inckley fox

He got a tune out of some of them for a while, until it started to go awry. Our second half of the season form, extrapolated, would have got us into the play-offs in 5th. The final quarter / 12 games would have seen us battling for 6th on goal difference. Fair play to Maresca for delivering what he was supposed to and, on paper, overwhelmingly expected to, but things were already slipping. And that's the point. Maresca is a good manager and yet, even with funds for a partial rebuild, and Vardy/Ndidi/KDH/Hermansen and a younger Ricardo at his disposal, it still started to go wrong. Cifuentes has none of those things, a far worse matchday atmosphere to get around, an inescapable deduction and a deeply divided dressing room. He might be expected to get the same tune out of 'them' as Maresca, but it's not the same 'them' as it was back then. And those expectations have always been more than a little hopeful. We've had three managers since Enzo, all of which came with something resembling a reputation, and they've not managed to lift the club out of the slump we saw in the second half of Enzo's brief reign. Or, if you like, the one we'd been in before he even turned up, when some of the worst of the current batch (Faes, Soumare, Kristiansen, Thomas, Daka) were also culpable. At some point you have to see that the common denominators - on-going poor recruitment of players (including, for the most part, under Maresca) and arguably staff, poor financial management, poor levels of professionalism - aren't really on the manager. Was it Rodgers who thought Faes, Kristiansen and Tete were the answer? Probably, I tended to think. Or Maresca who was convinced personally that Coady, Winks, Cannon constituted thirty million well spent for the long-term good of the club? Hmm. To a degree, perhaps. Or Cooper who lined up Skipp, Ayew, Reid and Okoli as the right way forward? Some of them maybe. Ruud with Coulibaly? Cifuentes with Carranza and Veites? A lot of these players, experienced veterans and emerging talents alike, were brought in and then promptly overlooked by managers. It's almost as if there's a disconnect... As such I find it easy to believe that these managers were unwise appointments, because of the people who chose them. And it's easy to criticise some of the more bizarre decision-making under whichever manager we're talking about, but always with the sneaking feeling that it's a lost, flailing boss who's desperately grasping for solutions. So Marti is most probably the wrong man for the job. I suspect reintegration of players was very high on the list of priorities and that was always unlikely to come off. But do you really want those same people - Top and Rudkin - at great expense, to lump for yet another gamble, and drag another poor desperate soul into the same mire? If there were any sign that problems really had been fixed, then by all means get rid of him. It's early days but he doesn't look up to the job. That much is true. But if you're going to change things there has to be a reasonable chance of it being for the better. Players need to be moved on and the club needs restructuring without the smear of Top's whims being all over our decision-making. Financial issues need resolving. We need to know where we stand. Recruitment needs an overhaul. And at that point there might be something to gain from looking at the manager.

It's true. I remember some brutal games but, at the end, you were all buddies. However I think that when I lost I was rarely in the mood for giggles. Perhaps in the bar later on... The thing is, though, that these aren't Sunday league players. Many of them have been found badly wanting and they'll be fully aware that many fans will expect them to look as though they care. If they were a set of players who put in a shift week in week out I'd be fine if they didn't worry too much about what a few narky fans made of them, but when your professionalism is being called into question again and again, when the accusation is that you don't give a crap, then if I actually did give a crap I might take the care to show it.

I kind of replied to you too in my other post. Sorry for not reposting you.

A very good question! I should really do more homework. The big caveat is whether there's any point in making a change. I could go on all day about my gripes with Cifuentes: calling for a 'clean slate' when you're the sixth manager in two-and-a-half years, then subsequently succumbing to the same set of problems. Placing faith in players who had let successive managers down, in some cases having had their professional standards called into question - and yet trusting them as senior pros, and even giving them the armband on occasion. The exclusion of Nelson in favour of Faes and Vestergard. Pushing James into the 10 role to accommodate Winks, Soumare, Skipp. The game time afforded to these players, and Ayew. Throwing Aluko in at the deep end without prior minutes. The tactics. The reaction to going three down in the week - saying the first goal was offside again and again, thus letting your players off the hook, then (unsurprisingly, if nobody wants to face up to reality) doing exactly the same four days later. But can this board do any better? Is the money there? Would a new manager walk into the same god-awful mess as the last three managers and suffer exactly the same fate? You get to a point where you have to wonder whether we're changing the things that need changing. If we do go for it, then there are loads of managers out there with good track records at their respective levels. I'm clearer about what I'd avoid than what I'd go for. I'd avoid anyone wedded to possession football, and anyone who favoured shape and style over physicality and substance. I'd look for a team-builder, and preferably a bastard. There are those who advocate for Carrick, but I'd want to see how attached he is to purist notions of the game. It's not the time for that, if it ever has been. I'd look abroad. I'd look at League One and Challinor and whoever else. I don't know enough about Skubala, but I'm sure there are other emerging names worthy of a quick look. And in terms of avoiding short-termism or backwards thinking, I honestly believe that O'Neill or, if he's learnt how to move again, Pearson on a two-year deal would offer more for the long term, and with respect to a fundamental tactical shift, than Farke.

