cityfanlee23

Right but realistically he doesn’t *need* to sign anyone to get this team promoted when we were 14 points clear of 3rd. He just needs to do the basics and stop trying to turn players like Choudhury into Beckenbauer. He's trying to turn pigs ears into silk purses with this current system. Just go back to basics and play to the teams strengths and we don’t really need to sign anyone. Obviously wish we could have strengthened but when it fell through you change the system to adapt. He refuses.

It’s a difficult one because we need to sign a manager who has the capacity to grow with the club should they get us promoted, which means signing a manager who could promote us and keep us up, that isn’t cheap. And then if we sign that manager and we don’t go up, we are financially screwed. I think right now *IF* the board pulled the trigger (they won’t) it needs to be someone who can fire them up for the final games. We would need a “firefighter” style manager to get us over the line essentially then regroup and look forward in the summer. Someone to come in, kick everyone up the arse, explain to them that they are playing for the badge and every single passionate fan out there and make them run through brick walls. The problem is I genuinely don’t know who’s available that could do that job. Big Nige on a short term deal with an agreement that it won’t be extended?

Please don’t take this as me making a suggestion because I’m not. But I even think Warnock would be able to come in and get this lot fired up for the final 8 games. “You’ve gotta f’in die to get 3 points”

It’s definitely not just a manager problem, but the managers job is to make the best of the situation he has, which requires flexibility. Short in midfield but have amazing flanks like Ricardo and Mavididi? Overlap. Simplistic example but you get the point, it everything is going wrong, and the manager still refuses to change he’s going to get a large part of the blame. Unfortunately players can’t be signed until summer, the board aren’t going anywhere just yet, all we can do is talk about player performances and manager performances.

Statistically if they had come in 2-3 games earlier they probably would have kept us up based on PPM. The margins were just too fine thanks to the board.

The really sad part is, I actually think Dean Smith would have got this lot up. And I was not happy with him at all by the last game.

This goes both ways, go back and watch our matches this season and see the sheer amount of goal scoring chances our opponents have absolutely wasted on us. In most games we gift opponents 2-3 big chances, luckily for us they often miss. It balances out in my opinion, if we started finishing our chances, and our opponents did too, it would net to 0 and we would still be in the exact same place.

Every single week that Enzo refuses to change, he is actively putting his ego and his system over the future of this club (if it fails). I haven’t been sold since day 1, on a few occasions he’s almost turned me, but even when we were 14 points clear of 3rd it seemed obvious to me that even if we did trounce the league and go up, our system is way too rigid and would be near impossible to be successful with in the top flight without monster levels of investment. Now I just think he’s very naive, it really was crazy how cult like the fanbase got over him, talking about how he’s going to the top of the game, going to take over at Man City, going to the top 6, we are lucky to have him etc. No doubt he’s done some real good things here, the speed at which he turned the ship around and brought real positivity to the club and fanbase for a long period cannot be ignored, but I just don’t have faith in a manager who lacks even basic pragmatism in his approach.

Do agree on that at the start of the season that partnership was solid, but can't really see why he's still not being given a run, Faes and Vesty keep making a lot of mistakes as of late so would be good to give them something to think about, personally I think our defensive record flattered to deceive for a good 3 months now, we tend to gift attacks to opponents quite a lot but haven't been punished due to poor finishing. Hope he gets his chance!

We really do need coady in the 11 more than ever, Faes is making multiple huge errors that almost lead to goals on the weekly, Coady has come in and done his job and has put in some decent performances and immediately been dropped. Considering our financial situation spending upto 10m when you include addons and wages on a player that barely gets into the team seems a bit of a stupid move. If he’s not favoured for the system then why buy him? If he’s here more as an experienced head we could have got plenty of players much cheaper than that. Frustratingly enough he would likely be one of the first names on the team sheets in a more conventional system.

It was a Joke. According to many on here if you want us to have a plan B it means you want the ball lumped up field to a target man all game.

Even if we had the means to do so look who would be in charge of doing it 😂 I’m still waiting for Ward to get an extension!

Get out of here you route 1 merchant I have a gut feeling we will scrape up through the automatics, but if we fail it's very simple, Enzo has gambled quite literally the future of the club on his "system" and would be unforgivable. 14 points blown and still nothing changes. I think we have the quality to drag us through.

