Hodgey

Players is the answer. When you go down you lose your premiership quality players but retain the players who took you down. They are generally on 2-3 yr contracts and you cannot get rid of them as they are poor players on high money, but you then fall into the trap of buying new (generally average) players due to fans/board demand to get back in the Prem without getting rid of the dead wood. Then you are competing with lean, motivated outfits moving up the leagues and start your perennial slide. Consider this -I'm informed we have 32 players and a wage bill of £180k a week (£9.4m a year). Anyone think we have got value for money there ??? - thats probably double wages of a number of teams finishing above us. Charlton and Norwich are similar (although slightly less wasteful)

He has one thing the rest of our team do not - raw pace. If you watch a game, even if he plays poorly, opposing defenses drop back or double up on him which should give the rest of the team more room to play. The actual issue is that we are not good enough to take advantage of this. He changed the game when he came on against QPR because of this. If our coaches cannot get the most out of him then they arn't very good - we've been here before when we all slagged him off, he went to Burnley who used him properly and he was one of their best players, and we all moaned, then he came back and was used inappropriatly again. What's more interesting is that with Schneiderlin and Holmes not playing we lose our only effective weapon - which is the long ball from the half way line to the left touchline where Holmes sits. Need a plan B