Avon Royal tmesis Expecting to sign more players is not a guarantee it'll happen. It's not a promise. It's merely an implication that signing more players is more likely than not.
You need to be oxf*rd thick or have a shedload of axes to grind not to understand that.
The club wanted to sign players. They failed to do so. That failure is a failure, no escaping that, but anyone claiming they've been lied to is just a drama queen.
I don't think many people are saying they've been lied to. I think most people are just frustrated and disappointed that the club failed to deliver on its plan. What is annoying is that some people seem to think that "disappointment" is somehow wrong.
But that's what a significant number of people are saying - there's a 10 page thread on here titled "Why won't the club tell us the truth?"....
I'm disappointed that we didn't strengthen more than we did, but unlike P!ssed Off and those who share the same view, I don't feel in any way hoodwinked by the club. It's my view that funds were available for the right players, at the right price, but that those players were of sufficient quality that we found ourselves competing with Premier League clubs and their TV money windfall, and ultimately failed to win that battle...
My issue is with those who seem to want to believe that there's all sorts of conspiracies at play....
- "Anton has no money" - there's nothing to suggest this, but we are still running the club with a budget as we were told would be the case all along. A proportion of "fans" seemed to have somehow decided that Anton was going to "do an Abramovich", despite being repeatedly told that would not be the case....
- "Anton is siphoning money out of the club into his own pocket". We had the same accusations thrown at SJM for years, accusations which the clubs own accounts show to be completely baseless...
- "The club is repeatedly pretending to be active in the transfer market to appease fans, with no intention of signing anyone"....third party evidence (confirmation from Spurs of a deal agreed in principal on Gylfi for example) shows this isn't the case...
- "If Wigan and QPR can spend money, why can't we, after all, we have parachute payments as well?" As I've repeatedly pointed out, both Wigan and QPR made significant sums early in the Summer with the sales of Kone and Samba respectively. We made no such sales, with our only significant income coming in the last week of the Window (an income which I believe is vastly over-stated at £5M anyway) and we wouldn't have had time to include that income in our budgeting anyway given that both deals were finalised so late....
- "Anton promised us more signings." You're taking the word of a man, for whom his first language is not English, quite literally. As someone else said, you're either stupid, or have an axe to grind. If you've ever bothered to listen to Anton, whilst his English is a million times better than my Russian, it's quite clear that he doesn't fully understand all of the semantics of the English language, so to take what he says literally is simply asking for trouble. Personally, I admire how open he's been so far, but I fear that this open approach will disappear pretty quickly if all he gets is abuse....
As I said, I'm disappointed that we failed to get our targets, but there's a World of difference between being disappointed and behaving like a spoilt, petulant, child as a significant and vocal proportion of our fan base are currently doing......