Raising Standards

[wassy04]

Wigan won 2-0 tonight, & it moves them out of the relegation, which must be a relief for a bankrupt club in turmoil.

Tendayi Darikwa got the assist for the second, the Wigan fans love him, some of you might have seen that Wigan fan who popped up one the NFFC twitter timeline, gushing about how much they thanked us for sending them him & how he was already their best player by far.

As you might expect there followed a couple of comments from Forest fans, debating whether or not he'd had a renaissance & whether or not we should have kept him, but I thought that discussion was missing the point, the reason he looked like a million dollar down there i because the standard down there i o much lower, & therefore poor looks average & average looks great.

It kind of got me thinking about some of the recent discussions I've witnessed, & even partaken in, & just how low our standards have become.

Of the players we've had in the last 8 or 9 years only a handful are worth a damn, back in around 13/14 you had Jack Hobbs, briefly, before the injuries crippled him, actually you had a few that year, because Reid & Cohen were still alive, Lascelles had made his debut & Collins wasn't quite to old yet, in 14/15 Antonio earned his corn, Lansbury was still bothered, & Robert Tesche, a player deemed average by the fan base at the time, was playing at a standard that would walk him straight into our team today, after that we had Pinillos for half a season, that one was sad, he never came back properly from that injury. We had Twisty's start to 16/17, we can debate what' happened next, but that tart to the season for us was the standard we should be aspiring to.

17/18 was the year of Lolley, & Tomlin & Osborn put in top Championship/Premier league standard performances too, since then we've had Matty Cash & Joe Worrall & that's it.

Others have, or had potential, others put in shifts for us, turned up & played their part, but they played that part as an average to high end Championship player, & have not, or are yet to put in regular 5 star performances that earn them a chance on the bigger stage, or at least indicate they might be able to cope up there, if the opportunity arose, & seeing as sport is competitive, & the object is to win & thus climb the leagues, our hope's, dream & aspirations must surely be to reach the summit of the mountain, & to do that we naturally require the players capable of doing it.

Someone said the other day, when talking about a player, that it was unfair to compare them to the likes of Reid, & Antonio, & Cash, but those are exactly the sort of players we should be comparing every player to, we should measure all our players by that sort of standard.

If we are to dare to dream then we need to dream of a team of 7's & ups, not 6.5's & make do's.

I felt sorry for that Wigan fan the other day, publicly gushing over a player that half our fans couldn't give a damn about, & then I thought how do we look, when our standards slip & we tart getting to emotionally attached to some average player that the rest of the world can see just in't that good?

We need to stop looking down in the gutter at that losing lottery ticket, & making excuses as to why our lucks never in & start looking up & at the opportunities, we should be dreaming of & demanding the best, we should aspire to a team that is not only good enough to challenge, but to win.

Sound.

No argument from me.

SA.

Here's a stat for anyone who doesn't dare to dream

Of our last 15 7+ rated players, 3 came on loan, & the other 12 cost a combined total of about a mere £8m, helped by the fact a few came through our academy.

OK, a couple of those were a long time ago now, but tell me why we need to settle for anything less when we've seen they can & will come here & when we've seen we can afford them?

It is all about getting the recruitment right

A well drilled team of players, the majority rated 7 & up, supplemented by a squad of 6.7 & ups & we'd be in the play offs or higher, so it's what we need to aim for & to ditch or avoid anything not up to those standards

Can I just ask for the clearly uneducated amongst us, where are you getting these ratings from? Because without context, it's difficult to know what you mean.