Stoke

[Dreamkiller]

If you're going to bang on about a long term project then fans have to see something early on that gives you confidence that the club is going in the right direction.

Jones record so far is really poor and nothing suggest he is the man to take Stoke forward.

He just screams lower league manager to me.

It's hard to disagree with that. The problem is that the club has so many issues - just too many to go into without me getting banned for boring you all with, so it's difficult to contemplate just how difficult all the previous mistakes are to rectify.

He may well be just a lower league manager, but that doesn't mean he can't adapt. Too often in football management now, people get chucked onto the scrapheap for making a mistake, rather than being allowed to actually learn from the mistake. 

There were definite signs of green shoots towards the end of last season, and when all is said and done, this was still only the first game of the season. 

I won't write the guy off yet, and after sacking three managers and backroom teams in the past year and a half, our club can't really afford in FFP terms to do it again, bearing in mind we had to compensate Derby and Luton to appoint their management teams as well.

The worry is that supporter pressure will get to the players to the point where the manager won't be able to do anything to prevent a slide that leads us to dumping a potentially good manager. We're in vicious circle territory here.

Yeah I can understand that. 

Rowett looked a decent appointment and had a good record in the Championship so I have to think if he couldn't get a tune out the players then there was something wrong somewhere. Therefore you probably have to give the next man a bit of time for a club that was on a downward spiral. Jones probably deserves a bit of patience right now but we all know you don't get that time in football. We all want results now.

That's right. I doubt Rowett's as bad a manager as we made him look. His problem was that he saw our squad and thought "Happy days" when in reality it was and largely still is a festering corpse. We could have had a complete clearout and started again on the playing front, but FFP is killing us. We can't do what the owners are easily capable of doing.

Bet365 could buy the stadium.....

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Anyway, don't worry about it DK.... Connor Wickham could be coming in to solve your problems

He'd fit in with our other strikers at least. 

The stadium ownership and relationship between Bet365, The Coates family and Stoke City is a bit of a maze with holding companies and all sorts of perfectly legal shenanigans going on. 

As far as I know Stoke City own the stadium, but Bet365 own Stoke, whether directly or via one of the holding companies, so maybe Bet365 buying the stadium wouldn't actually affect anything as they basically already own it. 

That's just me guessing as I'm nay expert at this sort of thing.