inckley fox

You may well be right. Realistically, Cooper saw that we needed a replacement for KDH and another more conventional #10, and when he saw the budget decided that cheap back-up options for the wingers was the way forward. Ideally I'm sure he'd have asked for at least one new first choice winger. Both of our first choices - that we'd spent handsomely on the year before - had difficult pre-seasons and poor starts to the season, hence the bargain basement options ended up getting more game-time than we'd have liked. I don't necessarily agree with that, and I let out an almighty groan when we made those two signings, but I don't think the decision-making from the manager's point of view was anything exceptionally daft. His instruction to the recruitment team was 'I need wide players'. They responded that they needed to be cheap, so Cooper added the stipulation that they have good PL experience, and Glover and co. came up with Ayew and Reid. It turns out they weren't the best suggestions ever, and the boss should perhaps have said 'go back and try again', but that's been the nature of our recruitment under every manager, including Enzo, since the Puel-Macia years. Sadly it also applied to our replacement for KDH. I still think that by harping on about Reid and Ayew we're losing sight of the real reasons for our plight. It wasn't a couple of bargain buys who ended up getting a bit too much exposure. It was financial mayhem, pending deductions, budget restrictions, years of poor recruitment, unsuitable managerial appointments and a lack of professionalism by many of the regular playing staff. Ayew and Reid may be symptomatic of some of that, but so are many other things.

I heard various different figures for that, in the 3-6m range, but either way, I wouldn't argue with you. I understood the logic, but it certainly isn't what I would have done. I mean, just to clarify, I think they're both crap.

It is relevant though, when you're dealing with financial restrictions (free transfers vs. 20m of spending). I don't actually believe that either of them currently offer more, but I recognise that the manager was looking for cheap alternatives / back-up to two more expensive inherited wingers. They ended up playing more because Stephy had a poor season and Abdul started poorly too, one game aside, then got injured. I'm not making any outrageous claims about them being good signings or anything so don't worry, you can go ahead and read the rest of it if you have nothing to do for an hour or two!

I get that promotion is always a fine achievement and should never be taken for granted. Even so, we were expected to go up and we did, albeit with some very sketchy patches in the second half of the season when we certainly weren't miles better at playing our system than Southampton. And if we were adapting over the course of the season, you'd expect to see things getting better, not worse. Our evolution suggests that, in spite of what Enzo said publicly, we'd actually adapted very quickly (as you'd expect, given that these players were way more expensive than anything else in the FLC, and had mostly been signed for another very possession-centric boss in Rodgers) but then became too one-dimensional. The key issue, though, was whether we'd gone about promotion in a manner that allowed for success thereafter. To me it was quite obvious at the time that we hadn't. And not purely for PSR reasons. Whichever way you dress it up, the side still largely consisted of a backbone - in Faes, Justin, Mavididi, Vestergard, Winks, Ndidi - which was going to be too poor at this level, and require a level of spending that we didn't have in order to rectify. Even if we also consider the players who did well under Enzo and haven't disgraced themselves since - the injury prone Ricardo, the unproven Fatawu, the increasingly past-it Vardy, the up-and-down Hermansen, and KDH, who would have been on his way regardless - you still think 'a lot of these guys were going to need strong competition in the PL'. So Enzo would have had to play a blinder in the market. Now, you have faith that he'd have found a more Enzo-esque midfielder than Ndidi. So what about Winks - would he have been just great under Enzo? And what about KDH - would he have stayed? And surely Enzo would have had less money to play with than Cooper too, due to the compensation package, and would have had to go through the same scouts. Would he have managed to do better than Cooper in replacing KDH, AND found a replacement for Ndidi? If you look at the Enzo-Glover signings in 2023, it shouldn't fill you with confidence. Winks has been poor since January 2024. Hermansen was good in the FLC but up and down since. Coady was a dreadful waste of money. Mavididi was decent enough at a lower level, but poor beyond. The jury is out on Fatawu as a top level player, and between him and Mavididi we spent 20m (five times more than Cooper spent on the wide players that you single out for criticism). Cannon was another expensive flop. None of the three loanees were good enough. It's hardly stellar stuff, is it? Whether the players enjoyed playing for Enzo or not is of little concern to me. I know for a fact that several of O'Neill's players were terrified of him, and even disliked him. Nige made his enemies too. It isn't a popularity contest, and if they all adored being told that they could be a new Man City, and hated the reality check of being told 'Actually lads, no you can't', then that just underlines the fact that Enzo wasn't such a tremendous appointment after all. He's like the cool Year 10 teacher who everyone loves, before going to the serious, results-driven Year 11 teacher who tells them that, no, they're not all geniuses and no, we can't just watch films all year. But, like a bunch of Year 11s, I would take these players' critiques on management with lashings of salt. What I think is that Enzo leapt at an opportunity that McKenna turned down because of (a) financial constraints, and (b) being aware that he couldn't possibly fashion a competitive side at PL level, and with limited resources, that played his style of football. I also think that if he had stayed we'd have seen the same mixed bag of signings that we've seen under every manager, including Enzo, for years, and that these players (and they would have been largely the same set of players) would have been shown up every bit as much. What I actually know, on the other hand, is that we did end up changing our style dramatically, and lots of players with a massively over-inflated sense of their own worth got very upset about it, and then subsequently demonstrated a fatal lack of professionalism. None of them, including Enzo's signings, made the grade. And the side that came up with us, and continued to play in a vaguely Enzo-esque manner, were the only side that were worse than a team that some have called one of the most appalling in PL history. To me, all of that suggests that in 2023 we should have appointed a manager who would build something that didn't need overhauling the moment we went up. And if we want to end this terrible cycle we're in and establish ourselves in the PL again, then we have to learn from that mistake.

