Long live Martin O´Neill and let´s look forward to next season

I received an email a few hours ago from a regular visitor to the site, suggesting I put up a quick question, which I´m usually all for, but since replying to this person saying no and explaining why, I thought I´d put it here also.

It isn´t word for word, but the essence of the email is in this post. Before I forget, the quick question request was ´should we get rid of Martin O´Neill?´.

I basically replied that it was madness to even suggest getting rid of Martin O´Neill and the reply I got back was that it read, from what I´ve posted the past couple of days, that that was what I was suggesting.

While I can see that someone would see that, I´d have hoped that regular visitors would know that I believe Martin O´Neill is the right man for us, that I hold the position of manager as the most important in the football club and that changing managers is not what we should be doing.

If you don´t, this is the post I will in future, refer you to.

Yes, we have absolutely every right to feel frustrated at the football we´ve had served up to us the past three months and some of us can still hold the decision to send the kids to Moscow as a wrong one and one that Martin O´Neill will not be forgiven for, but getting rid of the manager, would be like stepping back three seasons, if not more.

When I say more, it´s because we are likely not to get a manager as good as O´Neill next time round and the work he has done since arriving will be completely undone.

The thing is with football clubs, stability is a key factor to success. Look at all the big and successful teams and you will see stability. Also, look at all the big and successful teams and you will also see blips early on and in every season. What stability brings is an ability to fix them quicker over time.

What we have seen these past three months is a blip. Martin O´Neill will get over this and if you look back at his second season, he fixed the things from his first and this season, you can say that quite a few things have been fixed from the last one.

Next season, with more stability, a few more players of better quality and some of the deadwood gone, we will do well. Top six might not be as easy next season, but we can not fall into the trap that clubs like Spurs, Newcastle and Manchester City have fallen into, which is that of replacing the manager after one bad run.

Everton stuck with Moyes and we have to stick with O´Neill and any talk of getting rid of the manager is madness.

Now, talk of hassling Lerner to make the investments in getting us into the top four are not madness, but that is for another day, week or maybe even season.

For now, we should just accept that we´re playing in Europe next season and we are, for now, a top six club that if we had just done as well at home as Fulham have would be a top four club - it´s not that big a difference you know, it just wasn´t our season.