Over-achievement

[diamondgirl]

Do you think we "Over-achieved" last season? The Chairman has said, twice, on the OS that we did. :Oops: My thoughts are that you do what you do, on merit. I don't think we had any real luck in the last campaign, in fact, the opposite so we could have finished in a much better position than we eventually did. (7th) Surely we must approach each season with the view that we are going to be promoted. Did the Chesterfield board/ Chairman approach last season with the attitude "If we get promoted we will over-acieve". I would think not. Are we to go into the coming season thinking "Well, if we finish above the relegation line, we have acheived what we set out to do..stay in league 2"

[HRG]

Well, I was thinking we'd be in the top half of mid-table going into last season. We exceeded my expectations but with the good football I saw at the few games I went to and the praise the team has recieved from other clubs fans (Bury for example), I can't say we over-achieved. We finished where we did because the squad was good enough for that Play-Off spot and final.
In my opinion exceeding expectations and over-achieving are two entirely different things.

[leetufc]

I think we overachieved given the size of our budget compared to those around us, and the fact that the season before we had finished in the bottom half of the league. I thought before the start of the season we'd be good for midtable but didn't believe we had enough strength in depth to challenge for the play-offs, so in that regard over-achieved slightly. There's no doubt though that we deserved to be in the play-offs come the end of the season. We played some great football and over 46 games the table does not lie. We were helped by certain teams not performing to their potential and dropping away towards the end, but that is the nature of football.

As for the coming season, I think we should be hopeful we can make play-offs again, but we should not state that as our aim. It puts too much pressure on our players unnecessarily. We need to be realistic unfortunately. Their are lots of big clubs now in league two, all of whom will be pushing for promotion and spending a lot more than we can. We have barely got a first XI at present, so this season really needs to be about consolidating and building the team back up, and then pushing on the season after. We should aim for top half and hope we can sneak into the contention for a play off place. I believe aiming for merely survival is wrong, but we need a realistic ambition which is midtable at least, hopefully top half, playoffs an outside chance.

[united09]

I don't think we over achieved, we did better than mosted expected yes but didn't over achieve.

[Regiment]

oh Chris, what have you done ?!?!?!? you're opening a big can of sh*tworms there !!! ha ha

it's a tough one. what is meant by "over-achieved" ?? It's open to interpretation really, but if we're saying : "over-achieved = exceeded expectations", then, yes, maybe we did.

however, for me, saying we over-achieved is like saying we didn't deserve what we got, and that, i strongly disagree with. i don't remember coming away from a game last season thinking "we were very lucky to win today", but many times on the long drive home i thought "how the hell did we not win that game".

after 46 league games, your final position when all said and done, is where you deserve to be.

saying we over-achieved is like saying we were not in fact better than the teams below us, but as you mentioned in another thread, as an example, our performance at Wycombe, against a very good side, was fantastic, yet over the course of the season, Wycombe deserved to go up. We have a good side, we played very very well at times last season, so justified our end of season position.

Simon Baker is using it as a safety blanket for failure, aim low, and if you do well, you've exceeded expectation, or at least gone beyond what had been asked of you, and if you don't surpass that expectation, you haven't failed. but i don't think that necessarily means the same as over-achieving. i'm sure our players go out in every game believing they can win, and why shouldn't they ?

it's easy to set ourselves low targets for the coming season with all that has happened in the last few weeks, and all that will happen in the coming weeks, but i'd like to think all the players will be determined to match, if not exceed last seasons achievements. And if they do, i will not consider it over achieving, whether i actually expect them to or not, but if we don't quite reach those heights, i will not consider it a failure either. if we're too close to the bottom, then i would be disappointed, because i believe we are better than that.

i'd rather leave judgement for the coming season until everything has settled down and we know what players etc we will have next season, and i think Simon Baker should've done the same, rather than be negative from the start.

[TorquayChalky]

Long-time lurker, first poster so feel free to say I m talking rubbish!!
I personally think this overachievement philosophy is quite an interesting point and in a way probably underlines in part Buckles move to BR (had we finished mid-table would they have really seen him as the man to get them straight back to League 1?).
For what it s worth I don t think we did overachieve. We had a very good season and at times played some quality football. Buckle built a good but small squad with some very shrewd loan signings but we were very lucky with injuries throughout the season and on the whole everyone s form was pretty consistent.
At the start of the season I think the general consensus was we had what it took to be mid table at worst and pushing playoffs at best 9think there was a poll on here at one point but can t remember the outcome).
As it happens we were lucky to scrape a play-off place with 68 points (only other time this would have happened with this points total in the last 12 seasons would have been 05/06). Our end of season form was ordinary at best (2w-5d-1l) and in the end we only got there due to other teams not taking their chances. Overall we had a very good season that almost became a great season but I m not sure that constitutes an overachievement.
In my opinion overachievement was just another example of bucks-speak used to massage his own ego and get his name in-front of other clubs Chairmen, as let s face it he was always far too ambitious for us!!!!

