As the season has progressed I've began to just kind of accept where we are and what we now are as a football club.
We hear all these arguments about whether we're still a big club or not, some base that on fan base, others on trophies won in recent history and others on trophies won in the clubs history as a whole. However what you can't dispute is that we're now a very mediocre club, run in a very mediocre way and we've fallen so far behind clubs who we once considered our rivals that it's frightening.
If you looked at the goings on at another club, say West Ham as an example and saw them bring in Steve Walsh, followed by Allardyce (which they obviously have done), Sammy Lee and Craig Shakespeare we'd have absolutely pissed ourselves but it wouldn't have come as a surprise. We now find ourselves in the position where that's the best we can attract, our players are cherry picked by the top clubs and we aren't a big enough pull to attract players that will haul us back to where we want to be.
So, it saddens me to say that I've accepted what we are as it stands, a poor mid table premier league club which doesn't look like an attractive proposition to the players we need to help us progress, one where the best youth players will be sold off to balance the books, or simply because they request to leave as silverware at Everton is unlikely.
Anyway, there'd be far less angst if we just kind of accepted where we are and stopped trying to pretend we're still something we're not, stop with the utter delusion that pours out of a good number of us. I still have hope that one day we'll get back to the top of English football, but for the time being and with the staff the club currently chose to employ I've put any of those thoughts to the back of my mind.