Its a results oriented business and as such that is what most all managers are judged on. And they all know that. In losing 4 world class players its true that any manager here would have been in a similar boat at the outset. However, each of them would then have achieved quite different results. Whatever plight that pervades our club, or any club, the respective manager is tasked with overcoming it and some will achieve more success than others.
With regard to Poch, I doubt whether the shadow of those 4 players looms large over him since they departed a while ago. A passage of time, development, growth and acquisition has since occurred and more pertinent to him now is that he took over a young team, a 'very good squad' which underachieved in finishing 6th according to some. He is tasked with getting the best out of those young players...and the senior one's.
It is indeed, but it's the criteria that they are judged against that is the problem. I keep rambling on about it, but unrealistic expectations are slowly killing us.
Take AVB for example (this isn't a 'we should have kept AVB point btw, just wanted to use him to illustrate things a little better), he lost someone who was arguably the best player in the world that helped us get to our highest ever points total in the premier league. This points total
still didn't get us into the CL. We then bring in 7 brand new players, none of whom have actually ever played in the league before. But no one said at the start of that season 'we've just lost Gareth Bale and signed 7 new players who've never played in the premiership, I think this year we can totally forget about 4th because it's unrealistic since we didn't even manage it last year with Gareth Bale'.
AVB then of course got sacked because the results weren't good enough 'For a team that should be challenging for 4th place'. We weren't a team that should be challenging for 4th place. We were a team that put up a decent fight for it with one of the best players in the world leading us there the year before. Last season we were a team with many new faces to integrate that has just lost one of the best players in the world. 6th was probably about right and in fact we done quite well to remain mathmatically able to obtain 4th for as long as we did (and fantatically well to get so close to the points total from the year before). Yet the season was seen as a failure in most fans and the media's eyes.
We do have a 'very good squad' but the days of going into every season expecting to strongly challenge for 4th place are gone. We, the media, the club and everyone else need to accept that and start again.
Every manager of ours has had to make do with players he didn't want, bargains he didn't make, and expectations that hardly match the investment made into him or his vision for the club. Judging them is thus rather harsh, although in terms of instantaneous results, it'd probably be Redknapp wayyyy out in front, with the rest lagging behind.
We don't actually know this statement is true or false because we have this magical mystical transfer committee where absolutely no one outside the club has a clue who makes the decisions. When Redknapp was in charge you could have judged him on his signings but he wasn't here to go through losing his top class players and being tasked with replacing them.
With Poch, the only players we can be sure he does not want are the wants he puts up for sale in Jan. The signings that are brought in, who knows. I do have my doubts about the whole 'He didn't want that player' thing though. I'm sure they have some kind of formal process for agreement on signing players.