Most liked posts in thread: Richard Smallwood

Who cares!

What are you dwelling on the past for?

This is why your car wash is failing!! You have no vision!! Look to the future ffs.

 

Fordy, I thought you were better than this. It is absolutely bonkers to compare The Premiership, where the money disparity is exponentially different compared to L2 and also where first team squads do not have around a third leaving each season.


There's no logic or stats to back up the narrative, that a team has to have been better than we have in order to be optimistic about promotion the following season.

In L2, it has been showed numerous times, that previous position is irrelevant

Crewe and Swindon were 12th and 13th and then got automatic in 19/20. Cheltenham, who along with Exeter were the best team I saw that season - ended up 4th having been 16th the season before.

Mansfield were 16th last season and then got to this season's play-off final.

Port Vale ended up 13th last season and got promoted

We got promoted in 2012/13 having been even lower.

What I love about L2, that, more than any other division, promotion is linked to the manager who has the best ability to choose a correct squad and and an identity of play. We've got a manager, that already had us wishing the season wasn't over and the squad already 'looks' better.

The manager situation is very relevant. In recent seasons all 12 promotion winners of the past three seasons were in place no later than mid-June of that pre-season. In fact 9 of these were managers who'd been there the previous season.

This shows that knowing your squad and having time to build an identity - is far more important than previous league position.

 

Im feeling pretty confident we are dping all we can for promotion. Proof will be on the pitch but I saw enough improvement last year under Hughes and with 11 new players plus maybe 2 or 3 more I dont see why it isnt possible.

You dont need a squad oozing with quality to compete in this league.

 

There seems a method to the madness now which wasn't there before. We've needed a central midfielder since Cullen left and yet we've never really targeted the type of player that Smallwood is. And im not on a championship standard player, just one who was competent enough to anchor the midfield.

 

Ryan was already doing a good job off the field, but a hapless one on it.

I guess we don't need the Director of Football given Hughes is basically running the club from a footballing perspective, but I'm very concerned that we wouldn't have appointed one had we appointed someone else.

I think we were doomed to repeat certain mistakes, UNTIL Hughes applied.

From thereon in, it was plain sailing. Club weren't getting that wrong. Get Hughes, back him, let him make whatever changes he likes. And that's absolutely the right thing to do.

 

The model will work or it won’t, collapse will ensue if it can’t be sustained. We shall see. We have said before you can make a team with money, but getting it into a conducive playing unit is another.
At the moment I prefer our direction of travel….again we shall see if it pays off?

 

Honestly Park I'm 100% sure your reaction would have been different had we have signed him. It wasn't a player I thought we would sign but I would have been excited to see how the lad would progress if he had.

 

To be fair there are some good posters on there but they seem to be have been drown out by a dozen or so posters who pretty much spam every thread.

 

Exactly. I belive his goal tally last season is more than the total of all his goals scored in previous seasons at other clubs COMBINED. He may go on and get a decent return next season as the likes of Mullin and Stockton have done after their 'breakthrough' seasons, but even if he does and he ends up league top scorer again, it's no guarantee that Crawley will end up finishing in the top 7.

 

I'm old and always hungry

 

Crikey! Cookie's put a bit on

 

I dont see Cook going anywhere unless an offer we cant refuse comes in. Dont see the Club forcing him to move on anyway.

 

No chance will Hughes will want to pee about for a couple of seasons he will have come in and seen what a poor league it is and with a few decent signings he will get us up next season .............. and I think the owners pushing the boat out will have the same mentality as him

 

We still haven't worked out how we are playing upfront with Cook/Oliver and the three behind. Both Cook and Oliver feed off scraps and don't really get involved in the sort of build up play that Hughes is trying to achieve. Walker is a very welcome return as it gives Hughes another upfront option, interesting to see where he fits in with the three of Wright, Chapman and Banks, three talented but inconsistent attack options. Cook and Oliver certainly don't work together, a problem when one is our only real goal threat and the other on a three year deal.

 

What strikes me is the idea that a player has to absolutely stand out for all the right reasons at a lower level, in order to be able to play at a higher level.

But it's easy to see that's not true by reverse engineering the situation.

Both Mark Bower and David Wetherall sunk down the divisions with us, and it made little difference to their performances. They didn't actually get any better. They were a 6 or a 7 the entire time.

Richie Smallwood has dropped two divisions and again, it seems to have made little differences to his performance.

All three could have suddenly been signed by Championship/Division 1 sides, and again, they'd probably compete perfectly well.

It's more about what those players are good at, and I imagine at Hull if Richie Smallwood recycled the ball, he probably did so with a similar pass accuracy whilst playing it to better players than Gilliead or Platt.

Smallwood has been poor lately, it's true, but the histrionics in this thread are embarrassing of late - he's the same player, and didn't become crap overnight - if we surrounded him with Championship level players, he'd look like a Championship level player himself. Unfortunately, without Crichlow in the back line, he's largely surrounded by mediocre League Two players.

 

The back pass from Smallwood on Saturday would have been no problem generally for Crichlow to deal with, you always run that risk passing back to someone who is slow like Taylor if they lose control.
Interesting to see how Crichlow seems to have fit in very quickly to the demands of L1 football, comments from his new club seem very complimentary. He's a big loss for us and I don't think we've replaced him.