cityfanlee23

But how do you know we would have stayed up? The only real way to prove it would be to be able to show actual evidence that Everton stayed up as a direct result of the players they signed above the threshold allowed, how do you prove that? The vast majority of Evertons signings were awful and you could easily argue made them a worse team when you factor in how gutless they were week in week out, the only way to categorically state we would have stayed up would be to be able to pinpoint exactly why the players they signed were the reason they stayed up. I’m not sure that’s possible.

It’s not really evidence that we would have stayed up though. How do we know that their spending didn’t negatively affect their end position in the table? you could easily argue that if they had not scattergunned so much money they may have had a more cohesive team. Or for example you could ask whether people think that last seasons LCFC team would have gone down under a different manager? If we had appointed Smith earlier we would have stayed up based on Points per game. Plenty of other managers could have kept us up.

Great attitude but I just don’t think the system suits him, I also don’t think it suits Vesty although he’s been a revelation compared to recent years. We have too many defensive mistakes in us and often gift 2-3 clear chances just from us losing concentration every game. Our system requires players to be able to play with 50 yards of space behind them and Souttar and Vesty can’t do that long term. With that in mind though, it really does depend what long term looks like for us tactically, should we get promoted we won’t be able to sit so high up the pitch in the top flight. So then the question becomes is he good enough for the top flight? Souttar should ideally get some game time but if Coady can’t even get into the squad I don’t think Souttar is going to get the nod ahead of him any time soon. Great attitude though.

Mutual terminations don’t often pay up the full sum, they often come to an agreement to pay a smaller amount upfront which costs the club less. And pays the player a good lump sum, for some players that allows them to make more money over the same period of time given the amount of time they then have for other big paying gigs. I don’t really think Vardy is about the money though, but it’s not working for him and hasn’t been for a while now. but with such a short period of time left it’s probably worth him sticking around.

I do understand the purpose, it just is not working very well in terms of end result. The teams often either aren’t taking the bait because it’s very obvious how we want to play, or we pass the ball to death and are too hesitant to make the progressive pass when the opportunity arises. The main frustration though is that when we get the ball on the break we default to this same style where we turn a 3vs3 counter into an 8vs11 parked outside their 18 yard box with no way in. I appreciate dominating the ball, I love watching Man City play, the key difference is though we don’t seem yet to know when to press the button. As I’ve said I think Winks is doing an amazing job, but I think he has so much talent that is not being utilised for the sake of the perfect passing goal. Would love to see him getting forward, taking more shots and putting some more penetrating passes in.

Too often we go for the easy pass. Harry Winks is a perfect example, he’s miles above this level, and we’ve seen the sort of goals he can score and the passes he’s capable of making, and I know that he’s integral to the way we play, but as much as he’s been the standout player, even now we are completely wasting the talent in his locker IMO. He has the ability to be far more progressive than he is, this season in the league he’s been brilliant and we all talk about his amazing pass accuracy stats, but he’s made almost 1500 passes, roughly 300 of them have been forward. Almost 1200 have been backwards or sideways. So much obvious talent in his locker going to waste, he’s one of the best players in our system but he’s very clearly hampered by it also.

You’re right, how Rodgers went on for so long with such a huge support base was all the evidence we needed. It’s one of the major reasons we went down. Even in his final games when it was obvious he was take us down there was still a majority clapping his name.

It’s a slightly tongue in cheek comment about our “horse shoe” style of play, the ball goes out to Mavididi, comes back to Justin, Justin > Vesty, Vesty > Faes, Faes > Ricardo, over to Fatawu, Fatawu whips a cross into a crowded box and we either repeat that or the opponents try to counter. we’ve made about 10,500 passes this season and scored 21 goals from open play. That’s 500 passes per goal. 239 total crosses this season. Of our “action zones” 28% is in our own half, 44% is in the middle. We do pass the ball sideways and backwards a lot but that’s expected considering how much of the ball we have, the issue is our chances to pass the ball forward into dangerous areas are limited because of how often we allow the opposition to organise themselves. Often we accuse teams of “parking the bus” but I think in many cases teams are happy for us to have the ball.

