helped you be brilliant at your job. Under his line management, your section has gone from being no hopers to one of the most dynamic and competitive in the company. In the mean time, the board, though distant, has been performing worse and worse. Your section is doing well, but it's obvious to everyone that the way the company is run is a shambles. These people are doing so much wrong - they are taking the company down the tubes. Flushing it down the toilet. To make things worse, these incompetant clowns are undermining your good boss at every turn. They've already tried to sack him once, after he nearly (but didn't) miss ONE deadline, even though he's never missed a deadline in his time at the club, and the board had expressed their total belief in him.
Just recently, the board promised new staff to help ease your team's workload, so you could push on from nearly best to BEST. Of course, the whole office was buzzing, boss down to secretary. However, when the time came, you didn't get new staff at all. You got replacements for some good staff who left. Now, these replacements are sound - but the workload was too much before, where are the new staff FFS, the staff you were promised?
To top it off, the board have recently come out and laid the blame for the companies failings at your bosses door, the company is still going down the toilet, and all the trade papers are talking about your boss like he's the cause of all the problems - boardroom problems that have been obvious since the take-over a few years ago.
Tell me, honestly, how does this affect your work performance? It doesn't matter if you're paid £3.50 an hour or £1,000,000 a year. Something like that fucks you up, it demotivates you, it makes any set back that much harder to take, it makes you stressed, it makes you ill, it makes you go home and act like a shit to the people you love.
I use the home analogy because I have direct experience of it - I don't know the work one personally, but I know other people who do, and the effect on the person is basically the same. It doesn't get better until you leave or the board changes. Sacking the boss and replacing him doesn't make a blind bit of difference because NO manager can compensate for a shit board, just like no accounting secretary can compensate for a shit accountant.
3) Rafa wasn't 'lucky' - he was a superb and astute appointment, in my view very strongly arguably the single best decision Moores/Parry ever made. Pray, tell me how many other managers had a proven track record of winning leagues against opponents with superior finances and playing resources? Please tell me if you can see anyone who resembles Rafa working at another club now - because I can't.
4) Ferguson was a 'perfect fit'. Sure. He also had big piles of money thrown at him, and total control of the club from day one. If Rafa had spent 5 years buying £20-£30million players season on season, without having to sell, while being given to mould the club in his own image, maybe I'd be asking questions. He hasn't even had remotely close to that kind of luxury. All it took him at Valencia was a slump from the top 2 and a decent squad to start with. There's been no such slump here, no squad to start with, no investment of the kind Ferguson enjoyed.
5) If you don't realise those factors in terms of Rafa's job performance, then you shouldn't be judging Rafa's job performance. If you DO understand those factors, then if you have a 'personal tipping point' with Rafa UNTIL the boardroom situation is sorted out, then I personally think that's idiotic. Like I said, changing the line managers when the board is fucked is fiddling while roam burns. It's changing not for the sake of seeing hope of better, but changing because that's the easiest thing to change. Changing the thing that's most easily removed instead of tackling the actual problem is fucking stupidity. It's repairing a bike with a broken frame by changing the break pads. The very best you can hope for in that scenario is a still-fucked bike that stops a bit quicker.
Except in this case you're basically playing pot luck with the pads. The vast majority of pads you are likely to get will probably make the brakes WORSE, so the chances are you're frame will still be fucked, only now you can't even stop. Great.
6) Houllier - for me is a poor comparison. Firstly, because he had a relative level of financial backing and board stability that Rafa could only dream of, in comparison with his rivals. In what way would sticking with him have kept us as regular CL contenders? We struggled desperately to qualify in his last couple of seasons, and that with (given the current climate) TWO fewer realistic challengers (City and Chelsea having been added to the list).
7) Hiddink and Cappello. Hiddink 'would do a good job anywhere' - except the FA cup with the worlds biggest wage bill is the biggest, and indeed only trophy he's one in the best part of two decades. Capello, sure, but he's never been tested at a club without the money to compete. He's superb - but tell me, when has he ever had to work without the resources to quickly build a team in his own image? Never. It was Rafa's almost unique record in that respect which led us to hire him in the first place.
7)The only way we can hope to bridge the gap to our rivals, regardless of the board, unless we get the same or more money, the same or more wages, is to give a better manager time and control. There is no other way. Thus far, we haven't even given Rafa control - we haven't even given him a chance to see what he can do with his hands untied as of yet. Any new appointment would likely have even less control. At lest Rafa has perhaps given himself a fighting chance, we haven't even really started on what you might call his 'real' reign.
Luck and injuries - please, I don't mean to use these as an excuse or as a main reason, just that in my view they are a factor. Just a factor, Gerrard's court case, for example, is another factor. But enough, let's leave that because it's irrelevant - we disagree, fair enough, all good.
9) Group tipping point. That point was reached and to all intents and purposes breached with Ferguson. Thank god for them that the board had clear minds. Giving in to mob pressure, to the overwhelming weight of opinion of people who often can't even bring themselves to acknowledge the boardroom problems even as a factor is populist madness of the very worst sort. I can see now you are not suggesting we do that, and I'm glad, but my view on 'them' is 'fuck them - they know fuck all'. Honestly. The Roman People cheered as games were held in the honour of emperors who presided over a growing ruin (maybe not strictly accurate but I think the analogy is fair). Newcastle fans jeered their way to relegation (at least to an extent).
In a situation where Rafa is maybe the one clear minded decision maker at the club with a comprehensive knowledge of the game we, all of us with any power to do so, must back him to the fullest extent possible.
Still, I shall try to avoid using the 'who else' argument as much as I can - I feel I do have plenty of arguments in Rafa's favour, and perhaps, if you'd like, and if I'm in the mood I'll share a few over the next week or so that don't touch on board issues at all (though I have made them before, and many of them recently). Still, to take us back to the start of this post - I answered who else because I was asked 'Is he the man'? A direct answer to a direct question, and not through any lack of belief, or arguments in his favour that stand on their own merits.
Put absolutely simply, my other answer to 'Is he the right man', is an emphatic 'YES', because his methods, manner and playing style, to me, do suit this club superbly - and we saw a tantalising glimpse of that Valencia-at-their-best-maybe-beyond last season. That man and his methods have not changed - confidence has, and the board has dealt us another crippling blow, in my view a big enough one to explain a lot of that dip, and a lot of the apparent sudden poor quality of our players. In a more cold sense, it's also an emphatic 'YES', because I don't see anyone else who has successfully (in a big league) overcome the advantage of entrenched wealth with any degree of consistency the way Rafa managed with Valencia, and the way he has already shown us he CAN achieve here with the CL, another CL final and one of the very best (in terms of performance and points) league seasons in even our glorious history. That we fell just short of the glittering prize should not distract from the brilliance of the performace - just like Usain Bolt's incredible sprints do not diminish the brilliance of the athletes who followed him to previously unimaginable times. At least, unlike with Bolt, we got close enough for it to have been a photo finish - let's not lose heart quite yet because we're struggling in the following season. It's not like we're an old squad with an old manager - we are still young and have every reason to believe we can repeat and better that performance - most certainly so, emphatically so if we can remove the real tumour eating away at our club.
