Supercity88 I read your post and admire your commitment and I hope every word you write turns out to be true. The issue that I have is not with Pellegrini and not with the club, but it is with a group of snipers and malcontents who moaned on all last season wanting the dismissal of Roberto Mancini. This is a post which sums an attitude up:-
"[BillyShears"]Fuck Mancini. He's history. A limited coach and horrible man who was taking our club backwards. Pellegrini deserves all the praise he's getting because he's not only a world class manager, but also a top man who will do what's best for City and not what's best only for him.
Funny as fuck the Mancini lovers who can't bring themselves to be positive about our new manager because they're still pining for the Italian. As well as being very transparent it's all a bit sad.”
You'll note that it oozes abuse but is short on argument. The nearest we get is that Mancini is a limited coach, a horrible man and that he took our club backwards, but we are not told why he was limited, horrible or how he took the club backwards. The anti-Mancini campaign always confined itself to vague statements such as that – they didn't expect to win the title every year but they did expect a “credible” title challenge, they expected progress in the CL, but no detail of how a credible challenge was to be known (“better than this season”!). Mancini could then be criticised for not meeting these “targets”. They were never defined so that he could never hit them.
We know that the board at City set the manager very precise targets at the start of each season. We know Mark Hughes had to get 72 points in season 2009-10 and we know that he didn't get the whole season to see if he was going to hit that target: he was dismissed in December 2009 because the famous “trajectory of results” made it pretty clear he was not going to do it after spending somewhere around £100 million and paying sky high wages. Now Roberto Mancini was not given 3 years to “see how he went”. The club were satisfied enough with his first 2 full seasons to give him a new 5 year deal – what got him the sack was his failure to meet targets set at the start of the season and Pellegrini was hired.
Now we find the Mancini process in reverse for Pellegrini. On July 25 in the “Are we 3rd best?” thread Billy Shears replied to the question:
“I think on paper we've got the strongest squad but football isn't played on paper. I would expect us to be in the top 3, and I'd like us to win the league. However, I understand you can't win everything so on that basis footballing progress, CL progress and a squad not falling apart at the seams is what I'd like for the season.” This is typical Billy Shears. It says nothing and it sets non targets so that Billy can appear like an Old Testament prophet next May to say that Pellegrini has hit them all and shown that he's “not only a world class manager, but also a top man who will do what's best for City and not what's best only for him.”
The trouble is vague and vacuous claptrap won't wash at City any more. Since 2008 the club has been pursuing a 10 year plan to become a self-financing club capable of competing with the world's best. Every season has to mark progress to that goal. So, what precise targets will you set Pelligrini, Billy? Put your money where your mouth is for once. How will be recognise adequate progress in the CL, where have we got to finish in the PL at the lowest, how many points must we get as a minimum, how will we recognise footballing progress if we see it – how many more goals must we score? Must we concede fewer? - and how will we know that the squad is not falling apart when you refuse to accept the testimony of Kun Aguero, Jack Rodwell and Pablo Zabaleta that it never was under Mancini?
Some of us want to know if you have any clear view of the future of this club rather than the settling of a personal grudge against a very successful manager. Some of us who have supported this club for a very long time through good times, bad times and very ugly times, and who don't want to see some jumped up know-it-all giving fans on here half baked and abusive sermons in place of precise reason. This is why posters find Billy Shears pompous and self-righteous.