Newcastle

[Danny 0]

I can imagine a lot of people will read these posts and be thinking 'wtf? underachievement and disaster in a period where we won 9 titles in a row?' but it's only really now that you can look back and think about how much more we could've and should've achieved.

 

Out of the Champions League in qualifying to Levski Sofia and AEK Athens. Bottom of a group containing Steaua Bucharest. Bottom of a group containing Grasshoppers. And domestically, going 3 seasons without beating Celtic in a league match at Ibrox (results being 1-2, 1-1, 0-2, 1-1, 3-3, 1-1)

 

Brian Laudrup says his biggest regret during his time here was our failure in the CL. For all the talent that we had, that we utterly underperformed in that tournament was for him his saddest memory.

 

Personally I believe Walter's management was to blame - unlike our superb run in the 92/93 season where we worked as a team, when we had Gazza and Laudrup we pretty much expected them to run the show for us without having any tactics to counter them being marked out of many games. Where Ferguson was able to run the show for us in Europe for us many times, he wasn't regarded as a star player in the way those two were - our European naivety was extremely poor and we got slaughtered by lesser teams with better tactics.

 

And it's why with an all round decent team with a good 4 or 5 strong players, we were able to have such a great run to Manchester - it was a team and not reliant on individuals. And Walter had also learned from his Scotland period.