A preliminary whinge

By Kym Smith on May 14, 08 11:50 PM in

Hello. I'm not new to the gentle art of whinging about Birmingham City; I've done it for a few years in sundry other places, so if I've irritated you in an alternate incarnation, please forgive me.

I chose Blues at the tender age of ten as I wanted to support the team that bore the name of my city and I have followed their ups and downs (mostly downs, it sometimes seems) ever since.

This season has proved to be no exception and like thousands of other fans I am now wondering at what became of our return to the Premier League.

There have already been a lot of column inches written elsewhere about the whys and wherefores of our latest rather short stay in the top flight and I may as well add my voice to the many. Sadly, it's not going to be very comfortable reading for any passing members of the Board.

I feel let down. Massively.

After assuring us that they had learnt their lessons from our last relegation season, we as fans had been promised that they would invest properly in the team to do everything to ensure that we would at least have a fair chance of becoming re-established in the Premier League.

At best, the money available was not spent wisely; the players bought in were not of the right quality and some of them struggled at this level. At worst, it was cheapskating and we stood no chance against the likes of the mid-lower table clubs that we should have been competing with; the likes of Wigan, Fulham and Bolton.

I'm not one of the people that advocates that we should spend recklessly; Heaven knows, the last thing I want is for my club to "do a Leeds" - but there must be some middle ground as far as investment is concerned. I know that the club's owners are not a bottomless pit, but while spending is at its current level, the best we can ever hope to be is a yo-yo team.

To avoid that, we have to rebuild wisely, which in my opinion means keeping the core of the team together; not selling the likes of Larsson and McFadden to the highest bidder. Constantly ripping the side apart will never enable us to move forward.

We have some good, young players, many of whom were not quite ready to make the step up to the top flight last summer. I don't blame them at all, as in the main they did their best.

Alex McLeish needs the opportunity to make the team his own and for that, he will need reasonable backing.

So I hope that someone out there has been listening to us over the past few days. We don't necessarily all hurl abuse at the Directors' Box, but we want to feel that the Board are listening, as we are not "customers", we are fans and there is a huge difference.