Definitely Maybe
Striker
I know, no mental gymnastics here. I've made pretty much exactly the same point in another thread. In fact the form dropped long before January - there was a clear drop off from November onwards.We are still 4th because of the gap we built up, our form has clearly dropped since January. Last 5 games we are 13th in the form table, not good when our playoff rivals are top 5 in said table.
It takes some mental gymnastics to act like we aren't playing the worst football all season in this part of the season.
We were crying out for 3 or so established championship players in January to get back into the automatics like we were.
The OP makes pretty much the same posts every year though about spending money in January. He was desperate for us to spunk £5m on Johnson Clarke-Harris for a long time. We didn't have a prayer of catching the top two then and still finished in the play-offs without him. His point about all three seasons following the same pattern just factually isn't true. There's a separate point that we could have invested more this January and really kicked on which I agree with. I think they probably focused everything on getting Le Fee in early, not playing again in the league until mid-January after Portsmouth, having a couple of easy fixtures in Derby and Plymouth then having Mundle, Watson and Browne ready to return. Avoid defeat against Burnley, beat the two teams at the bottom and go into February with a much stronger squad regardless. Obviously it didn't pan out that way and the injured players took longer than anticipated to get back to fitness, which seems to be a pattern. I agree that at some point you have to question how much they actually want promotion - we can cry all we want about parachute payments but ultimately that is how much it costs to compete, we either want to or we don't.
(Not advocating reckless spending either but if we accept we're going to lose players every year in this league we are never ever going to be in a position to compete).