Kitchandro

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.

We remind me of Hodgson’s England in that last 10 minutes, can’t even control the ball. Cifuentes is well under pressure if we lose this.

You see I agree with most of the points in these posts but I just don’t get the arguments in bold. They are two separate things. I can see the squad is average and that owner and board are awful and all this. I’m very vocally against the owners. I can also see we have a few talented players that, coached correctly, are very good at this level and can make a difference. I can see when our tactics are going to be ineffective even with better players. I can see equally average and worse squads playing better football than us. I just don’t see why two things can’t be true at the same time. He might have been the best-known or most experienced manager we could attract. But best manager we could attract? Nah. We just don’t scout managers who fit what we need in terms of style of play and personality. Which is another major flaw of the owners, so it’s not letting them off the hook.

I do understand their way of reasoning but what it comes down to is a lack of critical thinking skills. These people are billionaires, they aren’t giving more than they are taking from communities. The one that really irks me is this idea that we won the league because of them - if that were the case then we wouldn’t have been such a memorable story. Why do your family members think it was so special, for neutrals as well as us? Our first 11 cost about £20 million and no other manager would have won us that title, yet Ranieri gets almost no credit (even on here). It was a combination of Pearson & Walsh (squad building) and Ranieri (tactics / mentality), not investment, that made the crucial difference. I’m not grateful to KP in the slightest, it’s all circumstance on their part, not genius or philanthropy.

I’m not saying the players aren’t arrogant and don’t have an attitude problem, nor that I rate all of them. But that is a separate discussion as to whether we should have hired a manager and if he’s the right fit for the club. There is no evidence available that suggests Cifuentes would play a positive, high-tempo attacking style with a different group of players. So whether the players are intentionally ignoring him isn’t really relevant. And the fact he’s unable to motivate them like Enzo did is relevant, because despite the fact I did not like his style of football, he DID motivate much of this same bunch of lazy, arrogant players. So it is possible.

Sorry, I don’t agree. None of the managers we’ve hired had a reputation for high intensity before or after their time here. When we are chasing the game, all of a sudden you see intensity and we improve. That evidence suggests that the managers aren’t committed to a high press high intensity philosophy, either because they’re cowards or because they aren’t bright enough to see how important it is. On the rare occasions we start with tempo, it drops off. So that might be an attitude problem, but it’s not the only problem.

Other teams have shit players, doesn’t mean a team can’t play with purpose and intensity. We have lacked this for years because we don’t hire a manager who demands it.

I don’t want to read people saying the squad is poor after that. We bossed them in the first half and clearly have some quality at this level. There’s no reason that shouldn’t have carried on. I can’t say whether it’s all the manager or if the players are just bad eggs but the mentality is all wrong. The players look like they have no motivation to be here at all. The 2nd half was pathetic again, and the Soumare for James sub was inexcusable.

Daka’s first touch costing us again

He has the option of not making the sub, they’re not obliged to. How is Soumare going to be better than James?

Some of these subs, god. Does he just use a randomiser to decide who comes on and off?

We deserve to be in front, we’ve been positive.

Completely disagree, and Emery finished in the top 4 with a weaker group of players than we had under Rodgers. Not that the comparison is relevant in the slightest. Emery hasn’t intentionally bled the club dry, called us a shit club, frozen out players for his own arrogance, changed the style of play for his own arrogance even when it was working, brought in his own scout to make signings that have brought the club to its knees, etc.

All of that was in the first few games. We fell off a cliff after the initial bounce and got hammered at home by Spurs, which should have been the signal that it was in fact just a new manager bounce and nothing to do with his management. I said that at the time, and keeping him on was just another of those decisions the club makes that was purely done because it was the easiest, laziest thing to do.