Do think our squads in the early days of the COMS/Etihad, before Sven came in, contained some thoroughly unlikeable characters who were either a) journeymen using our reputation as a "sleeping giant" (and desperation to become a "top six club") to line their pockets, b) "young stars" who turned up for a payday and couldn't give a fuck about the club, c) just utterly mediocre players who were hungry for nothing. And also Joey Barton.
Barton, Mills, McManaman, Cole, Samaras, the returning Dickov, Fowler, Corradi, Trabelsi, Hamann. Players who you looked at and felt nothing. By the end of Pearce's reign it wasn't even anger anymore, it was just numbness. There were players worth turning up for, of course, and in retrospect Pearce probably did make the right decision by making us play turgid negative football in a bid to keep us up, but that 06/07 season was utterly miserable.