I started following Dundee FC around 1979 / 1980. I remember the first players I liked were Jimmy Murphy and Billy Pirie. I went along quiet a lot in the 80’s and early 90’s and faded away for a while then under the Marrs started to go back and have continued to attend when I can.
Wednesday was another bad day for Dees, the sacking of Barry Smith was truly poor timing and while some will agree and some won’t you can’t hide from the fact that this has not shone the club in a good light. Reports are saying that the Chairman of the supporters society didn’t know anything about it. If true and given we are supposed to be a fan owned club something is not right at the top of DFC. Personally I would not have sacked Barry Smith now, there is little point as we are relegated anyway. The simple fact is that Barry had little time to prepare and the vast majority of his signing have not worked. Colin Nish has been very poor, John baird average, Martin Boyle we can’t say yet, Iain Davidson hard working but has found it tough in the SPL, Brian Easton is a good player but still finding his way back. Will Carl Finnigan ever play for the club, Declan Gallagher is decent as is Grassi. Harkins and McAlister good enough but McBride and Stewart, kerr are not.
At bit of mixed bag but overall I do feel that Barry signed poor players and most of them were panic signings, maybe not all his fault but some blame lies with Barry. However, sacking him was not the right decision at this time. One of my gripes as a Dundee fan is that we have never given a manager time to build something, either they have moved on to different things like Knox, Scott and Duffy or they have had to no time like Rae, Kernaghan, Scott, to not being great. Either way I had hoped that as a fan owned club we had learned our lessons and were going to try to do it different this time. Obviously not.
This season we have been seen to be not good enough, but to be good enough we have to start at the top and work our way down. If ‘ the fans ‘ can’t do things with a bit of decency and honesty then there is no hope for football in Scotland and possibly not something I want to support with my money. Dundee are rightly being lambasted today in the press and will have to do a lot of work to fix it, for the fans and for the football community at learge who must be thinking same old Dundee.
As for the next Manager I can only hope that this board don’t make a mistake and go for Jimmy Calderwood. He will not encourage me to attend games, in my opinion he is over rated and not the direction we should be going in. When the key to our future is young players and we do have a couple of decent ones then surely we have to be looking at the likes of Steven Pressley. I suppose my list would look something like this:
Steven Pressley, Stevie Campbell, Jim Jeffries, Alex Rae, Jim Duffy, Gary Bollan?, Gus McPherson?, Jimmy Calderwood not on this planet, Ray Farningham? Ian McCall no way, Paul Hartley nope, Jody Morris nope. I suppose other have different names. Lets just hope for once in our DFC supporting lives we actually get it right.
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