[Gulliball]

We had a brilliant side last season - 7th was a fair reflection of their ability, not over-achievement really. In terms of budget and reputation, certainly, but we finished in the play-offs on merit with a solid defence and dangerous attacking players.

[numpte]

Who started this over achievement clap trap....Buckle. He's been spouting it for months to a degree that no other manager I can remember had.

Self publicity.

As previously posted, there are half a dozen clubs of similar size to ourselves in this league and you dont hear them talk about it.

We are the only club talking nonsense and its BAD KARMA!!!

[tommyg]

Overachieve means to perform better than expected. I personally didn't expect us to get into the play-offs and would have been happy with a safe mid-table finish. So we overachieved in my eyes, but then it depends on what expectations you had for the club at the start of the season.

[basil75]

I've made my feelings clear elsewhere on whether we overachieved.

However, it's not a word our chairman should be using publicly and another "foot in it" with regards our approach to PR.

People of Torbay, come buy a season ticket - we won't be as good as last year and you shouldn't have high expectations of the coming season, but come and buy a season ticket anyway.

[Plymouth Gull]

Who started this over achievement clap trap....Buckle. He's been spouting it for months to a degree that no other manager I can remember had.

Self publicity.

As previously posted, there are half a dozen clubs of similar size to ourselves in this league and you dont hear them talk about it.

Exactly. Buckle was always going on about how small a club we were, and we had no right to be up there, bigging himself up in a way.

For the record, I was quietly confident of reaching the playoffs after our excellent end to 09/10 and then start of 10/11!

[exilegull]

Slightly OT but torquaychalky makes an excellent point. Does anybody remember a season when we lost so few key players to injury absences. I reckon the combined total for what could be considered the 7-8 core key players must have been less than 10 games - quite incredible really and played an important part in our achievements. If we had extended absences from players like zebus, branno, manse or nicho would we have finished quite so high?
Food for thought

[Dave_Pougher]

Over achieved,,,,,,,, now when did we last hear a chairman in the not too distant past start saying things like that?

[Alpine Joe]

It certainly does come down to what you would define as over achivement. If we had relied soley on Torquay United players last Season rather than those borrowed from elsewhere then we'd have achieved a mid table position at best. Using other teams good players (via the loan system) allowed us to achieve a position in the League that would have been beyond us had we been restricted to using our own playing resources.

As I wrote on another site a month ago :

"I saw a characteristic Buckle team losing at home to Crawley in the F.A Cup. Short on ideas & short on inspiration, heading for a mid table finish at best, possibly a little lower. The next time I was able to attend Plainmoor was more than a month later for the Shrewsbury game. I was all ready to watch a Torquay team that had struggled to record five League wins in the whole of 2011.

But the huge increase in quality was apparant within a couple of minutes of the kick off. Half a team of good players had been parachuted in from when I last saw them. All those unfamiliar faces, Murray,Tomlin,Stanley,Robinson,Pringle. Suddenly we had half a new team of players who were all looking a bit too good for this division.

From a team that had won 5 league games in the whole of the year, these players put together 5 wins in less than a month !"



Surely all those good non Torquay players running around in Torquay shirts, scoring goals for us & helping us win matches helped us over achieve ?

Now compare that to next season when,for instance, the central defence & the goalkeeper will barely know each others names let alone have built up an understanding that only comes from playing competitive matches together over a prolonged period. My expectations of what we can realistically achieve in the coming Season are far lower. Maybe that's the wrong approach,maybe Blackpool did start the Season firmly believing they'd be Premier League champions. Luckily there are plenty of different opinions which only leads to the Forum being that much more interesting.

[Fonda]

My opinion on this has been expressed elsewhere, but what the hell, it reiterate. No, i very much do not think we over-achieved. At the start of the season i thought we were good for a top-half finish. Our finishing points total was on a par with that. A few of the 'bigger' clubs that would have been expected to perform better struggled, and for that reason the points we got were good enough to see us into the Play-Offs.

This idea that we over-acheived is a myth perpetrated by Paul Buckle - the usual self-promotion. 'Torquay are a tiny club with a tiny budget. It's pretty much a miracle that i got them where i did. If it wasn't for me, they'd likely have been relegated again'. I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

There's also no doubt the board like to 'play safe' by keeping expectations low - but as i've said elsewhere, i'm not convinced it's an effective methodology. It doesn't inspire new supporters (or old ones in fact), and it gives the players an excuse. Someone mentioned above that it's good because it takes the pressure off the players. Personally, i like the players to feel a little pressure to perform, because without it performance levels drop.

The only possible reason we can consider last season as one of 'extraordinary over-achievement' is if the expectation from within the club was that '22nd will do'. And that's not a healthy mentatility, but which has been discussed previously.