Our Problems are as Old as the Hills

[daveyboy66]

19 hours ago, Athelwulf said:

The weather's about what it's doing now, and it's what we're all principally concerned with.

 

The climate is the general state of the weather, stretching back many millions of years.

 

As with meteorology, so with football.

 

The seeds of our failure were sown many many years ago, long before Pulis' and Chansiri's great-great-grandparents were even conceived.

 

To begin with, our passion for football in this region was our downfall; too many clubs for too few people/resources.

 

Yorkshire isn't like Lancashire, where towns and cities are all closely packed into one big conurbation.

 

Yorkshire towns and cities are widely separated by large tracts of countryside, and our own conurbation has six clubs.

 

Up until the 1920s even Rotherham had two clubs.

 

The great schism in Sheffield football many believed sealed our fate.

 

In the mid-1990s Reg Brearley at the Lane engaged three London financial companies to run the rule over Sheffield football.

 

All three independently concluded that Sheffield could not support two top-flight teams.

 

Brearley warned that if Wednesday were still in the top flight in the new millennium they'd be OK, but if not we'd be in big bother.

 

Big Ron made his similar dire predictions in the late 1990s too.

 

Secondly, there's the matter of the abolition of the maximum wage in 1962.

 

That may seem obscure now, but it probably played as big a role as any in our failure.

 

At a stroke it made our way of doing things, that is a club with no owner and thousands of small shareholders, a thing of the past.

 

In retrospect, it's remarkable that we ever played at the top level for a decade and a half with that system.

 

But our failure to change the system back then is the reason we never got a Revie or a Shankly, and why we lost Catterick and Wilkinson.

 

Our final fall from grace in 2000 was decided almost 40 years earlier, since the main reason for our relegation was the inability to produce sufficient funds to stay up.

 

Had, say, Spurs gone down - assuming the FA would have ever allowed it - they'd have borrowed the money to go straight back up and then paid it off once promotion was assured.

 

We just spiralled down and down.

 

Some may say that Chansiri has now vindicated the old system, but had we sold out in the early 60s, or the early 1990s, then we'd have got someone far superior to Channers.

 

Let's face it, if he'd have known anything about this game he'd never have taken us on, and I bet he bitterly regrets it now.

 

Finally, there's the lack of a youth policy.

 

Seasons pass and the years fly by, but you can be sure of three things.

 

Night follows day, winter follows autumn, and Wednesday don't have a youth policy.

 

Other clubs do for goodness sake, Leeds, Barnsley and the Blades to name but three, but we cannot for love nor money produce talent and that has had a grievous impact on our finances.

 

Like the weather, this current ********-up is just about the here and now - but the climate of failure here is much deeper-seated and long-established than that.

I don't know how long it took you to write this bollix but...if you were writing it longhand it would be a waste of ink