The People's Forum: We play terrible football

But we are more solid than most teams around us. That will likely be enough, possibly comfortably. Dyche has done what we hired him to do. Can he do more? Not in my view because he self-limits his own ambition with his inherent risk-aversion.

Moving forward the new owners need to marry realism with ambition. We cannot take stupid financial risks but we do need to take a few calculated ones on the football side. We need to operate in hope rather than in fear. Aim up rather than looking down.

Even with BMD and the commercial connections of TFG we will be mid tier in revenue terms. Other clubs are showing that coupled with a clear ‘philosophy’ top to bottom, quality coaching, positivity and a multi-season plan this can still be enough to create genuinely competitive teams.

Realism and pragmatism does not have to mean settling for something that is clearly not good enough. What we are getting is clearly not good enough for us. It may well meet the minimum pass mark of avoiding relegation with a little room to spare but anybody being OK with that or a slightly enhanced version of it moving forward baffles me.

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Before this weekend's games, the consensus on this site 's seemed to be we were unlikely to be drawn into a relegation scrap again, either because of our own strengths or others' weaknesses. I think such judgements need to be a little more circumspect.

Our own team is extremely limited in all the ways endlessly recycled here. The teams immediately above us (West Ham, Fulham, Brentford, Man Utd) have better players, play better football and are highly unlikely to be drawn into a relegation battle. Below us, it might look comforting given that we have three clubs yet to win a game. However, it is early days and Ipswich and Wolves have been a little unlucky not to have picked up a win. Both have goals in them, but are weak defensively. Even Southampton have been playing better than their points tally indicates, though their lack of a goalscoring threat may doom them. Leicester, currently on the same points are probably at a similar level as us.

Where I have more optimism is in the incoming new owners, who, in my view, will want to make some early investments in the squad as a signal of intent, this should brighten prospects for thus second half of the season, but we have to pick up enough points in this half to remain competitive, especially before the run of December's difficult games.