Ruud also speaks a great game. I'd be wary of people whose record puts you off, but whose personal charm won you over. Do we really need to keep going down the 'possession at all costs' route? It didn't bring us our success in the first place, and it's not even the norm any more for smaller clubs that want to compete with the big boys. I'm not sure we need a boss who pushes a one-dimensional 'idea' rather than the right thing for the right set of players. Becoming a managerial 'brand' may well make you personally more marketable, but I doubt it's always for the good of their employers. If what you build in the FLC is going to have to be dismantled upon promotion, I wouldn't bother building it in the first place. The idea of having to endure what we've just endured every other season is both awful and unnecessary, but when Maresca built his team around Faes / Vestergard / Ndidi / KDH / Vardy (i.e. what was left of the backbone to the side that had just got us relegated) it wasn't too hard to see that that was where we were headed. Surely it would make more sense to appoint someone who could fashion a style of play which might actually be of some use when we reach the next step. Otherwise, you have a situation where you either stick with the boss (like Southampton with Martin himself) and get mauled, or lose him (as we were forced to with Maresca, and Leeds may well voluntarily do with Farke) and then face the commotion of a complete rebuild of both personnel and style of play in a single close season. And we know how that worked out for us this year. I'd like to see us learn from our errors, just for once!

I think Harry Winks also has two relegations in his last two top flight seasons, courtesy of Sampdoria. Some of the characters mentioned here do seem a bit like the sorts of players who might 'attract' relegation, to say the least.

To be honest, with the Ranieri appointment I thought 'this was either a stroke of genius, or a massive stroke of luck'. After all, he'd publicly begged us to give him a chance. You knew you'd find out before long whether these were guys with great footballing nous (like Martin George in some of his appointments) or just chancers who'd do wild things which had wild outcomes. The passage of time was always going to tell us, and it did. Part of the problem with the support now is that they never saw that it was a manager and the brilliance of his backroom team who built our success, and not a bunch of Buddhist monks or free beers. It wasn't the 400K they spent on Mahrez, it was the scout who saw that he was a 60m player. If we were clear about that, it'd be easier for people to demand more of the owners. And they wouldn't go round appointing managers because they genuinely believe they have some kind of supernatural ability to sniff out the 'aura' of a great manager.

