All that talent, still we managed not to go up.

[StudentOwl]

34 minutes ago, Jackie Sewell said:

 the squad we had around 15/16, assembled entirely with the money he poured into the club, 

This is known as "revisionist history"

[areNOTwhatTHEYseem]

3 minutes ago, SiJ said:

We should have gone up in 2016/2017, but went all negative and pragmatic.

 

Meant we never properly challenged for automatic like we should have done.

 

I don't think we were ever catching Brighton.

 

I know we beat them in the playoffs the year before, but we certainly had luck on our side. Over the course of the season, they'd finished 15 points ahead of us, so we had a 15 point gap to make up.

 

Our transfers weren't strong enough in comparison to theirs to make up that much ground. 

[pat blondeau]

7 minutes ago, CircleSeven said:

Fair enough. I think all teams in the play offs that season were average though. Us, Huddersfield, Fulham and Reading were all a bit average. Some of our performances were good that season. Newcastle at home for example. We should have had it in us to get past Huddersfield IMO. Doesn’t matter now I know but there you go. 

Fulham scored 85 goals that season, I wouldn’t have called them average. 
 

We only scored 60

[Lincs Owl]

54 minutes ago, Jackie Sewell said:

I know we all blame Mr C for the current predicament, and rightly so, but thinking of the squad we had around 15/16, assembled entirely with the money he poured into the club, how did we possibly manage to avoid automatic promotion ? Can't blame him or his advisors for that. You only get one shot, two at the most, to buy yourselves out of the Championship. I don't see any club now, even Norwich, who have the embarrassment of riches we had.

Nice story but we didn't have any embarrassment of riches.  We paid next to nothing in transfer fees, but apparently were dishing out ridiculous wages, which ultimately crippled us.

Maybe it was the only way to get players to Sheffield.

Anyway congrats to Carlos for steering little Sporting Braga into the Portuguese Cup Final, beating mighty Porto last night.

[full fathom five]

23 minutes ago, Django said:

I think Carlos looked at the style of the 3 teams who went up in 2016 (Boro, Burnley and Hull) and thought that was the way to go 

 

Still bugs me that only Huddersfield at home and a very ordinary Reading at Wembley stood in our way of the PL

Yep, massive opportunity missed

[Lawrie’s Left Peg]

1 hour ago, Jackie Sewell said:

I don't see any club now, even Norwich, who have the embarrassment of riches we had.

Norwich made £16m profit from Premier League income during their failed season in 2019/20. They were then given an extra £40m parachute payment as reward for that failure and you really think that we had an embarrassment of riches in comparison ?

[CircleSeven]

45 minutes ago, pat blondeau said:

Fulham scored 85 goals that season, I wouldn’t have called them average. 
 

We only scored 60

And yet we finished above them as did Reading and Huddersfield and they didn’t make it past Reading in the play off semi. Scoring loads of goals is great (I wish we could) but they couldn’t and didn’t beat opponents when it counted,  that’s why I remember them as average. The following season they got Mitrovic on loan and went from being average to really good. And then they went up. 

[pat blondeau]

1 minute ago, CircleSeven said:

And yet we finished above them as did Reading and Huddersfield and they didn’t make it past Reading in the play off semi. Scoring loads of goals is great (I wish we could) but they couldn’t and didn’t beat opponents when it counted,  that’s why I remember them as average. The following season they got Mitrovic on loan and went from being average to really good. And then they went up. 

From memory they got off to a slow start but their form was outstanding in the second half of the season.

 

They were strong favourites to go up in the play offs but blew it in the first semi against Reading.

 

It wasn’t a surprise they went up the following season

[gurujuan]

1 hour ago, Jackie Sewell said:

I know we all blame Mr C for the current predicament, and rightly so, but thinking of the squad we had around 15/16, assembled entirely with the money he poured into the club, how did we possibly manage to avoid automatic promotion ? Can't blame him or his advisors for that. You only get one shot, two at the most, to buy yourselves out of the Championship. I don't see any club now, even Norwich, who have the embarrassment of riches we had.

Virtually every side that has been promoted automatically, has cost a lot more to put together than our play off final side. The bulk of the side, Westwood, Hunt, Pudil, Hutchinson, Lees, Loovens, Wallace, Lee, Bannan and Nuhiu, cost nothing, or mere pennies. Only really Forestieri and Hooper cost a significant fee Just getting to Wembley, was a tremendous achievement by Carlos.

[Lord Snooty]

 

I'd have have fancied Hargreaves to get us to Wembley with Forestieri, Wallace, Bannan, Lee, Loovens. 

The team was full of football intelligence at the peak of their careers. 

 

[SiJ]

1 hour ago, areNOTwhatTHEYseem said:

 

I don't think we were ever catching Brighton.

 

I know we beat them in the playoffs the year before, but we certainly had luck on our side. Over the course of the season, they'd finished 15 points ahead of us, so we had a 15 point gap to make up.

 

Our transfers weren't strong enough in comparison to theirs to make up that much ground. 

I disagree.

 

We has good depth in the squad and did the double over Newcastle that season who were better than Brighton.

