If the club wants sustainability (keeping the manager and selling a player each year to balance the books) then that’s fine. Most fans - fair weather ones like me or the true loyal supporters - expect to see progression - year on year improvements in final league positions, the occasional cup run etc.
I get that football fans are generally ambitious - and most are significantly more ambitious than me - but at what point do we stop, calm down and think "You know what, the club has made a ton of progress over the last decade, we're in a pretty good place, let's just sit back, relax and enjoy it for a while"?
Back-to-back League One playoff appearances, and every chance this year of making it three-in-a-row.
That's actually over-performance for a club of our current size and resources. By any financial metric you choose to use - attendances, revenues etc. - we "should" slot in somewhere in the middle of League One today.
And, as I was saying at the weekend, League One is a
great league. Really good level of football; fantastic mix of teams from the struggling giants through to the minnows punching above their weight (I think the fact that we're going to play league games at the Stadium of Light & Hillsborough, but also the Wham Stadium in Accrington and the Mazuma stadium in Morecambe in the same season is awesome); it's balanced, varied and unpredictable.
Which is not to say that we shouldn't get irate and complain when we **** up as badly as we did last night - of course we're going to.
Lord knows, I've criticized KR plenty this season for the absurdly lopsided squad he's put together, and for some of the idiotic substitutions he's made. The man often drives me nuts.
But maybe, just maybe as a fanbase, we could all take a breath, recognize the progress that has been made and enjoy watching a good team in a good division for a while?
Besides which, if OUFC is going to see
sustainable on-the-field progression beyond where we are now, we have to see significant progress off-the-pitch first. Unless our owners turn out to be sugar daddies of the maddest kind, who don't care about burning huge piles of their own cash, it's simply not possible to compete financially in the Championship whilst locked into a bad rental deal for a 12.5k capacity Kasstad.