Hamilton is an odd one. Obviously not a top flight standard boss, but fans took to him, we started the season well, and in spite of a 'spend nothing / sell your best player' policy we still ended the season with the same points that had kept us up a year earlier. In fact, didn't we go down in 20th, which hadn't even been a relegation position just a few years earlier? I was only a kid so the memory is hazy. Some managers just seem to invoke the wrath of the fans, and it's not always tied in with success. Taylor wasn't booed until very late in the day. Allen, Sven, Rodgers all had large sections of the fanbase onside to the end. We didn't get on Bassett's back too much. We liked McGhee, and many donned 'Ollie' masks, but - if you go back - swathes called for Bloomfield and Milne to go, 'fans' spat at Little three months before we got promoted (the day, he later claimed, he decided he'd bail on us whenever he got the chance), sections of the support did their best to hound O'Neill out of the club, were split down the middle over Pearson, hated Puel etc. The immensely successful bosses probably prompted more unrest in the stands than the rubbish ones! Cooper, perhaps rightly, was hugely unpopular, and yet Ruud seems not to rile us so much. Is that down to the characteristics of our fans right now (apathetic, misguided about those they should thank for their success, and old, like me)? Either way, it doesn't always make much sense. Regardless of the rights and wrongs, most fans were happy to give Hamilton another go, though what happened next was a cautionary tale for those thinking of giving relegated bosses another roll of the dice. Of course, he signed Walsh and Newell, so it wasn't all bad! And, while we're at it, I was told yesterday that we've been relegated under 14 different managers, and stuck with seven of them. Only one ever brought us back up. So Hamilton, and every other relegated boss (except for Frank O'Farrell, who at least reached an FA Cup Final in the process of getting relegated) should serve as a warning when it comes to Ruud. I.e., sack him, or it'll only get worse.

So many contenders. Kapustka, Musa, Slimani, Silva, Ghezzal, Ward, Benkovic, Daka, Soumare, Vestergard, Faes, Kristiansen, Winks, Coady, Cannon, Skipp... While Hernandez, Bertrand, Ayew, Reid and several loanees were also awful, at least they didn't break the bank. For me, it's Faes. I've never disliked a Leicester player as much as him. Slimani, Ward, Daka and Soumare are all fairly close contenders, if I try to be objective, but nothing matches my disdain for the frizzy haired prat.

It's really unfair to judge a player on what we've seen of him, but what little I have seen made me wonder if he was even second tier standard. And for some reason - can't imagine what that is - that felt as if it was to be expected. The recruitment department really needs the mother of all overhauls. After we've fired the boss, naturally.

It's the first time in my whole life I've gone into a game thinking that it'd be for the best if we got obliterated (with a couple of goals for Vardy, obviously.) I've honestly never disliked a Leicester side more than this one, even way back in the Hamilton and Pleat and Levein and Holloway days (when at least we had a defence, and tried a bit) and I'm going to have to give it a miss too, perhaps permanently until I've seen the back of the likes of Faes and Soumare. I just feel that some of these characters are malignant. Their existence (as players, of course, not as people - I don't want to sound like Trump) is harmful to the club. Maybe I'm just getting old, and falling victim to the pervading bitterness of the modern world. Or maybe they're just god-awful, unprofessional, repulsive crap and I've had enough.

To quote Big Nige: 'Well, there you go then'! To be honest, the only solid argument I can think of for keeping hold of Ruud is if the alternative is someone whose primary purpose is to get the likes of Winks and Vestergard back on board. If there are any more concessions to this set of players, I'd go with the guy who already hates them. But, seeing as there are plenty of potential managers out there who might be willing to watch the videos and see, without having to find out for themselves, what a bunch of cretins this lot are, I think I'll have to go with that option. Until I actually see who the next manager is, of course.

I read this once and thought 'you've not actually come up with any reasons for keeping him'. Then I read it a second time and spotted that, while this was indeed the case, you'd impressively managed to give some pretty solid reasons for getting rid of him. You never know, your gut feeling may be right, but if this is the state of the 'don't sack' argument, I wouldn't even wait until kick-off to fire him!