 

We had Brighton by the proverbials at the Amex (a man down, a pen) and had a complete meltdown.

[areNOTwhatTHEYseem]

1 hour ago, SiJ said:

I disagree.

 

We has good depth in the squad and did the double over Newcastle that season who were better than Brighton.

 

We had Brighton by the proverbials at the Amex (a man down, a pen) and had a complete meltdown.

 

Yeah, we had it in us to pull off some great results, but Brighton had the better squad and were more consistent over the course of the season.

 

They added the likes of Murray, Norwood, Duffy, and Sidwell to a squad which had finished 15 points ahead of us the previous year, whereas we added Fletcher, Abdi, Jones, Reach, Sasso, Fox, McManaman, Buckley, Rhodes, and Winnall.

 

Murray's 23 league goals alone dwarfs anything our recruits added to our squad that season.

[jonnyowl]

Wasted money in the Summer 2016 and January of 2017.

 

I was looking at some of the signing we could have had.

 

Cavaleiro was signed in summer of 2016 for £7.2m, would have been alot of money but he would have been perfect in our side and would have cost the same as Reach and Abdi.

 

Brighton signed Sidwell on a free transfer, he would have been better than Dave Jones

 

Even looking at Brentford's signings make me feel sick, Watkins and Maupay in summer of 2017 for £2m each.

 

[gurujuan]

Can remember post Wembley, Carlos saying he wanted William Carvalho, Lucas Piazon and an unnamed winger. He didn’t get any of them. Instead he got Abdi, Fletcher, Jones, Reach, Rhodes, Winnall and a dozen other nondescripts You could tell he was miffed with our recruitment in year two, 25m spent, and no real improvement to the squad. 

[katie melua]

Squad maybe but our first team was not as good as Brightons. That team had been together for a while, they had a very good manager in Hughton and bought the right players to take them over the finishing line. They were very unfortunate the previous season to go up and lose to us in the play offs.

Their defence in particular was by far the best in the league 

 

For me, whilst that season was our best - it could have been even better had we sold that little cry baby after refusing to get on the coach to Norwich. I think Newcastle or Fulham were offering us around the 15 million mark. That sort of income would have been perfect to invest in other players to complete the final pieces of the jigsaw we needed.

 

Although I am unsure if that income would have been spent on the players required. 

[gurujuan]

6 minutes ago, katie melua said:

Squad maybe but our first team was not as good as Brightons. That team had been together for a while, they had a very good manager in Hughton and bought the right players to take them over the finishing line. They were very unfortunate the previous season to go up and lose to us in the play offs.

Their defence in particular was by far the best in the league 

 

For me, whilst that season was our best - it could have been even better had we sold that little cry baby after refusing to get on the coach to Norwich. I think Newcastle or Fulham were offering us around the 15 million mark. That sort of income would have been perfect to invest in other players to complete the final pieces of the jigsaw we needed.

 

Although I am unsure if that income would have been spent on the players required. 

Maybe Carlos had that in mind, hence our interest in Piazon? Certainly, had we managed to bring in Carvalho, he would have solved the beast in midfield, so many of us thought we needed. 

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Jackie Sewell said:

I know we all blame Mr C for the current predicament, and rightly so, but thinking of the squad we had around 15/16, assembled entirely with the money he poured into the club, how did we possibly manage to avoid automatic promotion ? Can't blame him or his advisors for that. You only get one shot, two at the most, to buy yourselves out of the Championship. I don't see any club now, even Norwich, who have the embarrassment of riches we had.

 

Because others had spent even more than us?

We have never been in the top 6 in terms of budget. 

 

We did well that season. Few pundits or Wednesday fans were predicting us for the play-offs that campaign. 

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Django said:

You need a good manager to get out of this league, good players alone isn’t enough 

 

Wonder what happened to that manager?

[WhiteOwl91]

33 minutes ago, gurujuan said:

Can remember post Wembley, Carlos saying he wanted William Carvalho, Lucas Piazon and an unnamed winger. He didn’t get any of them. Instead he got Abdi, Fletcher, Jones, Reach, Rhodes, Winnall and a dozen other nondescripts You could tell he was miffed with our recruitment in year two, 25m spent, and no real improvement to the squad. 

And the season after wanted Keogh or Morrison...proven champ centre half..

 

Ended up with young unproven Van Aken 

 

There’s a trend there eh? 

[Guest]

5 hours ago, TheEnchanter said:

 

Just fact checked and we only scored more than 2 goals 3 times in 48 games that season. Hard to get promoted like that. 

 

Yet Huddersfield managed it with a negative goal difference having scored less goals than us. Our approach to the season was good enough, Newcastle and Brighton were clearly better than us, we did enough to earn a spot that gave us the play-off 2nd leg at home, an advantage most seasons.

Our downfall was the negative approach to a 2-leg tie against a team we were better than. Zero attacking intent in the first leg then tried to sit on the lead in the second leg, though having Fletcher go off at 1-0 didn't help. We then had a penalty taker decide he didn't fancy a penalty.