I'm not saying it's just the players, as I said, it was always going to be a downgrade - but the things that they are struggling with are not the things I would expect to change between seasons. This isn't a case of poor selection, this is a case of our defence in the last match not understanding how to hold a line all of a sudden. Your manager controls how hard you attack and whatnot, sure - he also controls the selections and such things. But the players themselves were capable of smurfing up in previous seasons and in this match they were punished heavily for it because they did it to absurd degrees. I wouldn't have held SAF responsible for these smurfups either.
"Pardew, Allardyce, Moyes, Mark Hughes" - come off it, mate. None of them achieved what Moyes has, and if they ever got a sniff at it, they couldn't pull it off a second season. Hughes did okay at Blackburn for a while, but never as high as Moyes was.
