Is keeping hold of VI. One hell of a coach. The board have blessed us with 3 decent/good managers in a row, so I'm hopeful they'd pull it out of the bag again, but what a loss he would be.
I don't think there would be any serious interest this season, but the board might need to back him with incentives for play-offs, or promotion for the 2021-22 season - enough at least to keep interest at bay. I think that VI will honour his contract until the point he senses that he has taken us as far as he can. We still have forward mobility and that should continue into next season as well. If he gets us up in 2022, I reckon that he'll stay on. If he nearly does, I reckon he would look at any better offers. He still has a major target to achieve with us yet.
If we have a good end to the season to keep both the manager and key players buying in to what we could achieve next season plus make a couple of astute additions we could have a real go next season. Tail off on the pitch or show a lack of reasonable ambition in the boardroom and some will look to jump ship.
Hopefully the board are astute enough to back the manager. Similarly, I hope the manager is astute enough to realise he was appointed into a project we have been building for years. It would not be as straightforward a task to take on an expensively assembled squad of underachievers and mould them into a fit and hungry, ambitious team. Then his job and future employability are at the mercy of an impatient chairman.
The main improvement VI has made is to drop (and ship out) the players that simply weren’t good enough. Both Stendel and Struber insisted on playing the likes of Bahre and Ritzmaier. 99% of our fans would have got sooner.
