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It's only 5 less goals though. I think Sharp's departure obviously contributed, no doubt about it but I don't think it was the main factor nor do I think if he'd stayed we'd have been even close to staying up.
Consider:The first 20 games of The Experiment, with Sharp generally available, our record was:P - Pts- GF - GA20 22 21 33After the sale of Sharp our record has been:P - Pts- GF - GA17 10 16 32
Call me a simpleton,
I hate to throw in a note of factually-based sanity into the ongoing hysterical debate and discussion of conspiracy theories, but I will anyway.In assessing whether The Experiment has been an unmitigated disaster or not, it seems to me that one blindingly obvious point is being ignored. Half-way through, we lost the one player that was capable of turning a poor team into a not quite disastrous team. Consider:The first 20 games of The Experiment, with Sharp generally available, our record was:P - Pts- GF - GA20 22 21 33After the sale of Sharp our record has been:P - Pts- GF - GA17 10 16 32Seems to say it all to me. Before Sharp was sold, we were making solid, if unspectacular progress and looking like a team that could just about squeak out of the situation we'd found ourselves in. Had we continued picking up points at that rate, we'd have ended up with 44-45 points, which might just about have been enough. That would have been Mission Accomplished given where we were in early Sept.After the sale of Sharp, our results have collapsed, albeit to a level considerably better than they were in the 7 games before The Experiment began and we end up relegated by a country mile.Call me a simpleton, but I'd say that's about as open and shut a case of cause and effect as you're likely to see.Interestingly, our goals scored and goals conceded rates have not been so different pre- and post-Sharp. I think what has happened is that we lost that little bit of indefinable extra that someone like Sharp brings, of being able to score the crucial goal at the crucial time to make the difference between winning/drawing or drawing/losing.(And before the usual suspects get on my case, I have admitted times many that I underestimated the quality of Sharp before we signed him, and that he is by some way the best striker I have ever seen pull on our shirt. I shouldn't need to keep re-iterating this, but the discussions seem to have got so personal of late that I don't doubt someone would be trawling back through past posts to find summat that I may have said in the past about Sharp that was less than exaltory so as to have a moan.)
Indeed I'm sure we weren't doing so badly WITH Sharp WITHOUT the experiment!There was a time when a return of one point per game with something like the strongest team available was used by a certain statistician as a basis to peddle an 'out' campaign against the manager. Oh how times have changed.
Now is probably not the time but I'd love to see our overall with/without stats re Sharp. The word talismanic almost seemed to be invented for him.
All that your admirable research does for me is to make me question (even more) the timing of the decision to sack O'Driscoll and bring in Saunders. Sharp was poised for a comeback, admittedly short of full fitness, at the time that the board pulled the plug on O'Driscoll. Also Brian Stock, almost as much a key component of the team as Sharp, was ready to play again and Ryan Mason was fit again.