Are we over or under achieving this season?



Tend to agree with this.
The upheaval in teh summer, the new owners, the new management team and massive changes in the playing squad meamnt we started a bit slowly, but I think we should be expecting more now of a squad that has PL/Championship standard players in it. Our main weakness is our defence and that is costing us game after game.
To be fair the premiet/championship standard players are our best performers
 
So falling short for you is not being promoted by mid-April? Or have you just decided already we are not going up?
There are two types of people marra, those who are constantly surprised at life and those that can see things as they happen and change their minds accordingly

Promotion isn't the most likely outcome at this moment in time
 
Who's talking about cast iron guarantees? We're talking about expectations based on the history and size of the club coupled with the new debt free status and budget size relevant to our competitors. Fans of this club have every right to expect that those factors should ensure any stay in this league is a very short one.

The history and size of the club are irrelevant to where we are currently.

We have no right to expect anything from our new owners, new manager and amended team this first season.

Make progress - good
Make play offs but not promoted - not the end of the world
Achieve promotion through play offs or automatically - great but next year will be tougher
Win the league - delighted but unlikely

Being a big club historically has no bearing on where we find ourselves. We arrived at this situation because the club deserved it; that’s got no bearing on the quality of support who have been unable to influence anything over the past ten years.
 
This league is awful and we have the best squad. Winning the league or getting automatic promotion is a must. Not getting promoted would probably be the worst failure in the clubs history.

Still time to turn things around but it isn’t looking likely, underachieving would be a massive understatement if we don’t go up.
 
I think there's a couple of ways to look at this which we have to take into account when judging.

Yes, we had by far the biggest budget in the league, and if we were starting from the same point as the sides around us I'd expect us to be well clear by now.

However, we're an absolute basket case of a club that's been in free-fall for the best part of half a decade. Constant churn of players and staff, increasing frustration and anger amongst the support. Massive wages still on the bill for players who aren't exactly walking the league.
An untried manager and owners.

Considering all of that, I think we're doing about as well as we could hope for. For my money another season in League One, winning more than we lose, regaining our confidence and positivity as a club and a fanbase, wouldn't do us any harm at all as long as the financials are manageable. The last thing we need is to go up and be getting walloped every week again.
 
I think with a pretty much whole new squad, new manager we have done well to be where we are.. Didn't expect us to challenge for top two yet here we are.. I expected us to challenge for play offs and we've confirmed that already. So expectations have been met imo.
So why spend £3 million on a striker in January, think the owners expect us to go up?
 
So why spend £3 million on a striker in January, think the owners expect us to go up?

Bit of a desperate buy mind wasn't it we didn't want to pay anywhere near that. We got very desperate trying striker after striker in the end we paid over the odds to get a league one striker.
 
Won less than half our league games when we have the most clout so allowing for the restructuring it's a 5 out of 10 for me. Our previous managers however are not really managing much such as Big Sam and Moyes but tbf Martin Oniel thinks Jason Steel is a championship keeper and if Lee Camp is in-between the sticks next season then that's 4 games we should hit the net.
 
People keep saying about only 3 losses which doesn’t exactly tell the full story.
3 loses is remarkable. However, not when you put 18 draws into the same sentence. Shows we’ve dropped points throughout the season.

Despite the 3 loses we are very much in a battle for 2nd place and looking at the bookies odds (Sky Bet) were 3rd favourite for that position (5/2) odds for 2nd place behind Barnsley (Fav) and Pompey (2nd Favs).

Overachieving.
At the beginning of the season I would have been relatively happy with mid-table stabilisation, given the total car-crash state of the club over the last two seasons (at least!).
By Xmas I started to think that we were in with a chance of the play-offs.
Up until two games ago I would have said we were certanties for at least second place.
Now I really don't know.
The pressure is on; only one out of four will get the automatic.
I hope its us.
The play-offs are a bit of a lottery.
 
In terms of actual spending, considering the amount of players we brought in, we've not spent a great deal. Wyke/Grigg/Baldwin are the top 3 buys IIRC

Grigg was probably over the top as we were desperate. But majority came in on free transfers. We have a league 1 squad with a few who would play regular in the championship, some would be squad players and others will go as not good enough for the championship more than likely.

Its easy to say we should be doing better because we have a bigger budget, but majority of that is down to a few players wages (Catts/Oviedo/McGeady/Matthews) who will all be on decent money for championship let along league 1.

There are a few games we drew which we should have won, and a few we should have lost. But surely almost every fan would take this current position at the start of the season. We had 14 players at the 1st training session, some of who weren't committed to the club at the time. Ross and his staff have done a huge rebuilding job, getting in players who not only have been able to compete in this league, but have shown passion and commitment. Something severely lacking over the past few years. Suddenly when we have that people find something else to twist about. We've had a cracking weekend at Wembley and promotion is within our grasp with 5 games left to play. We have owners that are committed, listen to fans and are enthusiastic about the future of the club. Get behind the players for the final push over the line rather than trying to pick faults. We could have been in a position where we were stuck in this division for years, if we don't get up this season then next season we should be right up there again!
 
As a club, we are massively under achieving and I said at that start of the season anything short of automatic promotion would be a failure.

That said, we basically had a clear-out of players and replaced the squad with league one level players which we got in cheaply or free and started the season with lots of players who hadn't played together and didn't have a pre-season. Given that shake-up and the fact that many of the players aren't as skilled as we are used to seeing, and the manager is clearly on a learning curve, we haven't really done too bad to be where we are now.

We do have our goalkeeper in particular to thank for gaining so many points mind.

Overall, we really do need to aim much higher.
 
Overachieving.
At the beginning of the season I would have been relatively happy with mid-table stabilisation, given the total car-crash state of the club over the last two seasons (at least!).
By Xmas I started to think that we were in with a chance of the play-offs.
Up until two games ago I would have said we were certanties for at least second place.
Now I really don't know.
The pressure is on; only one out of four will get the automatic.
I hope its us.
The play-offs are a bit of a lottery.
Mid table in league 1 man :lol:

We have spent more than the whole league combined and we certainly havent done so to finish mid table
 
Mid table in league 1 man :lol:

We have spent more than the whole league combined and we certainly havent done so to finish mid table

I was talking from the perspective of before the start of the season.
Currently, i would agree that we are underachieving; four points thrown away in winnable games.
 
The history and size of the club are irrelevant to where we are currently.

We have no right to expect anything from our new owners, new manager and amended team this first season.

Make progress - good
Make play offs but not promoted - not the end of the world
Achieve promotion through play offs or automatically - great but next year will be tougher
Win the league - delighted but unlikely

Being a big club historically has no bearing on where we find ourselves. We arrived at this situation because the club deserved it; that’s got no bearing on the quality of support who have been unable to influence anything over the past ten years.

No but having the biggest budget by a mile, the biggest squad, spending the most money, having the likes of McLaughlin and McGeady in this league is massive. After the start we had and those things in our favour automatic should be achieved. That's nowt to do with history etc.
 
From an outside perspective, I don't think you're underachieving. You've got an imbalanced squad, the manager is untested at this level and players were signed without the manager knowing what he needed. Promotion was always going to be a stretch at the start of the season, and you've done better than I thought.

Funnily enough I agree, but we also had lots of injuries to key players and suspensions and had to balance the books, we had a season like Pompey did last year no settled team.

So for me we have done well, draw in some games was players not reading the game better, Cattermole and Leadbitter, have the experience and should have settled the team down.

Inexperience and leadership not meshing, still in our hands to do it, all to play for now we see what the players bottle is like and who is up for it. Not blaming anyone, it's gone, history and shit happens.

Ha-Way the Lads!
 

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