2024/25 Sean Dyche

[Blue peter]

People really do seem to have forgotten this, it's quite weird. This was the point I (unsuccessfully) made a few times over the weekend - looking at where we finished last season and using that as a yardstick of what to expect this season is flawed logic because our finishing position wasn't really in keeping with what happened over the course of the season. We put a little run together at the end and suddenly it was as if people thought all our problems were solved and we were now an upwardly mobile team, it's bizarre. Again, whether you choose to see this as a defence or a criticism of Dyche depends on your own biases, but for me we are still very much a team I would expect to be in the lower reaches of the table and a little burst of good form in the last month or so of last season doesn't make me reassess the overall level of the squad I've watched struggle for the last 3/4 years.

Aren’t runs here and there what a season is made of though? If we’re going to say that was an outlier, then surely the 13 game winless run, season to season is an outlier as well? If we don’t have either runs, do we pick up broadly similar points anyway?

Whether you see us as 12th or say, quality wise 16th surely the aim should be for the manager to maintain (give or take) or improves where possible (so if we take the latter position, say a finish target 13th or 14th) but it looks currently like the team will be down on this, which is on the manager. At the end of the day we do have to have targets and there’s no point having regressive targets.