Fans can argue with me as much as they like, 2009-2010 was the season that could have fuelled changes for this club. A football team that had been stuck in the mud since the last time it was relegated from what was the third division of the Football League. It was an amazing season, one which saw the club ride the wave of the fictional owner and despite the money not actually being there the club was crowned champions.

A lot of people have been pointing the finger at Alan Hardy for it all, that seems to be the easiest route to blame.

The club has been in turmoil for many seasons, however the Trews had the chance to bring happier times. As much as AH has failed, why are people not accepting that they have a portion of the blame for sending the club back down to League Two.

My point is, lessons hasn't be learnt. Why is that?

The club has focused on the PR, talk of a 5 year plan but have poorly executed it. Any success has made them abandon these principles, thinking only on season ticket sales and making fans mindless with false hope.

Kevin Nolan was building a team.

His plans seems to have been interfered with if you read between the lines, it looks as if Alan Hardy wanted to bring in big names and reduce the experience/veterans that had been collecting. Lets face it, over the past 5 seasons Meadow Lane might as well have been a retirement home.

He had the right idea but it poorly executed, quite possibly with the wrong man in charge too.

We did need to learn from mistakes back then, but the club didnt and now we are paying the price. The club now has to face it.

Lack of football minded people, even with the previous owners they struggled to appoint the right staff.

That's half the battle if you want a properly ran football club.

Whilst I think there's a lot to be learned from the poor handling of the club, the stupid gimmicks and cutting corners.

I would prefer to focus on a fresh start, forget about pointing the finger. Let's face it, all the previous owners have a fault, Notts struck lucky in some senses that the Munto saga didn't throw us backwards. To keep that dream alive, really should have been the point the club turned a corner.

Sadly, we all know what happened.

I know many fans believe if Steve Cotterill had been given the budget he wanted or at least close to it, things might be different - hindsight is a funny thing.

think the club needs to have the right people in the correct positions, dont overload them with tasks and give the manager time to implement their own ideas. clearly missing out on promotion previously led the club to rush things up.

I don’t think they have or we wouldn’t be in this mess again the relegation from league one lessons should have been learned .. !! 

Until 1926 we were part of the furniture in the top flight. The story since then has been one of long-term decline and we could point the finger at several of our owners during that time. No-one foresaw what a disaster this season would be, but as Elton John once said, if you keep going to the barber's you're eventually going to get a haircut.

The last two owners have developed a culture of trying to spend our problems away, exacerbated by a happy trigger finger. That's how we found ourselves in a situation where we're relegated from the League with a wage budget of 3.2 million pounds (higher than many teams in League One) while Macclesfield stayed up on a quarter(!) of that. I strongly suspect that we've attracted a number of players who have come just for the money, which has contributed to a split in the dressing room. To turn it around we need players to be coming for the right reasons - because they are hungry to be successful at our club and want to pull together with the rest of the squad.

Notts never learns, its always the same and happier times will be there. It will take awhile to achieve them.

Owners don't listen to the fans, they think it's all about them and make decisions which football minded people wouldn't.

I'm not saying football fans are always correct, yet we care about the club a lot more than them. Most common sense fans would have pointed out the dangers of not backing up the keeper position, I recall @Chris mentioning and other fans saying how Fitzsimons is ready.

Well he proved that was incorrect and the fans who was vocal got drowned out.

The club operates on attempting to make profit or cover the revenue, not from learning.

Its obvious that Alan Hardy came in allowing the manager then, Kevin Nolan to go about overhauling the club. He put his feet up, became too used to the world of football and started to love the attention being the chairman got him. The previous owners, well they was different and the reason the club came back to league two was due to them never understanding what it took to establish themselves as a league one club.

5 year plan this, Premier League player that. It was all just a shiny gloss of varnish and nothing ever solid.

The foundations at Notts need to be properly laid, every time the building work starts fine. A decision is made by the owner and it undoes all the good work, fans who blame Kevin Nolan are short minded, it falls onto Alan Hardy's shoulders.

He could have done a lot more to save the club from relegation, such as not appointing Harry Kewell.

Alan Hardy just didn't know to properly run a football club, He had ideas just like our current manager but they didn't learn from their mistakes. Notts was just as bad under the trews.

The club doesn't learn well, the people who have been in a position to listen don't. They do things their way and that is why the club ultimately fails.

They never do, if they eventually learn one thing, they go terrobly wrong with another.

On 21/06/2019 at 22:39, cheeky~k8 said:

They never do, if they eventually learn one thing, they go terrobly wrong with another.

I agree

The club ultimately had no say in what the given owner does , you just hope the owner isn’t reckless in the ownership, so is it the club that has to learn? No it’s owners who need to not be reckless, and not spend / borrow what they don’t have the means to pay back or maintain. 

People need to advice you, Alan's biggest mistake was believing he knew more than everyone else. It's come to bite him in the arse now.

Could have made changes but just carried on spending too much.

No proper plan, no proper scouting and no real due diligence done when appointing managers and signing players. Every owner ends up spending 20p when we've only 10p to spend. Never really been a control on how much we spend in a transfer window 

Like with alot of things, Notts didn't deal with issues when they first occurred but left it to get out of control.

How does a football club learn without listening to the fans and having the right staff to do their jobs, Alan Hardy has cut into the club like a weed.