Personally I'd just discard names - like Farke - whom you know to be short term solutions. There are hundreds of managers, including some who have struggled upon promotion, who might be able to get things right if they ever got there again (which is obviously our aim). It's not imperative to appoint someone who has won promotion to the PL and stayed up, but rather - if we do make a change - to appoint someone with a better record than Cifuentes'. And that really isn't hard, because his record isn't great at any level. You can find people with more success at their respective levels than Cifuentes. And Martin. The problem with Farke, to a far greater degree than most others who might tick the boxes, is that he is an absolute sure-fire disaster beyond promotion. Staying up after winning promotion under him requires a change at some point and, therefore, another major shift. We got that after Enzo walked out, and I think it would be extremely unwise to do anything to encourage a repeat.

I heard it and that was my impression too. It sounds as if he knows there's no pressure. Could be misplaced confidence, of course.

Because if you get to the PL you have to replace him, or you get relegated.

Can't we stop looking for short-term solutions and patch-ups?

Fair enough.

Whether he was or wasn't, a good few people on here preferred the idea of Cifuentes, based on absolutely nothing.

Well, I'm not going to argue with you on that.

Why do you think that, out of curiosity? If I were on the board, and trying to cover my own back, I'd be looking to see whether a big January sale might bankroll a bit of spending under a higher-profile new boss. I think Cifuentes is 99% a goner already and the board know a managerial change will take the heat off them - if it's at the right time. With a points deduction looming, they'll be able to unveil their upstairs reshuffle to restore a bit of hope, then - come late December - look towards a new appointment as a further means of pacification. If, in the meantime, things miraculously click into place under a boss who looks out of his depth (in an admittedly dire set of circumstances) then all the better. But if they have to do all of these things at once, now, and there's no improvement, you're going to see serious unrest. They don't want all eyes on them this early in the season, with so much time for the outlook to become bleaker. So this collapse may bring things to a head some weeks earlier than they'd have wished.

It may well be that the 'clean slate' approach (which, worryingly, is probably what got him the job in the first place) has done for him. You just don't have that luxury when there's the turnover of managers that we've had. You have to learn from what happened under your predecessor. Are Faes and Winks, among many others, really going to be allowed to get another manager the sack? I think this collapse in form is a nightmare for the board. The plan of action most probably always had one eye on sacking Cifuentes, just not yet. Perhaps the idea would have been to distract from the points deduction by unveiling a significant boardroom overhaul. Then, you leave yourself with one more card up your sleeve before the heat is back on Top - if form is poor, you fire the boss, bankrolling it with a major January sale (Monga or Fatawu, I suspect) which also paves the way for a 7-10m spend. The problem is that January is some way off, the deduction hasn't happened yet, and now the pressure is on the board to play all of their cards at once. If there are more images of Top and Rudkin shoulder to shoulder on the big screen after that, and form doesn't pick up, then no number of interviews, reshuffles and gimmicks will be enough.

Just because something doesn't personally annoy you (and I can assure you that I don't feel in any way injured by it) doesn't mean that it isn't inevitably annoying for others, especially in my part of the county! I'd say that wasn't a particularly clever thing for him to be doing, but there you go.

Is this fake, is he trying to piss people off, or is he utterly thick?

