Not all Saints fans think George Burley's reign has been a disaster, here is a view from one of them.
In spite of the undeniable fact that George's reign at St. Marys must ultimately be seen as a failure, he has done a lot of good, and done so under difficult circumstances with ridiculously high expectations.
He signed quality players in Grzegorz Rasiak, Marek Saganowski, Andrew Davies, Yousef Safri and Inigo Idiakez. He gave debuts to Gareth Bale and Drew Surman, and presided over the transformation of Chris Baird and Kenwyne Jones from reserves into prized assets. He got us into the play-offs last season, and did so playing decent football.
George did all this having had to scrap almost an entire squad of nonentities and sell Theo Walcott, Antti Niemi, Nigel Quashie and others. He conducted himself with great dignity while the board bickered amongst themselves, somehow contrived to drive away potential investment from a billionaire philanthropist, then tried to sell us to a high-risk hedge fund. He was faced with building another new team at the start of this season which he knew would be expected to challenge for promotion, despite the asset-stripping of the summer, and in truth I wonder if his stomach for the fight had gone by then.
The majority of fans never really appreciated him, and there are reasons for this. His team selections became increasingly baffling as time wore on- he picked players out of positon and dropped popular members of the team for no apparent reason. A look at the stats for this season show that Saganowski and Rasiak have barely played, despite each having set the division alight at times last term. Rumour is that both are rather difficult characters who are in the habit of sulking when things don't go their way, but they are also both excellent players who are far more accomplished than the likes of Stern John and Bradley Wright-Phillips.
Burley also played favourites, signing various players he had worked with before and selecting them irrespective of form or fitness. Jermain Wright, Chris Makin and Kelvin Davis are all solid players and good professionals, but there have been times when there have been better options that have been overlooked in favour of them. This season Jason Euell has been preferred to Jhon Viafara despite the former's confidence clearly being shot. Viafara is a donkey but he has the pace, power and stength to be a force in this division, and his absence from the side has wound up a number of fans.
I'm not holding out much hope of getting a decent replacement. All the candidates come with some level of baggage. The fans won't abide Billy Davies after a number of incidents in last year's play-offs. Appointing Hoddle could potentially be divisive, and there are rumours of problems with his health.
We have no money to spend and are languishing in mid-table, so the likes of Gary Johnson are not likely to be tempted. On the plus side we actually have a very strong squad in the context of the Championship, plus the usual littany of promising youngsters (Adam Lallana, David McGoldrick, Oliver Lancashire) so perhaps a new manager with a fresh approach, plus a clean slate for the whole playing staff could see an upturn in fortunes. If whoever takes over can get Rasiak and Saganowski firing we could actually climb the table fairly rapidly, but that would necessitate a manager who is willing to play proper football, as neither of those players are suited to the long ball game.
To be honest, it could be a pivotal moment in the club's history- get the right man and we could possibly resurrect our promotion chances. Get the wrong man and we could be playing Havant & Waterlooville in a local derby in a couple of years.