For all the poor results we had, Ernie had us playing some of the most exciting football I've ever witnessed live and he gave us a genuine chance at winning the title. Really hope whoever comes in can bring the best out of the quality players in the squad and give that sort of hope again
Sure we had some stinkers, but remember we use to be a team that would sit back and defend and just launch crossed into the box. That was literally all we did. And away games we almost always looked getting smashed.
We definitely played better football under Merrick. Though I'm lost for why our home record dropped so much under his watch.
My biggest criticism is he seemed to have a very casual attitude to defensive solidity (the old call of you score 3 and we'll score 4). I think that was a bit unrealistic when we did have generally less resources than the opposition and when the goals dried up we were just so easy to beat because we give up 2 goals a game. When we lost attacking form we just looked so dire because conceding goals was just inevitable. You look at the signings we made in the off season and apart from Rossi, where we had such an obvious need to recruit an experienced player, they were all signings that were intended to help us score more goals but it left us very unbalanced across the park.
I actually think that our defense this season has been much improved. You compare us to the rest of the league and we are 2nd equal for clean sheets and about middle of pack regarding shots on target conceded per game. In the context of the HAL, our defense is not that bad - it's our goal scoring which has been poor, we have had 100 shots and only scored 6 goals.
We've conceded 14 in 8 - it's not good. And you illustrate my point, we expect to concede to when we don't score it's bad