Were there actually any reports, or was it just idle speculation on here?

I found his remarks truly incredible because they betray the real reasons for what's happened this year. He says the problem was that the club didn't stick with an identity, and brushes off the fact that Southampton did actually stick with an identity which bore more than a passing resemblance to ours at the time, and were promptly torn apart for it. He fails to talk about all the other sides who successfully changed up their game to avoid relegation. What he's really saying is 'we didn't want Enzo to go, we wanted to carry on playing his way, and believed we were good enough to do it'. That's why we saw those scenes on the night Cooper was fired, and that's where you see the dressing room antipathy which Top responded to by firing Cooper and replacing him with Ruud. I'm not going to mount a case for Cooper's defence here, because the decision to get rid of him wasn't straightforwardly wrong - but the dressing room revolt which necessitated it was. And it was symptomatic of a set of players with a collective attitude problem which was never going to be compatible with a relegation dogfight. There may be an element of truth when he says that it's useful to carve out an identity in the second tier and take it with you to the first. Don't overhaul your squad as Ipswich did. Don't sack your FLC-proficient but EPL-deficient boss, as Leeds may. Don't uproot your style of play like we did. But if that style of play was clearly going to get you mauled at the highest level, your mates shouldn't be holding 'Enzo we miss you' placards aloft, they should be ruing the day Enzo ever came to the club, because Faes and Jannik believing they're prime Beckenbauer in the PL was never going to be a recipe for success. And yet, when the mate in question is singled out for his poor attitude by the next manager, instead of heeding his call for an improvement in professional standards, again you see the real reason for our demise. And when Coady talks about differences of opinion amongst senior players, you can see it's a clash between those players who believe we could have done better if the board, two different managers, and in general everyone other than themselves had done a better job, and those players who think that more responsibility should be taken by the ones on the pitch. The truth is that sides can change and adapt - even in the PL, if people get on board. These players were never going to get on board, regardless of how necessary it was (and it was pretty clear from the second half of 23-24 that we were going to need a bit of a rethink), and as such they ducked out of even engaging with a relegation battle. Coady complains that six weeks isn't enough to change your style of play. Quite apart from the fact that it had been enough back in the summer of 2023, and has been enough for countless other sides to at least make some headway, there's another issue: Cooper had six weeks with them in pre-season, but by the time the players turned on him he'd also had two months of a league season. It's the norm for newly promoted sides to take time to acclimatise, and if you're 16th that far into the campaign (and higher when we first got inklings that not everyone was with the manager), then you'd hope to kick on from that if everyone was pulling in the same direction. We'd have needed to, because we didn't look very good! But instead of building on the foundations that they'd set over 15, rather than 6, weeks, our senior pros screamed and bawled about how much better things were back in the Championship, and eventually got what they were asking for - a manager who was, by all accounts, very affable with them in the early months; more possession, plenty of first team gametime without putting in the effort or performances to warrant it, and finally a return to the paradise that was the FLC. What Coady wants us to hear from that interview is that the club made fundamental errors and that's why we went down. What it actually tells us is that, while the club did make mistakes and those players may well have gone down regardless of whatever we tried, their own lack of professionalism made failure a certainty. We either played as they wished to play, and got destroyed, or didn't, and they'd make damn sure that we got destroyed. Not consciously, of course, but it all amounts to the same thing. It's no surprise that he also dedicates a lot time to explaining the difference between laziness and a lack of confidence, and why it's easy to confuse the true. Again, there's an element of truth in what he says. But you have to wonder why he feels the need to say it. A guilty conscience, I suspect!

Reminds me of when Harry Kane left Spurs.

I tend to focus more on what he gave us, rather than what he took. It's not like we've been hard done by.

