Judge the full circle

Alan Judge heads back to Blackburn on a free transfer.

I was never convinced by him.

I think the jury's still out on him

He always had something imo- I still maintain that the team that got relegated from the Championship wasn't a relegation team man for man. Poor management was a bigger problem than poor player imho- if Holloway was in charge of all those players than we wouldn't have gone down in 2009/10.

Really?

I thought they were shit, to a man.

I can't think of one decent championship standard player among them. Fallon up front every game, Clark, Duguid, Fletch...a rabid bunch of losers.

Duguid, Clark and Fallon fair enough but that's very much the far end of the 'good to bad' spectrum of the players who played for us. Shane Lowry, Fletch, Stockdale, Bolasie, Arnason (then), Reda Johnson, Joe Mason, Gow, Noone, Mackie, Bhasera, Seip (when he played) and for me Judge all had a bit more talent as induviduals than the sum of their parts combined. Some of them have proved me right and some have proved me wrong with their subsequent moves but on the whole I don't think we should, man for man, have been QUITE as bad as we were given the abilities of some of us players at that time. I still think we wouldn't have gone down with Holloway that season.

Bolasie and Gow never really put a shift in for us, Clarke, duguid, Lowry and fallon just weren't up to standard, you can't carry that many players at that level. Judge was ok, not brilliant, no replacement for Norris.

I don't even remember Lowry. I had to google him and I still don't remember him. He played in almost every game this season for Millwall.

Judge was a poor man's Norris and I thought he was mostly awful. For me, it all went wrong for Fletcher when he was injured by Shaun Derry against QPR. Fletcher was never the same player after that. I really don't like Shaun Derry.

I must be the only one who thought Shane Lowry was quite good then. Does anyone remember the time where he and a fan had a barney towards the end of a game over by the Lyndhurst and he had to be dragged away?

Whenever I hear Judgey's name I have a little chuckle with the thought of those legs of his scurrying up the corridor to the manager's office to complain at being dropped.
With the teenage stack and rack system employed by Premiership football clubs there are a whole bunch of guys who think they are better than they are.
So Judge comes under the premiership starlet Chadders category in my opinion..ie pretty hopeless. He got a good cross in once, just once as I remember, and I groaned when he returned at the start of a new season. The die was cast.
Of that list of Sam's, only Mackie, Mason and Noone would get into any Championship team of mine. I found Gow's admitted style ultimately disappointing and Reda was very very raw. He was however very entertaining and there was reason think he might improve elsewhere. Fletcher couldn't cover a centre back if he tried, and Seip had just lost it. In the end, as a player, you're just as liable to perform badly because of the players around you and the "feel" of the club as the manager's input. But then again, there's no escaping the real reason .....how good are you.... as Mackie proved week in week out.

worried of penzance wrote:

Whenever I hear Judgey's name I have a little chuckle with the thought of those legs of his scurrying up the corridor to the manager's office to complain at being dropped.
With the teenage stack and rack system employed by Premiership football clubs there are a whole bunch of guys who think they are better than they are.
So Judge comes under the premiership starlet Chadders category in my opinion..ie pretty hopeless. He got a good cross in once, just once as I remember, and I groaned when he returned at the start of a new season. The die was cast.
Of that list of Sam's, only Mackie, Mason and Noone would get into any Championship team of mine. I found Gow's admitted style ultimately disappointing and Reda was very very raw. He was however very entertaining and there was reason think he might improve elsewhere. Fletcher couldn't cover a centre back if he tried, and Seip had just lost it. In the end, as a player, you're just as liable to perform badly because of the players around you and the "feel" of the club as the manager's input. But then again, there's no escaping the real reason .....how good are you.... as Mackie proved week in week out.

What........ Newell's 'headless chicken' Mackie ?

To be fair I'm clouded as I think I saw something like 15 games over that season or so without seeing us win.

Noone and Mackie had potential but nothing around them. The rest were just awful. Sturrock's pressing game of 2000-2004 was completely abandoned and we sat off sides waiting for them to dick us, no adventure, no shape, nothing. Maybe a better manager could have forged better performances, but the whole club just seemed totally downbeat after the January betrayals, just waiting to be relegated really, and to be honest this attitude hasn't really recovered to this day.

Mock Cuncher wrote:

the whole club just seemed totally downbeat after the January betrayals, just waiting to be relegated really, and to be honest this attitude hasn't really recovered to this day.

Indeed. It all came from the top when the really good players, and manager, suddenly clocked what was going on and took the M5 option.
The couple of months that really proved to me what has always been said of this club is so true. It is in an even worse state now with it's underlying culture and busted reputation. What decent player wants to play for a club where there are people running it who have not paid people in full, yet buildings will be sprouting up everywhere. Sadly, it's name will be stinking in the football village.

GreenSam wrote:

I must be the only one who thought Shane Lowry was quite good then. Does anyone remember the time where he and a fan had a barney towards the end of a game over by the Lyndhurst and he had to be dragged away?

I was stood right there, one of the Lyndy boo boys was giving it the large one to Lowry and he flared right up and was going to give the guy a hiding, boo boy didnt fancy it one bit and moved behind his mates until Lowry was dragged away before giving it large again, tough as fook.

GreenSam wrote:

He always had something imo- I still maintain that the team that got relegated from the Championship wasn't a relegation team man for man. Poor management was a bigger problem than poor player imho- if Holloway was in charge of all those players than we wouldn't have gone down in 2009/10.

trouble is, holloway wasnt in charge - due to shall we say, off the field shenanigans, and we were relegated, so a relegation team in my eyes, set up by the owners, not the team management

I sort of agree with Sam. We were good enough to stay up but didn't. I think three things led to our eventual failure. The first was not sacking Sturrock. The second was sacking Sturrock and appointing Mariner which was a huge and inexplicable gamble. The third was the astonishing succession of injuries to our centre backs.

<nips off to GoS>

<comes back>

That season we played all of these players at centre back.

Kari Arnason
Chris Barker
D'Arcy Blake
James Chester
Carl Fletcher
Reda Johnson
Shane Lowry
Bondz N'Gala
Gary Sawyer
Marcel Seip
Krisztian Timar

I don't think any team can withstand so much upheaval at the heart of its defence and get away with it and when players like Arnason and Fletcher are roped in from midfield then that gets screwed up too.

I can't help but think that, like David Kemp long before him, Sturrock was sacked at completely the wrong time and that his replacement by a rookie manager never really stood much chance of succeeding. We'll never know of course but I have always felt that Kemp would have kept us up all those years ago. Maybe Sturrock would have kept us up then too.

sorry to be the pedant, but if we were good enough to stay up we wouldnt have been relegated

Mapperley, darling wrote:

sorry to be the pedant, but if we were good enough to stay up we wouldnt have been relegated

Overall yeah but there's a difference between having a good enough raw playing staff and a good enough team on the whole.

points make prizes, they weren't good enough