I know that there's a danger in saying 'at one point we were in the bottom six of the current form table' under Maresca, because we're hand-picking data to suit our argument. I also fully agree that Maresca deserves loads of credit for winning the title. We may well have been the most expensive ever FLC side and very strong favourites, but you still have to deliver and many don't manage that. He's a good manager, did well for us in the short-term, and only the other day someone showed me a curious stat about how our net spend compares to success in a season, relative to spending trends of the time, and given the profit we made on transfers under him he did very well by that metric. 2023-24 is right up there with the best seasons we've ever had while raking in relatively high sums for transfers. But I still maintain that in the long-term his main positive contribution was to deliver a largely expected, but fairly meaningless, promotion. Its principal positive consequence was a much-needed financial one, but from a footballing perspective he did nothing to set us up for the longer term. Bearing in mind that as fans we have to focus on what we see on the pitch because we don't get to see the financial intricacies of how the club is run, I don't think we can say he was a particularly good appointment for us. Why? He built the side around Faes and Vestergard at the back, who were never going to be able to develop into a top flight partnership. Nelson barely got a look-in. Ricardo as an inverted right-back was largely sussed by the second half of the season and never had much of a future in the PL. Winks as a solitary DCM had no future. Nor Ndidi as an 8. Or, given our financial constraints, KDH as a second 8. Vardy established himself as the first-choice striker over the course of that campaign. That didn't have much of a future either. If we look at his quite costly outfield signings, they were mostly short-term fixes, and few - if any - had an especially positive long-term impact. Coady was past it. Winks has been mostly poor and at times, allegedly, problematic. Mavididi was never anywhere near a PL player. Fatawu hasn't shown that sort of level yet either (though there's time, of course). Cannon wasn't good enough. So it was a season in which absolutely no foundations were set for a longer-term rebuild, even though the funds were there to do a lot more. Cifuentes hasn't had that luxury nor, with the departures of Ndidi, KDH and Vardy, anything like as good a squad to inherit. On top of that, things were clearly on a downward spiral over the course of the entire second half of the season under Maresca. If you extrapolate our points-per-game for the final 23 games we'd have finished 5th. If you extrapolate them for the final quarter of the season (rounding up to 12 matches) we'd have been vying with Norwich for 6th on goal difference. And then, seeing that his style of play wasn't going to be viable in the longer-term with that set of players and little in the way of transfer funds, he - wisely perhaps - jumped ship. And we got relegated. And now we're in the FLC, and crap again. As far as legacies go, it's a pretty grim one, even if we can hold the board largely responsible for the turmoil. It's just curious to me that we're going down that same road again with Cifuentes. He's been brought in to get existing players who we know not to be good enough at a higher level, and who have let us down over and over again, on board rather than to look for longer-term solutions. And to play a vaguely comparable style which would be fairly useless and require another about-turn if we were ever promoted, instead of attempting to do the groundwork for a change at this level (something which some players indicated was a problem when Cooper arrived). Only this time, so far at least, it hasn't worked. And we're stuck with a short-term approach which, in the short-term, is yet to go anywhere. For me, the problem is not so much the manager, because I think most would have struggled to do what Cifuentes has been tasked with doing. The problem is the nature of the mandate that we're giving managers: to get a tune out of expensive flops, and to play the kind of football that Khun Top dreams of when he tucks himself into bed at night. It worked for a while under Maresca, but if the manager doesn't see that the directness and positivity we showed in the final 20 minutes against Norwich is the way forward, rather than the way he'd meticulously set us up to play over the other 70, then we're stuffed. There's only any point in changing the manager (and I'm not sure I'd be averse to that in an ideal world because I don't think he's very good) if we're also going to fundamentally change our approach.

I don't agree with it, but my family are all teachers, nurses and police officers so I tend to have a degree of realism about it, especially when the threats are obviously empty. No, I don't lose sleep about that, not when it's been directed at me and not when it's directed at anyone else close to me. Perhaps I should. But I don't like being on the receiving end of nasty abuse too much, so I'd never join in with that particular chant, and don't condone it either. But it is precisely the sort of thing I'd expect if I was a football club owner who'd been widely accused of incompetence. And, while the wording feels a bit dark and sinister side to my ear, I think you'd be very daft to take it literally. I mean, for many of us our favourite ever manager - while employed by Top and his family - literally yelled 'f*** off and die' in the general direction of a section of the support once. I don't recall them chastising him, and neither did I feel that they should. Of course, I'm conscious that responding to abuse is very different to instigating it, that there's a difference between it coming from one highly-pressured individual and it coming from a mob of them, and also that Nige's intention that night was probably to direct his comments towards a handful of individuals, rather than a few hundred. But thankfully most of us didn't take the manager at his word when he was apparently wishing death on people that day, and I'm not sure we should now. I honestly think it's all a bit pathetic. On the one hand, because we can't articulate our opposition to the board in a more unified and persuasive way, and on the other because the club's feathers have been so ruffled by this. Maybe I'm missing something, and things got worse than what I've read on. If not, they really should concentrate on doing their jobs properly rather that petty, divisive statements like that one.

Players who put in a shift, in this squad, are always going to stand out. But he did brilliantly today. I can't say my feelings on the manager have changed at all, and certainly not on the club as a whole, or even the players. I'm not sure the timing would be right to fire the manager, as much as it seems to be on the cards at some point or other. There'll be a feeling that the final phase of today's game could be a turning point, or even a blueprint for the way forward, so it's unlikely they'll pull the plug now - especially given our financial problems and the far more pressing 'upstairs' issues that need resolving. Until they are, I'd have very little faith in their ability to find an upgrade on Cifuentes.

You're right of course, but I just don't think these things were a factor in the injuries today.

