New CEO Is Dane Murphy

[wassy04]

Apart from a few greats in the game like Cloughy, Ferguson etc, I happen to believe that one single person is very rarely responsible for the entire sucess any club might be enjoying.  So be it, Murphy, Cooper, Marinakis or anyone else for that matter, my view is always that sucess is earned by everyone pulling in the same direction and the club functioning at a level greater than its parts. Thats why Ive never been overly critical of Marinakis amd Vrentzos when they were getting flack and never joined thr Murphy bandwagon when he was considered to be the second coming. Its the same with Cooper. I like the bloke a lot but he's not bigger than the club. And he would possibly concede privately he got a lot of things wrong at the beginning of this season.

I think you're missing the point, him getting a lot of things wrong is built into the process of gelling a new squad. It was always going to be a learn on the job situation as the majority of the players had not played at this level. Part of the effect of "gelling a squad" is learning your best system/starting 11 which was always going to be tricky when you had 15-20 new players plus the guys you weren't sure whether they could step up. Could he have got to this current setup quicker, perhaps. However, perhaps the team would not have found it's current level without the experience and learnings of what went wrong in the early games and therefore where the tactics needed to focus to be effective with this squad. All these things take time and experience, one bad result does not make a season. 

Cooper is not bigger than the club but that doesn't mean he isn't massively in credit with the job that he's done. It's completely unrealistic to expect continual improvement in anything. If it wasn't for how bad we were in games 1-8 last year, I'd of said this season's achievement so far is greater, that's how much the odds were stacked against us. I just think you're missing how incredibly difficult this was going to be for so many reasons.