Even a brilliant, and unexpected, Wembley win can't camouflage what a dreadful season Posh have endured

But a glorious, and surprising, win in a Wembley Final in front of the biggest crowd ever to watch a Posh match, against a team who have just smashed an EFL record for the number of points won in a season, can’t camouflage what a dreadful campaign our favourite club has endured. Nor can a win double over Cambridge United including a 6-1 thrashing at London Road, the brilliance of Kwame Poku or the emergence of Harley Mills

The bad comfortably outweighed the good. This was a season when quality was replaced by mediocrity, when classy, entertaining football, became clumsy and error-strewn, and when a reputation for unearthing gems like Ephron Mason-Clark was damaged by the failures, so far at least, of non-league signings like Chris Conn-Clarke.

Posh have finished in their lowest League One position (18th) since Darragh MacAnthony took control of the club in 2006. They’ve collected their lowest number of points (51) and their lowest number of wins (13). They’ve conceded the second highest number of goals in their division (81) and lost 7-2 on aggregate to newly-promoted Mansfield Town and 4-0 at home to Cobblers, a team that normally treat trips to London Road as an exercise in damage limitation.

If those statistics don’t hurt the players – and some recent efforts suggest they don’t – Posh really could be in a world of hurt without some magic in the summer transfer window in the 2025-26 season.

Injuries to key men didn’t help, but they also don’t excuse everything that went wrong in a season that was rescued by some emergency defensive surgery in January. There’s a chance Posh boss Darren Ferguson will employ a psychologist as well as a physiotherapist on his medical team next season such has been the mental frailty of players who appeared to be overwhelmed by expectation as well as the plethora of physically imposing opponents.

Ferguson’s own form was well below the levels we normally expect from the most successful manager in Posh history. He was stubborn, not so much with his selections, but with the tactics he employed. The insistence of playing through a press after replacing gifted ball players like Ronnie Edwards and Harrison Burrows with lesser beings was often self-defeating.

Poor starts often left Posh with too much to do (they had the worst record in the first 15 minutes of games in League One with seven goals scored and 14 conceded) and they were one of the worst teams in the division for dropping points after scoring first. Mentally weak you see. They went six months between winning back-to-back League One games for the first and second times this season and they went six months without an away win.

Replacing four top players in the summer was always going to be difficult, but it proved to be impossible. Players arrived from the Swedish second division, Harrogate, Rochdale, Fleetwood and Altrincham to replace players who went to the German second tier, Sheffield United, Southampton and Coventry City, and it showed.

Posh lost power as well as sheer skill from their outstanding 2023-24 squad. Ephron Mason-Clark and Josh Knight were not just quality performers, they were as hard as nails. They were replaced by players who looked like they’d blow over in a strong breeze. Posh have been bullied into submission far too often this season. They won just one game out of 16 against a team who finished in the top eight.

Two loan signings from then Premier League champions Manchester City didn’t work out, although Mo Susoho was dreadfully unlucky with his injury mishaps. Goals didn’t arrive from central midfield with centre-back Manny Fernandez scoring more in the first half of the season than Archie Collins and Hector Kyprianou scored all season between them. Joel Randall lost the plot and the love of the fans before leaving the club in January.

When Posh lost 3-1 at Bristol Rovers at the start of February they looked to be in an irreversible decline so credit to Ferguson, Sam Hughes and Tayo Edun for inspiring a relegation-beating recovery, although not winning any of the last seven League One games either side of the Wembley triumph is worrying for the immediate future. Ferguson’s post-season claim that he’d ‘done a damn good job’ could be viewed as a comment on how badly some of the summer signings had been.

Credit also to Poku for carrying the team during those early season troubles when he looked like racking up some ridiculous attacking numbers for a winger, but then disaster struck as he wrecked his hamstring on the same night Posh lost 1-0 at home to no-hopers, well they were back then, Burton Albion and were forced to suffer the refereeing of Darren Drysdale. Drysdale was hopeless, but he wasn’t the worst which is a neat and tidy summary of officiating standards this season. Poku now departs alongside Kyprianou and human racehorse Ricky-Jade Jones at a time when confidence in the recruitment process is at an all-time low. To be fair it’s one bad window after some decent windows, but two bad ones in a row could be fatal as far as staying In League One is concerned. Posh start from the unenviable position of having four left-backs on their books which suggests the thinking hasn’t always been joined-up.

But there is always hope. Oxford United had an unusually poor League One season in 2022-23 and finished 19th. The following season they finished 5th and won the play-offs beating Posh along the way, albeit with a very different model that MacAnthony and co demand. Oxford though have just secured a second season in the Championship.

It could be a softer division next season, one without the extreme wealth enjoyed by top two Birmingham City and Wrexham. The teams coming up look modest and the teams coming down won’t be getting 111 points.

Posh have to get better to satisfy the ambitions of the manager and the chairman. They have to get much better to reward the support, and indeed patience, of the club’s fans in a season that few would have expected back in August.

There was toxicity, but mainly on social media which is where the nasty folk congregate, usually anonymously, these days. In the stadium it was relatively calm which is remarkable given some of the performances.

Home support dropped by just an average of 35 fans a game despite a huge drop-off in standard of performance. If standards drop any lower a return to League Two after a club-record absence of 17 years can’t be ruled out.

Even a third EFL Trophy win in a row wouldn’t compensate for that.