Even presuming we could attract and afford him, my original point on this (to which you were responding) was...

Keep in mind that the incoming manager has to find out about the players, the league, the club etc, will not have time to radically change the style of play, and that any medium to long term ambition pales into insignificance next to the urgent need to get about a point per game for the next couple of months.

Whether Benitez is a candidate for the job this summer is another matter, but right now I don't see why going into talks with Rafa would be a better bet than getting Hodgson in the building. By the time we play Leicester we will have had a manager in place for nearly a week, he and his staff will know all the players (bar one or two) inside-out, and there will be no teething period when the players and staff get to understand each other.

The fat waiter lol , Rather have Roy for as long as he can make it to the dugout without a zimmer .

And we still need a striker

I think this is key. He's proven that he can extract performances greater than the sum of hte parts. Last time he did pretty well with a poor side.

This time he has on paper, a good side (with some weaknesses). Solid composed CBs, some youth and bite in CM, 3 exciting forwards + OE/JPM.

Parish is, as you say, a constant but even without ever having met (let alone worked with) him, I don't draw the same conclusion as you.

We have spent a lot less than most:

[Link]

Parish is a constant throughout, but so are FFP, the size of the ground, how many executive boxes we have etc.

The accounts show, beyond any doubt whatsoever as far as I can see, that the club has routinely spent every penny it can on players including borrowing some money from the Yanks. Managers and pundits will compare our spending to that of other clubs, but the relevant point is to compare our spending to our limits. The 'lack of funding' argument holds very little water. Would we rather the club went into dangerous debt and/or ignored FFP rules?

How Parish is to work with is another matter. He has been part-owner, majority owner, and now (apparently) minority owner with operational responsibility over the years, but whatever his stake in the club Parish is local, a supporter and (perhaps critically) present in the building every day. That is in stark contrast to many club owners, who live abroad and/or are hands-off up until they dislike results and sack someone. I've no idea whether Parish is hard to get along with, but I wouldn't be surprised if you, Syd and others are right to think that relationships have deteriorated behind the scenes. Perhaps that is more likely to happen because we have a physically present, hands-on Chairman in a kind of tight-knit, small-scale internal organisation, but then again it's not as if all these massive clubs with huge operational structures and foreign-based owners never end up all falling out is it?

Palace were mocked for sacking FDB so soon after appointing him, only later did it become apparent that Frank had alienated players and staff, blanked Parish and Freedman when they tried to work it all out, and basically done an awful job. A foreign-based owner wouldn't have known much about that, but Parish did because he was there on the ground.

I can well believe that many of our managers have moaned (sometimes publicly)/fallen out with Parish and Freedman/left/got the boot over the relative lack of funding, but that doesn't mean they are right and Parish is wrong.

Edited by TheBigToePunt (22 Mar 2023 11.57am)

Edited by TheBigToePunt (22 Mar 2023 12.07pm)

I can only re-iterate that when one is seeking a manager for club that hasn't recorded a victory for 3 months and is in a PL relegation battle with 10 games remaining, the options become limited.
Managers with experience at the top level will certainly not be overly interested in the vacancy !

Steve Parish has turned to Mr Hodgson who kept the club in the PL for 3 seasons with no outlay in terms of transfer funds.He trusts a vastly experienced manager who has fulfilled roles at International level and managed the likes of Liverpool and Inter Milan and a person who is content to accept a short-term contract.

In the circumstances I understand why Mr Hodgson was approached to preserve our PL status.

One first teamer was allegedly going in heavily on an academy player and another first teamer got annoyed over it. I don't know who either of the players were.

Secondly if it's true that Vieira wanted to leave a mid table club to join one struggling against relegation it must indicate that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark