If City's owners imagine a top-six finish is a base camp for attacking the top four next season, they haven't been paying attention. That is old, discredited, thinking, mainly due to the arrival of the new, but already discredited Europa League. If Mark Hughes wishes to make himself permanent at City and put his own fingerprints on the Eastlands revolution, he needs to aim higher than fifth or sixth. He needs to take the club into the Champions League next season, because he might never have a better chance.
It's an interesting article and well written too. I'm not sure I wholly buy it though: striking the balance between radically improving our team over the summer and carefully building on this season's foundations will be difficult. There's a danger that if we aim too high too soon we may bring in eight or nine new first teamers and watch the building work crumble around us. But if we aim too low we may not improve sufficiently even to make sixth.
So finding the approach which maximises our improvement won't be easy. And generating sufficient improvement to really challenge Arsenal or Chelsea next season is a huge ask. I'd happily take sixth now.
4 comments:
All along it has been people from the press that are raising the expections of our club.
It needs to be ignored so that we can concentrate on what the club are saying will happen.
I personally think a steady season where we finish 6Th would be a really big step for us.
i think the target set is something that should be the minimum, and something the press can grasp hold of, im sure hughes will have ambitions of doing best as possible and so will the owners.
If the chairman had indeed set a target of the top four, doubtless Paul Wilson (amongst others) would have published an article attacking their unrealistic thinking and bemoaning their impatience.
Khaldoon has come across as very shrewd this week and the 6th place target is a great example. It's high enough to appear to be pushing Hughes but low enough to keep the fans' and (more importantly) the journos' expectations from running away.
I'm sure the target is actually 4th but to say that would only heap unhelpful pressure on the manager and maintain the tedious speculation that he's been working under all season. If he said 4th and we finished 5th, he'd be seen as having failed.
He's a damn clever chap. "One of he world's great young business leaders."
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