Agree fully. Sam mentioned in the press Sunday about a pre season friendly at his old club Limerick. Has a meeting to discuss transfers and decides to retire. Whatever made him quit it happened in the last few days.

What exactly does the Director do ?

Freedman thought he was going to a club with superior resources. Shame for him he's not as intelligent as he thinks and didn't realise their debt would level the playing field and left us with the best singers in the division and best goal poacher/space finder/lone striker.

Pulis thought he again was going to a club with superior resources. West Ham.

Sam we cannot say yet. My guess is he'll end up somewhere in December and hasn't done the dirty on us but it's just a guess. 6 months on and off might be more appealing but it looks like he needs his back room staff and that's a problem.

Parish preventing signing too many Rio Ferdinand type or expensive Defoe signings I agree with. Extending contracts of players without consulting the manager first I don't, if that has happened.

COYP

It seems to be a common theory that Pulis and later Sam wanted to sign older players with no sell on value and Parish put a block on them but nothing has ever appeared in print to justify these conspiracy theories.

What makes it more interesting is that when Pulis joined WBA he didn't seem to be at all interested in signing the very same players that he allegedly wanted to bring here.

From his public pronouncements it seems that Sam was interested in Defoe but that he realised that his demands were far too expensive.

I can understand that Sam and Parish might have disagreed about Defoe, since Parish has been sold pups by getting in shall we say "experienced" players such as Adebayor and Remy and having them lay eggs, whereas Sam obviously worked with Defoe before and knows and trusts him. But both are sensible enough to see that Defoe is not the only player who could do a particular job for us, and Sam's statement was clear that this was not about recruiting particular players at all.

@OneWayTicket - I mentioned his health in passing in a previous post, purely from a point of view of "maybe it's one of these issues that we don't know about"; and I also think that on Sunday with the adrenaline from the relegation fight no longer there he lacked the energy we have seen at every match since the new boys came in. Certainly, people who have undergone that kind of operation can't carry on like say Ferguson and certainly not if they expect to enjoy retirement as well as a career.

I think folk need to stop trying to assign blame to either Sam or to Parish and give the man the benefit of the doubt, if indeed doubt there is; he has at least earned that. The Pulis and Freedman and I suppose Dowie experiences have made some of us cynical.

Edited by chateauferret (24 May 2017 10.56am)

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The Ferret
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This is bang on the money!