Kitchandro

Great example of a player who was absolutely awful for us but gets remembered differently because he was in a successful side.

Who said we were boring

Do you not think other Championship teams have bad strikers? We were 2-0 up, Daka’s lack of quality shouldn’t have been the be all and end all.

I think some of it is poor attitude from players, but I think it’s mainly to do with a cowardly approach from the manager. Sometimes we are too tentative to come out the blocks and try to score, other times we are scared of losing a lead and just think sitting deep and doing nothing will make it all go away. It’s common with professional football managers which I find very odd - losing doesn’t kill you it’s just a thing that happens in football. Being scared to lose instead of having the will and belief to win is pathetic when you’re on the money these people are on with nothing serious really riding on the result, compared with people in normal jobs. If people genuinely believe our fitness isn’t up to scratch then every single member of the coaching staff should be sacked and publicly laid into in a statement before their heads hit the pillow tonight. That’s the very basics of professional sport.

Support must be dwindling for him now surely. There’s not a lot of excuses when you’re 2-0 against Bristol City and can’t see the game out. That’s management flaws, not players being incapable. This guy doesn’t learn lessons.

When people say our players ‘just aren’t good enough’, I give you that first half. Up to the players but also particularly the manager to play like that consistently. Best performance of the season by far, we looked a different team.

Surely the second part of this proves he’s not the right person? Basically the argument for keeping him comes down to ‘might as well’ or in other words ‘cba’. It’s not like you, brookfox, has to do anything. We know the manager isn’t very good and we would like a better one. Better managers exist IF our club was willing to scout them like other clubs do. Everything else is irrelevant. Most of us know the owner won’t hire anyone good but we know they won’t sell up and we know they won’t buy decent players either. I ask this a lot, but if the manager offers nothing, or managers can’t make a difference, why have a manager at all? Shouldn’t we just let these unmanageable players manage themselves? Nobody ever suggests this which I find surprising. They are so sure that managers can’t make a difference when the players are average but want the club to spend money on someone who they admit is tactically inept, unwilling to change and doesn’t provide an ounce of entertainment.

The thing that this post reminded me of, being written by an outsider, is how it should have been a turning point in football and it wasn’t. My belief was that our success should have meant that no manager could ever again say to a group of supporters that their needed to play negative football to compete, and that the only expectation was survival. Allardyce, McCarthy, Pulis - they’d all been proved wrong. All football fans should have had renewed pride in their club and the sport, because they had a right to believe these things were possible and that entertainment, at the very least, was not determined by finances. Within a couple of years, the club that inspired that teared it all down. We let successive managers (Puel and Rodgers) tell us those very things. Our pathetic fans and board clapped along while they told us to be grateful, that we couldn’t compete with Wolves, that when they turned up we were happy just to survive. That’s the thing that annoys me most of all. We let these rich guys tell us what to accept again, rather than the other way round. That’s why the club is dead.

Marinakis is a horrible guy and if you think King Power are dodgy, well…speak to a Greek about him. Another reason I’ve turned off football is when you realise those lining up to own football clubs is one terrible person after another. Circus doesn’t even begin to describe this sport.

People will forget that the players got relegated to League One. Remember Richard Stearman? Played in the Premier League for Wolves soon after. Did anyone care Tielemans or Maddison got relegated? They won’t forget that Leicester got relegated to League One. It will be a stain on our history, the more years we spend in the lower leagues means more ammunition for us to be mocked and belittled, more ammunition for people to say we don’t belong in the Premier League and to be grateful to people like Top and Brendan Rodgers. The whole point of supporting your local team is about pride, this club is badly lacking that. Playing in League One for a few seasons will only diminish that pride further. There’s no guarantee it will lead to anything positive either.

I always laugh thinking about the clubs people must think we are smaller than if we were truly supposed to be a mid table Championship club. We’d have to be considered smaller than Portsmouth, Coventry, Brighton and Stoke 😂

King Power won the league - CHECK Several unnecessary ellipses - CHECK Meaningless philosophical sounding phrase - CHECK Stating the amount of years you’ve supported the club as if it adds more weight to the overall point - CHECK You missed out ‘we were in League One once’ though.

This has been the case 2020. We play football like we think we’re too clever to score a goal.

There’s gonna be people in future years who never watched this match in full but no exaggeration we could / should have won that 6 or 7 nil.

It’s very hard to see what the game plan is. We start on the back foot and just play hopeful long balls.

He’s not going to get better without regular appearances. Other players aren’t exactly demanding starts, I would rather we give chances to a player who still has potential to improve with experience.

Unfortunately managers never learn. They have their way of doing things and they stick to it. I firmly believe Marti will continue to do the same things until the fear of losing prompts him to do the right thing.

Difference between winning and losing that game is massive. In terms of relegation I mean.

These aren’t mutually inclusive. Possession percentage is often a byproduct of several factors. Possession football is the prioritising of possession. Which is an issue, even if it’s not the only issue.

1 win in 10 is inexcusable.

I consider ‘possession football’ to be football where possession is the aim. We did play some great football under Rodgers for about 6 months but it wasn’t because we kept possession, it was because we passed the ball with tempo and accuracy. Agreed that accurate short passes are great when there is purpose but that’s just passing football - possession football is when the purpose is possession. I’ve often said it but the amount of possession a team has is often correlated with the quality of their players - you can batter a team from start to finish with 85% possession but that doesn’t mean you’re playing possession football - just means they can’t get it off you. What I’m saying is - possession football is the enemy because it’s a major reason we play badly (even when we had quality players 5 years ago). Prioritising possession has so many drawbacks; it invites pressure, it bores (demotivates) the players and fans, it allows the opposition to get players back into position, it invariably leads to a reduced tempo and worst of all it’s not how most goals are scored so not even statistically backed (again, the key stat is not how much possession winning teams have but how many goals are scored in moves with a high amount of passes in the build up). So, if we’re saying that we’re missing high quality passing at a high tempo, that’s not really compatible with possession football because the priority of possession football is to slow the pace down and not to take risks. Passing the ball quickly and with attacking purpose requires the risk of losing possession.

I think back to Wolves under Solbakken who were tipped to go back up and started the season well, but dropped like a stone and were relegated. They had some solid players for this level as well. I don’t think we’ll go down but if the mentality doesn’t improve we could do, that’s the key thing as well as any points deduction.

Then let’s sack this one so we don’t have to pay him and have a youth coach take over, or let the team vote on the line up democratically. If you can argue Cifuentes is doing something useful, fine. If you can’t, and your only defence of him is that we have a rubbish squad, then he still shouldn’t be here. He has excuses, of course he does, but so did RVN and he’s not still here so why shouldn’t the same logic apply to this guy?

Because he’s pulling up trees in Sweden or Poland or something and wants to prove himself in England? Because he’s managing at a lower level? Because he’s managing the youth team or is an assistant like Maresca was? We know there are confident, exciting managers with great ideas employed in these capacities because other clubs take a chance on them and reap the rewards. Good managers start somewhere obscure all the time. We don’t dig deep enough, it’s as if we think a manager has to have managed / played in England or worked with a big shot like Pep.

I initially said Marti wouldn’t last 18 months but he won’t last til bonfire night at this rate. The players are pathetic but the manager needs to be doing something to warrant employment, like it or not he’s well under pressure now. There’s just no positive signs at all.