You are Hol's own version of Lawro.

One more point

Every season since we have been promoted you post negative stuff like this.

Agreed. Around 12th is where we belong. Too steady to be relegated
but not good enough to get into the top half and in contention for Europe. Sourness said “Palace’s target each season is to avoid relegation”. On that basis we’re consistently winning our league.

Unless the owners find a rich buyer from the middle/Far East this is as good as it gets. The alternative is to go down, start enjoying watching the football again and focus on the academy and bring through youngsters to sell on to the big boys.

Sorry I feel like this is too big of an excuse that the Club keep using and I'm sick of it.

Do we need a rich Arab owner to win the Title or finish top 6? Yes of course we do.

But we do not need to get relegated to start playing good football and build from the Academy.

It's okay to play turgid football to stay up for the first 3 seasons max. We are well past that. If we continue we'll end up caught up in a battle one year and go down with nothing to build on and probably finish mid-table in the Championship the following year.

After year 3 in the Prem, the Club should've set out a road map like Southampton and followed it. Start introducing X amount of academy products when we are safe, replace 25% of over 30's in the transfer window etc etc.

When playing dire stuff like we are playing now, allow it for a game or 2 (City away is fine) but then start asking the Manager what his plans are to move us away from this.

Yes we will stay up this season but it's coming to an end. All you ask is when we are relegated we are in a better position than when we entered the Premier League and we are not. Which is appalling for the amount of time we've been in it now.

I agree BUT we didn't do that. We have only NOW got a half-decent academy up and running. It is already showing promising signs and we can hope that we will see some fruit from it in the not too distant future. Unlike Southampton we still have a tired old stadium in need of significant renovation.

The club has acknowledged that they are adopting a policy of bringing in youth and I'm sure they mean to, but it's not going to happen overnight. Our problem has been (and people seem to forget this) that we only rose from the ashes of administration ten years ago and surprised ourselves by reaching the PL quicker than we could have imagined and unlike the previous occasions we didn't go straight down again. We spent a lot of money (for us) buying players to keep us up, which was fine at the time but left us short in recent years. Indeed, since Hodgson came in we've probably recouped more money from sales (AWB and Sorloth) than we have spent buying new players (I'm excluding the signing on fees for the so-called free players).

On that basis, what you understandably say should happen after 3 years is only now beginning to happen at Palace after nearly 8.

It seems to me we are in a race against time to 'grow' our squad from the academy before relegation threatens. I suspect that Parish and Co may be happy for Hodgson to continue until we are in a position to move to the next stage.

Edited by doombear (18 Jan 2021 11.41am)

1. Most of the time we are indeed horrible to watch.
2. Our defence has been awful against some of the big clubs (conceded 15 without reply in 3 games) but in the other 16 league games, we've conceded 18, which considering our defenders' injury problems isn't so bad.
3. As for scoring, we've scored more goals than 7 other teams in the PL which is better than last year.

I'll reserve judgement on Hodgson until after the Fulham game when we should have a fair idea of whether or not we are likely to become embroiled in the relegation scrap.