I'm curious about this stance, which I guess is probably the majority view. Why is no amount of injuries an excuse? Surely there is, rationally, a number of injuries which would be considered a reasonable excuse? And if so, where should we actually draw the line? I think something often happens where fans will be quite rational about what can be expected during a short injury crisis and their tolerance threshold simply moves as a crisis drags on.
I think injuries this season have been so debilitating to ETH's ability to ever put players capable of what he wants in the positions he wants them in, not just in one or two positions but in a handful of positions in the majority of games, that I don't think you can really use this season as a measure of how successfully he might manage us in a season with a more typical number of injuries, with someone else in control of transfer business. I just think fewer people agree with me now because there's a fatigue that develops watching your team play badly and lose over an entire season.
Allegations that his transfers and other decisions left us with fewer good options to weather the injury crisis are entirely fair.
And I completely agree with your second paragraph, clearly the injuries can't be viewed as some unavoidable act of god either, and some part/parts of the blame there should fall on the manager.
I can only speak for myself here, but my view is that a top manager should be capable of getting results under adverse circumstances. I wouldn't expect any manager to win 15 games in a row with 10 first team players out injured, but they should be able to get results by changing their game plan.
When ETH keeps saying he can't play his style of football because players in certain positions are out injured, this implies to me he can only succeed under ideal circumstances. And ideal circumstances hardly ever occur at this level of football.
All top sides even this season have had spells with key players out injured, and their performance expectedly dropped, but they still got the results. That to me highlights their managers' and teams ability to eke out results under adverse circumstances. I recognize they have better squads, but then again our manager has been responsible for almost a dozen signings, only a few of whom have actually strengthened us.
Ever since the last international break, we haven't won a game in 90 mins. During this time we are only missing 2-3 key starters. If you are still using injuries as an excuse for our performances against Brentford, Bournemouth, Coventry, then I'm sorry I just cannot agree with it. With the available squad we should have won all these games. Especially when as I mentioned in my previous post, you have constructed a squad where certain key players are well established as being injury prone.