The Peterborough Evening Telegraph
Well done Fergie for making fools of his cowardly critics on social media
Football and politics stir the passions like few other subjects. Sadly logic and reason have become casualties within followers of both.
Opinions are difficult to shift. Inconvenient facts are ignored or twisted to suit an individual’s preferred narrative.
I won’t bore you with politics here, but there are still people out there in Cloud Cuckoo Land (aka Twitter) who believe Posh were wrong to hire Darren Ferguson as manager for a fourth time.
I sort of understood that viewpoint when it happened. He’d left the club staring at a miserable relegation from the Championship 11 months earlier, but that doesn’t dilute his record of three career promotions from League One in any way, shape or form.
Surely you’d think those knockers have changed their mind now? Or at least they’d be silent?
But no, they are still out there, hiding behind silly made-up names and claiming Posh should have taken on Rafa Benitez, or Neil Warnock, or some other unaffordable name.
Still Ferguson has made them all look like fools.
Posh have picked up 35 points in 17 matches under Ferguson which is automatic promotion form if stretched over a full season.
He’s engineered six away wins in eight games and instilled an attractive, positive style of play with the same players that looked stale, rigid and slow in the first half of the season, apart from introducing a more experienced goalkeeper and a dashing left-back.
Posh are scoring freely and yet also look much more solid and organised defensively.
Misery and foreboding have largely been replaced by joy and optimism.
Of course, Posh might well still fall short of their play-off goal.
They are battling some big clubs with some top players for a place in the play-offs. Eighty points wasn’t enough for a top six finish last season.
It could be enough this time around, but that still requires Posh to pick up three wins and a draw from their last five matches in a tricky fixture schedule.
Posh have two of the bottom four and two of the top four still to play and the recent results of some big hitters against relegation candidates has shown no game came be taken lightly.
Sheffield Wednesday, Bolton, Plymouth, Barnsley and Derby have all come unstuck against struggling sides.
If Posh do fail Ferguson will cop some flak or sure, but it wouldn’t be on him.
I take more notice of what the likes of club legends Craig Mackail-Smith and George Boyd, and current star Jack Taylor, say about Ferguson’s skillset than the ramblings of a few fools on social media, and so should you.
**All us Posh fans can do right now is get behind the team and help propel them into play-off action for the first time since 2014.
It’s clear chairman Darragh MacAnthony is battling against a strong financial tide, but what those ‘fans’ who appear to have embarked on fault-finding raids on Companies House are hoping to achieve is far from obvious.