These wretched team meetings . . .

[stockwellpete]

In my 4th season as Sheffield Wednesday boss, I managed to recover, after an early season player's revolt, and get my team in the promotion hunt with about 4 matches left. There were about 8 clubs still in the hunt. I then had three team meetings arranged for me where the plan seemed to be that I would go and tell all my poor dears things like "don't worry if we lose", "it's just another game" and "we never expected to go up anyway". WTF?! If it is just another match, why do we keep having these daft team meetings for? Anyway, I played along with this charade and the players were all very jolly afterwards - and we kept on winning, eventually securing an automatic promotion place as runners-up.

 

I then had to have another meeting to tell them what the expectations were for next season. The board have told me the aim is just to stay in the Premiership. So I said this to the players and they went ballistic! The team leader said something like, "Come off it, we are clear favourites to go down". Some players were "hurt" (snivel) and "offended". They were also upset that I said I would be strengthening the team (so that we had a chance of not being relegated, you numpties) and they weren't happy about that either. 

 

This all seemed very odd to me. First of all, you wouldn't keep calling team meetings if you wanted a "business as usual, one match at a time" approach to the promotion run-in. Maybe you would call one - and it should be an option in the game with a risk/reward element to it. Secondly, players would not respect someone who said something as inane as "we are not expected to be promoted". He would do much better to say something like, "we can do this lads" and "don't die wondering" and so on. And players who have just won promotion would generally respond better to a manager who said something like "we know it is going to be tougher next season, but we will be strengthening the group so that we can make an impact straight away".

 

Anyway, I applied to the Premier League to have our club name changed to "Sheffield Snowflakes", but I have yet to receive a reply.

Edited July 10, 2023 by stockwellpete

[Conardo]

Thats the only time i push the reload button...