Well, if a player isn't selected because the manager doesn't deem him good enough, and is then mostly substandard when he finally is picked (under two different managers), I wouldn't classify that as a strong start, at least. Are you suggesting that we've been held back a great deal by not having Stephy as a first teamer? That's a hard sell. If you're arguing that Reid was no better, that's not such a hard sell! But by and large, we're talking about two players who haven't been good enough. I'd have lumped for Stephy too, just about, but I can understand perfectly why he was sidelined, and I doubt the stats, for what they're worth, illustrate that one should have got the shout over the other. Reid ended up playing more than he should, largely because two different managers were unimpressed by Stephy. As many glaring errors as Cooper and Ruud may have made, I wouldn't class that particular decision as anything exceptionally weird.

Well, the examples you gave would explain why he had that approach. Fatawu was poor in his early performances. McAteer doesn't look anywhere near a PL player. Alves is with a bottom three second tier club who can't decide whether he's good enough for their team. Mavididi has had a poor season. If those guys were the ones kicking up a fuss, I don't know how they felt they were in such a position, nor why the club would pay attention. But we also have good reason to believe that Owen isn't entirely on the money here, and that Vestergard, Winks and possibly Faes were also unhappy. Now, they don't have the credit in the bank to be heeded either, but their discontent would nonetheless paint quite a different picture. Specifically, it would dispell this slightly silly idea that Cooper was obsessed with experience, sidelining and isolating all our young talent, and in some way we're doomed as a result. That incredibly simplistic argument - possibly conjured by people who are still trying to justify views on Cooper and Van Nistelrooy which haven't aged well - doesn't stack up. I'm sure, given we'd spent around 20m on wingers leading up to his arrival, he'd have preferred bargain basement signings like Reid and Ayew to serve as back-up to them. After all, there's plenty in Cooper's managerial back story to suggest he wouldn't be averse to young talent, and the major fees we parted with under him were all for under-24s. But both Stephy and Fatawu started the season poorly, one got injured, then the other continued to be underwhelming. So the bargain buys ended up playing more than they should have.

The hefty sum on Winks worked well for the Championship, until the New Year at least, but if the idea was that he formed part of a new backbone to the team for a return to the PL (and if you're paying those sums in the FLC, as with Coady and Cannon, it should really be with one eye on what comes next) then that was another dud. I honestly don't think we can be too complimentary about our business that summer. Yes, we went up, but that always had far more to do with inherited talent than with shrewd recruitment. The team-building was quite poor and left us with too much work to do when we got promoted. The jury's out on Fatawu at the top level and Mavididi hasn't cut it. That's the best part of 20m dedicated to wingers - almost our only transfer outlay on those positions for years - meaning we had zero left in the kitty for those positions this year, after the botched attempt at replacing KDH with Skipp. Hermansen did well in the FLC and early on in this season. In spite of his poor form now, we'll make a profit on him and he'd appear to be an example of good recruitment, even if there have to remain some question marks about him at this level. Coady came in for a big fee, presumably with a view to him replacing either Faes or Vestergard at CB, and being a key player. He wasn't, and he hasn't been much use in the PL either. Cannon was a poor signing, offered us nothing. We got our money back for him, but that's the best you can say. Of the loanees, Doyle did well early on but lost his place, and is still playing at that level. Casedei was poor. Akgun wasn't good enough. So, for an outlay of nearly 60m, we got a decent enough keeper, a winger who is good in the FLC but not good enough in the PL, another winger who may or may not be a bit better than that, a midfielder who was good at first in the second tier, fell away, and became an utterly hopeless, half-arsed troublemaker the moment we went up, an even more pointless CB, a flop of a striker, and some negligible loanees. If that's brilliant (and it's not) then Cooper's transfer business would also require positive reassessment, even though it doesn't especially deserve it. After all, it's roughly the same outlay on players (if we consider that the Fatawu signing was largely agreed in advance), and his options were severely limited by the financial chaos at the club. Everyone seems to think Okoli should be in the side. Bilal is highly rated by fans. Ayew and Reid cost next to nothing, and were only intended as back-up to the wingers who we'd actually parted with significant sums for (a purpose which they might have fulfilled if Mavididi had stepped up, and Fatawu had both avoided injury and improved on his early displays). And fans are always telling us that Facundo should be a starter, and was our best performer until Ruud got his hands on him. That leaves Skipp - and Edouard - as the only straightforward sticks you can beat Cooper with. And, just to underline how poor our recruitment has been for years (including in 2023), it's not clear that Cooper wanted Skipp, Edouard or even Okoli. He overlooked all three repeatedly. And the fact that, in his defence, Maresca never seemed interested in Coady or Cannon only seems to emphasise that our post and pre-2023 recruitment issues were also perfectly evident in that solitary, not-so-brilliant-after-all summer.