Early days yet but I’m already seeing some of the same sort of attitudes that many had towards Brendan. Different scenario obviously because we are on the up and under Rodgers we were down and out every week, but it does smell similar in that if you question Enzo then you either aren’t intelligent enough to understand the system or you’re just a moaner because we are top therefore anything that you say could be improved is void. Id argue the one of the big reasons Brendan was here so long and one of the reasons we went down is because the majority of fans in the ground refused to criticise and made every excuse possible for very basic errors. Enzo has done an amazing job so far but we still have many areas to improve and so far we don’t really seem to be addressing them tactically imo. But again, I fully appreciate how early we are in his reign.

I get what he’s saying but this screams snobbery and elitism that if you don’t agree with the tactical approach then you simply don’t understand what we are trying to do. Many of us completely understand what we are trying to do, but we disagree with parts of the system and are not being shown signs that it can work long term and are seeing a failure to adapt different aspects. Theres far too much snobbery on this forum already where people assume you “don’t get it” if you disagree with it (not you)

There’s 2 issues that I think stem from one core problem. The attackers are not making the right tactical decisions, if we hit teams on the counter and it’s a 3vs3 for example, you can bet your last £ that instead of making a final pass or having a shot we will instead push the ball out wide and then turn around and pass it 40 times, and by the time we finally decide to shoot there’s 11 opponents in the box. Time and time again we make the wrong decision and pass backwards when we can hit them where it hurts, whenever we counter with the ball I simply don’t expect us to make it count as we know we will give them an age to get back and defend. So with that said, I’m not 100% sure the attackers can be fully to blame. Whenever Iheanacho is in the box he’s completely surrounded by defenders, whenever fatawu is on the wing he has 3 players to beat to then have 1 attacker in the box and another 5 defenders in the box with the striker. This is a very poor tactical decision imo from Enzo. He is the one drumming it into the players that 70% possession is the ultimate goal, and passing sideways is the answer. Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe in his style being one that can do well for us, but as I’ve said time and time again, it’s the pedestrian style that bothers me. We can blame the attackers for wasting chances, but ultimately the tactical approach is one of the main drivers, whenever we have a clear chance on we pass it backwards or sideways. I have absolutely no doubt that if someone like Daniel Farke was in charge these players would be producing far better attacking results. Would we be top of the league? Probably, do I want Farke in charge over Enzo, right now no I don’t. But for me each player has issues individually, but fundamentally we are tactically poor in attack and we give opposition teams an age to position themselves, then wonder why they are so hard to break down. If Enzo would allow them to just attack with tempo more often rather than always taking the easy sideways pass we would be far more effective imo. This starts and ends with the system imo.

I think a big concern for some (inlcuding me) is that most fans are talking about “when it clicks” and so far it really hasn’t, but the issue is we simply won’t be allowed to play with such high possession in the premier league, and we struggle to create chances with 70%+ so how will we create chances against better defenders in the premier league with 40-50%? I know championship teams park the bus and premier league teams don’t, but it’s far harder to score against premier league teams that don’t park the bus than championship teams that do imo. The issue then becomes what are we actually building towards? If it clicks in the championship that’s great, but if we get promoted and suddenly can’t play the way we’ve been building towards then not only do we need a rebuild in just 6 months time, but we also need to likely completely change our approach tactically. Some elements of our play will obviously remain, but it seems to me like we are building a tactical approach that we won’t be using next season if we go up, seems like extra unnecessary work.

But apart from that he’s one of the best strikers we’ve ever had and with the right team will score 25 goals a season and we will be really sad to see him leave to any premier league club that wants to pay his wages… right

At this point I hope he's gone in January, was convinced he would come good but he just can't be bothered. It's difficult for our strikers to get clear chances given how we play but even when he's not getting chances he doesn't even seem willing to run, on multiple occasions today I saw him standing in a position where if he took a couple of steps forward he would cut one of Boros passing lanes, but he just didn't care enough to do it, low and behold they pass in that lane multiple times and he just walked/jogged around watching it. He needs a fresh environment and we need his wages off the books for a replacement. Love Nacho but the step down should have made him shine, if he continues like this it will be a very sour ending.

