SPECULATION - Simon Cox

[Royal Rother]

The unusual thing in this case, lest we forget, is that he left around the time we made the Premiership. He wasnt ready for that then in the opinion of SSC.

We were in the Premier league and starting to struggle surely?

[Ian Royal]

Yeah 2nd prem season, but it was just before things went totally shite iirc.

[Southbank Old Boy]

Things had already been going wrong and the signs were there

The freak win over Liverpool, and the nature of the Spurs defeat papered over the cracks a bit, but we were struggling for some time by then

I vividly remember coming out of the ground after the Bolton defeat (first game of Feb) convinced that we were going to get relegated as we were again that poor

The side was crying out for something different at the time

[Deathy]

Things had already been going wrong and the signs were there

The freak win over Liverpool, and the nature of the Spurs defeat papered over the cracks a bit, but we were struggling for some time by then

I vividly remember coming out of the ground after the Bolton defeat (first game of Feb) convinced that we were going to get relegated as we were again that poor

The side was crying out for something different at the time

Couldn't agree more, and that change needed to be a new manager, as much as I love Coppell. He didn't have enough ideas.

[Royal Rother]

Is that what you said at the time?

[Ian Royal]

I agree the signs were there, and that action should have been taken. But equally it's easy to know with hindsight we needed something big to happen. Things werene't that bad in January. It wasn't looking good, but we didn't look like needing a lot to stay up at that point.

It just went unspeakably bad after. Would Cox have made the difference? I doubt it. What we really needed was a strong midfielder ready to come straight in and a striker who could bang the goals in straight away. Or a winger capable of supplying the decent stikers we already had.

It's unlikely Cox could have made a big difference, given his relative inexperience. Afterall, he has only just become a Championship player, and is totally unproven at that level a year and a half later.

[Hoop Blah]

The signs were very much there.

We'd struggled to find anyone capable of doing much on the right of midfield and our run of results up to January, and more importantly the performances, were pretty poor.

Don't know about anyone else, but I for one was asking for something to be done to address it, either by giving Cox his chance (especially after his excellent cameo, on the problem right, against Spurs) or by signing a right winger or a centre forward to shake things up.