So what you’re saying is he will get sacked over the break and the new manager will come in and give them a boost and we lose 3-0?

You must be one of them route one merchants

I think their system is a little less reliant on control though so I agree to an extent but we also have to remember they have world class recruitment. We have eroded/had our recruitment system dismantled over the years. The last time I felt like we had a good system in place was under Puel. This really isn’t a dig at a set of fans but I’ve been quite confused that we have a rather large part of our fan base who think our system can work next season because we will be improving the player base, whilst ignoring we have Rudkin in charge, then lots of those same individuals are the same ones saying he’s useless 😂 I’m really not sure if I’m hopeful or fearful for us at the moment, we simply have to go up to save the club, but if we do it could be a very rapid descent back down. on the one hand we need significant investment in Enzo to make this work, on the other hand if we do that and go down we will be ruined for a generation.

This is the big Enzo conundrum. we know he’d rather put his principles over the club if push comes to shove, so we have to accept that for what it is. The problem is, we simply cannot afford the players he needs to make this work, neither can the majority of the premier league would be my assumption, it takes elite players to make this properly functional. Unless the scouting team and Rudkin have some world class transfer gems up their sleeve it simply isn’t going to work and gambling the club on blind faith is insanity. It feels like Enzo will only ever be suited to a big club with top players, or a smaller club with a big budget who can afford them. That narrows his options down massively.

Yeah come to think of it you’re right of recent performances, but it just feels like we only have 45 mins in us, is accountability/leadership really that low that we can’t show up for half of the game most weeks? Then again, we did the same under Pearson for long periods of the season where we would turn up in the second half and we had plenty of leaders under him. Strange, unacceptable nevertheless.

I just can’t understand why we are pretty much always so poor in the first half. Why does it take us 45 minutes to show up every week?

I understand the admiration, I thought it was admirable at first, at this point I think it’s probably some of the most naive and stubborn management I’ve ever seen. so many players completely incapable of playing this system and yet he refuses to change. Nobody is asking for silky football and giant killing, just give us at the very least the basics and a cut out the mistakes stemming from trying to play inverted full backs and putting passing pressure on defenders slower than molasses. crazy to me that people still think we are on the right path with this stubbornness. edit: none of that was a dig at what you said by the way 😂

Precisely why if we do go up, I hope Enzo gets an opportunity elsewhere and walks. We cannot afford this stubbornness in the premier league. We need to extract every single percentage point out of the players we have and that simply won’t happen under this system.

Alonso’s Leverkusen have perfected entertaining control, they break quickly and with intensity but have 60% possession this season the same as us. We are the “can we order pizza for tea?” “We’ve got pizza at home”

I think his options will be limited if clubs actually look at some of his flaws here, Is a club going to take him on knowing regardless of his playing staff he simply won't change his style or be pragmatic? are clubs going to gamble knowing that he will need potentially a huge pot of money to build a squad that can suit his style? big risk unless you have the cash.

I guess it's just personal opinion really, but the thing is, we have some bench players like Mcateer, Souttar, Cannon, Coady, Akgun, Doyle that would still get into quite a few squads in this league, so even with a few injuries, the squad as a whole is still good enough to outplay teams like Sunderland even if we have the odd spot on the pitch that is weaker from week to week. Sunderland and other teams all get injuries too. There are only 2 teams in this league that would look at their squad and think "yeah we are slightly better than Leicester", so in a theoretical world we could say that Leicester, Leeds and Southampton "should" win all of their games, but that has no impact on the fact we are far superior to the rest of the league. And we are top obviously, but the sheer amount of games that we have been well below par for 60 mins is just not acceptable for a team with our quality. Every team has injuries, there are only 2 teams in the entire division that wouldn't swap teams with us. We are top, I can't complain about the position, but when you analyse every performance we have had so many games this season where we could have buried it 3-0/4-0 but we have ended up barely hanging on, or even dropping points. Most of us that have grumbled about the style (I love the Gegenpress so this just doesn't entertain me very much) have gone along with a lot of it because we should be improving as time goes on, but we are not.

I don't get it either, more a judgement on modern society where fans idolise celebrities. It's the way we are going, unfortunately.