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I think Ron Greenwood was a man of his time. He was a gentleman of the old school. His reluctance to break a verbal agreement over Ferguson was naive and from a distance of 40 years looks foolish. He just thought his word was his bond. It's easy to sneer at that, but it's an entirely admirable trait.

Where he can be faulted, and r50whu may even agree, was that, being a man of his time, he was over-deferential to the miserly bunch of Cearns and Pratts that ran the club. His failure was not to push really hard for money to buy the players that would have allowed West Ham to progress. Who is to say he was wrong? Times were different. He would almost certainly have been sacked without any payoff if he had rocked the boat.

His wasn't really all that good with the financial side and couldn't understand players wanting to be paid more. His disagreements with Bobby Moore are well-known and can be understood without necessarily condemning either man. Moore wanted the right wage for his labours, Greenwood was a dreamer who couldn't understand why Moore didn't want to play for the love of it. In fact, Greenwood was a product of the era of maximum wage and pre freedom of contract. He never really came to terms with the financial side of the game post those two massive changes.

Greenwood wasn't perfect. He certainly was adamant to the point of stubbornness in his refusal to compromise his footballing vision, but that vision still defines the club and makes its fans different. We still laugh at others clubs' fans for caring more about results than entertainment.

I think Greenwood's faults cost West ham some success. Because those faults were not so relevant in the international game, he was probably a better England manager than West Ham manager.

Me, I'd rather be West Ham than Man U or Liverpool however many cups they have won. Have you heard those cunts bleating on the radio when their team slips to 3rd?

A Man of Constant Sorrow wrote:

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Apologies chaps - it was Banks, not Shilton.

I was most certainly around at the time.

The reason West Ham had limited transfer funds were because on the whole Greenwood spent it on rubbish. Players like Stephenson, Taylor, Greaves, Lutton, Ferguson, Eustace and MacDougall were just not good enough.

John Cushley was actually a decent signing - but Greenwood hated the fact that he got stuck in - so wouldn't play him, preferring instead the "ballplaying" ie non-combative talents of converted midfielder Alan Stephenson.

Greenwood had neither the will nor the nous to get us even challenging for the league title - the highest we finished under him was sixth. Even fucking Redknapp beat that - and Roeder finished just a place off.

His "football vision" such as it was completely compromised the club as it set an agenda still prevalent today that it was alright losing, so long as we did it gloriously. It allowed successive boards to hide behind a (largely false) assertion that we played football the "right way" .

I hated it then and I hate it now...

Greenwood wasn't the best in the transfer market.

However, he did sign Standen, Byrne, Bonds, Robson, Taylor (blimey, he's on my list of good signings and your list of bad ones) and Alan Devonshire.

Bertie Lutton was £5,000 from Walton and Hersham, you can't use him as an example. But you should have used Derek Hales!