Me personally, I think it's even more circumstantial than that. Poch was the right man at the right TIME. I am of the opionion that with a few rare exceptions, a player is pretty much a player. What they do and how they do it is more down to the environment and culture that their individual skill. A really skilled ball juggler with exceptional control doesn't mean he's a good footballer.
What we had under Poch were a hungry team with a great mix of talent and age, where everybody believed in the project and ran themselves into the ground until they didn't anymore. In hindsight we should have put more pressure on the established first teamers by reinforcing, but it's hard to justify when they perform as well as they did on a regular basis. Years of hard work, arguably the hardest in the league without winning anything was more the downfall than Poch doing anything worse or differently. Look at Liverpool, their downfall has an eerie similarity to ours, and they HAVE won something. Every manager or boss comes in with his own project, and it's usually easy to buy into when everything is untried. Sooner or later without success this will fade, with Poch it took a long time, under Jose not so much. During this time, something negative grew that I believe we still have with us. If a football club is anything like other workplaces, new employees will start out with their own mindset and expectations, but will soak up the internal culture pretty quickly. I don't put any more credibility to footballers' interviews than politicians, and I really do belive that we have a culture of a workplace you go to to collect wages, not to win things. At least we were such a club in the 90's according to former players, and I fear not much has changed. In my linguistically challenged head, there's a difference between wishing and wanting. We're a wishing club.
As another poster said, it's in the walls. I don't think a manager alone can change that.