I think something worth mentioning that is a bit of a trend is the amount of "nailbiter" games we seem to end with. By "nailbiter" i mean games where we go into the final 15 minutes or so where we are either 1 goal ahead or drawing, where the opposition only have to pounce on a mistake and steal points from us. So far this season these are the nailbiters: vs Coventry (1-0 down in the 77th min, won 2-1) vs Huddersfield (73rd min winner) vs Cardiff (1-1 before a 92nd minute winner) vs Rotherham (1-1 before scoring winner in the 84th min) vs Norwich (1-0 up before finishing the game in the 87th min) vs Preston (1-0 up until the 76th min, won 3-0 in the end) vs Stoke (1-0 until the 90th min) vs QPR (1-1, 80th min winner vs 10 men) vs Boro (0-0 until 83rd min goal cost us the game) Some of these results can be looked at in different ways for example Preston where we ended up quite comfortable, but the point is in all of these games we have go into the final 3rd of the game in the same position we were in today where the opposition is just a goal away or a mistake away from taking points from us. It's worth noting that in most of these games even when we have conceded I've still felt like we will get a result as we have the individual quality to make things happen, but in most of these games we had ample chances to put the games to bed long before that final period, but far too often we spend the first half slowly and waste a lot of chances. Things can come good, we definitely need to look at the Vardy/Ian/Daka situation in January as something isn't really clicking there, but with that said I can imagine it's hard to click given we hold so much possession the opposition just crowd the striker out, so given the wages the 3 of them are on, to have something like 9 goals between them is not really sustainable, but I suppose we would struggle to change JV's situation given his contract is almost up anyway. But overall I think it's really important that as much as we have turned the ship around under Enzo and we finally have a blueprint and a decent culture around the club again, Enzo's work so far really cannot be understated, we do need to find a solution because we have the quality to put most of these games to bed earlier, and although the table does not lie, we are top and deserve to be, today is a reminder of what can happen when you don't take chances. Credit to Boro they deserved a win today IMO, they played really well.

I did not imagine seeing this a year ago on here not wrong though

Jesus lads do I need to be the voice of reason here? I don't thnk we need to really change a lot, we just need to play faster and I think we would break teams down and punish them more, also need a few signings in Jan. Just concerned that we keep making the same errors every week though, we do the complicated tactical philosophy part, but we fail at doing a lot of the basics like making that final pass or just lumping it upfield instead of trying to backheel outside of your own box.

Not sold on him atm, he's got the ability but constantly seems to second guess himself and then makes mistakes. If he puts his head down and runs he would have most full backs in this division.

Yeah I've no idea what planet he was on there backheeling that, and it was a very poor refereeing decision to pull it back given he played the advantage and pulled it back the moment boro got into the box, what a free kick though.

Every week we go into the final 75 a mistake away from dropping points. We HAVE to take our chances.

Problem is we are always a mistake away from conceding, like that.

What on earth was Vesty doing there, and also that is a HORRENDOUS refereeing decision with Boro in our box to call play back. Had to play on there.

Just to clarify I'm the one saying that we are/should be planning for a promotion already and that is the entire foundation of my points. The ones who just blanket call everyone a moaner seem to be the ones that only look to next week, which imo is not how we should be looking forward. We can agree to disagree and look forward to potential promotion

Oh i'm fully confident we will make some signings. And I agree one of the big problems with this season is that teams are not setting up how premier league teams would, so it's a bit of a concern that when we do go up, we will have been playing a specific way that we likely won't be allowed to play in the top flight, Burnley have got the same problem at the moment where they have had to try to very quickly change their style to suit higher quality opposition and so far it's not really working, but they have signed a lot of new players who have yet to impress. We won't have 70% possession in the premier league should we go up, so it's about what we do with the possession that counts. It's really hard to tell what will happen should we go up, can only hope we are in a position to buy some decent players.