I know the board don't care a great deal about public opinion, and I appreciate what you're saying about a new influx of Glover-scouted players not necessarily being a good thing - but I think even our fans might grumble if they adopted a 'sell everyone / buy no-one / persist with Ruud' policy.

I've spent all this time saying that nobody can come up with a coherent argument for keeping him, and you've gone and done about as good a job as anyone conceivably could. However, I reckon you'd pick the same holes in it as I would. I'll go through it point by point anyway. 1. Not having a 'squad of his making' is not a justification for going with a manager. That's the case with literally every new manager, so the same thing we can say in his defence (albeit with the mighty caveat that in Ruud's case he's shown himself to be an exceptionally poor fit for the squad) can be said as, if not more, convincingly about any of the alternatives. 2. Even over the past two games, I've not seen anything which would make me stick with the boss. He rode his luck in one game and deservedly lost in the other, which was the latest installment in an all-time record for being awful. 3. Yes, he can probably get rid of Vardy, Ndidi, though perhaps it won't be so easy with Winks. In the case of the first two, I'm not sure they've actually been among our main offenders this year (off the top of my head, Faes, Winks, Justin, Kristiansen, Soumare, Skipp, Reid would be among those higher up the list). But yes, it'd help to clear the decks - though again, that applies to literally any of the alternatives to Ruud. Personally, I wouldn't entrust someone whose judgement has been as questionable as this manager's with a squad overhaul. 4. Will Ruud be such a draw for potential signings after this season, compared to bright up-and-coming bosses? I'm not so positive. These players don't look all that bothered about playing for him, and I imagine most of our targets will be less interested in meeting Ruud than our chairman, or maybe Woyo, apparently was. They'll be more interested in actually doing well. 5. Yes, he has worked with young players in the past. It's not really what he's done here, though, in spite of the recent debuts. We've seen attacking threes of Vardy, Ayew and Reid while Alves is out on loan, Monga is still training with the kids, and Facundo and Mavididi are benched. And I think, once again, there are alternatives out there with better records at bringing on youngsters than Ruud (or Dyche or, up to now, Rohl, for that matter). 6. If it's too expensive to fire him, then that's pretty much the end of the discussion! I've got no interest in bankrupting the club. However it would also be mind-blowingly dim, even by their standards, to appoint an inexperienced boss to a relegation fight without a clause. Maybe they didn't, and if we have to keep him then we have to keep him. But if we don't, then we shouldn't. 7. He has indeed had all of that time to look at the squad, but still drops Okoli for Faes after a decent performance, still picks Reid, still persists with Soumare. His responses to our performances, like his slowness in coming up with anything approaching a new idea to arrest our decline, have been baffling. His decision to prioritise defensive stability - given his dire track record for defensive stability and the fact that our only positive outfield attributes had previously been attacking ones - just about sums him up. 8. I don't think he has sorted out those problems, including the one with Winks. That's why we keep hearing about them! If standards are poor at a club, you do have to wonder why you see so many of those whose standards are visibly too low in the line-up.

Part of it is because I accidentally voted for him to stay.

I honestly didn't know! And, by the way, I suppose you could change my opinion on most things under the sun if you argued your point well enough, and the facts backed you up. I doubt you'd need to work very hard to prove that out current owners are rubbish. I'm not trying to defend the club, nor fly the flag for woke culture. Not at all. I'm just not sure that negligence and an inability to appoint well-qualified people to key posts are emblematic of woke culture.

Is this serious? If not, it's very good.