The best argument I can come up with in his defence is that it's amazing how many baffling decisions even good managers make when they're scrambling for solutions. When there is a huge amount wrong at a club, from incompetence 'upstairs' to incompetence and apathy among the players (regardless of their experience, their wages or one-time price tags) and unrest on the terraces, there's rarely a sense of clarity from a manager on the best short-term way forward. Look at some of Pearson's selections in 2011/12, when the board's big-money Sven experiment went wrong, the squad was packed with overpaid dross and the fans were growing disillusioned. It took time for him to unravel, and there were plenty of moments when people said 'what on earth is he doing now?' or 'there's no apparent improvement in the team or in individuals'. On the other hand, I don't get the sense that Cifuentes has any sort of a handle on the chaos. We can't dominate games and yet select players like Ayew who, for all his qualities (and there are some), instantly breaks down our own counters. He did it on two separate occasions in the minutes before we conceded on Tuesday. There are individuals who needed putting in their place after having been negative influences in the past (e.g. Winks, Vestergard) who, whether they're rightly in the line-up or not, have also been rewarded with the captain's armband. There's the sidelining of most youth players, with their potential cameos instead going to the likes of Reid, Skipp, Choudhury and Kristiansen. There's a system which is slow, rigid, predictable. There's the peculiar exclusion of Nelson. There's the equally weird notion that our worst passer of the ball, in Okoli, might work as a full back pushing up into midfield. There's James being shifted into the ten role when he's done perfectly well sitting deeper, in order to accommodate Soumare. There's Carranza, who doesn't look like a footballer at all thus far. I could go on. In his defence, I'd say that the mandate he was given was primarily to get the best out of a set of senior players who, the owner maintained, were at very least too good for this league. I base that on Top's language when Cooper was fired, which implied that he believed these players to be better than their league position suggested - a view shared, oddly, by some on here. I think that belief persisted, and Cifuentes has done his best to get a tune out of the established senior pros. And, while you're doing that, it's inevitable that people will find themselves saying 'how does he still get a game?' when you're dropping Soumare for Skipp, or Skipp for Winks, or Faes for Okoli, or Ayew for Daka, or Thomas for Kristiansen. You move one player out who long-since burnt his bridges with the fanbase and the next guy in line is someone else who is equally despised. And overriding it all is the fact that our recruitment, our finances, our managerial appointments have been so damaging for so long that you can't simply click your fingers and snap out of it. Did Maresca do that, or did he have better players at his disposal and the money for something of a reset? And even then, it was starting to revert to type towards the end of his tenure. I have a degree of sympathy for Cifuentes on those scores, even if I'm seriously unimpressed, and strongly suspect that any man who Top and Rudkin deem ideal for the job is probably the last thing on earth that we need.

Everyone was. Was he more part of whatever it was that was malignant in our club's culture than Soumare, Faes, Vestergard and many, many others who had never been a part of the culture that brought the club up in the first place? Your argument hinges on the idea that Vardy's influence, and the fact that he had so much influence, was a negative thing. So have we seen any sign of improvement since he's gone, as you might expect? And at what point did his influence go from being a good thing to a bad thing? I'll bet, if you had to put a date on it, you'd go for some point in the final couple of years of Rodgers' reign - the time period which marked the departures of Morgan, Fuchs, Schmeichel, the more acrimonious exit of Fofana, and the arrival, for catastrophic sums, of the likes of Faes, Daka, Soumare and co. When Youri, Soyuncu and Evans clocked out. When Rodgers gave up. It's very peculiar, against that backdrop, that you'd single out Vardy, regardless of his wage or whether he's cordial with the chairman. The majority of the most successful and influential players in our history have also had been part of a decline. It applied to Black, Chandler, Lochhead and Adcock in the 1930s. It happened to Shilton, Sjoberg, Rodrigues and Cross in the late 60s. Then to Weller, Sammels, Wallington and Rofe in the late 70s, and to Izzet, Savage, Elliott and Taggart in the early 2000s. It's a real shame to take the view - as some always choose to - that as club legends like these, and Vardy, grow older, and as less talented, less driven newbies appear all around them, often led by negligent or incapable managers, that it was they who were the real problem all along.

It's very odd that he never gets asked about it. The total freeze-out suggests something has gone on behind closed doors. If his attitude has been found wanting then, given the culture at the club and the nature of our current problems, you might have more sympathy for Cifuentes' stance. Of course, to me it seems, on the surface, like sheer madness. Not least because the attitude of plenty of people in the team week-in week-out has also been found wanting, at far greater cost than 45 minutes v Huddersfield, and without having shown - as Nelson has - that they're capable of doing well at this level. But as I say, if journalists don't ask the right questions, then you have to wonder. Down the years we've seen young players at many clubs vanishing, much to the fury of the fans, only to find out that there was an incident, a row, a failed urine test, a heap of personal issues, or some bluster from an agent who felt he could push through a move. Or, sometimes, in spite of early promise they just turn out not to be very good. I've got a stack of gripes with the club right now and a much smaller, but rapidly growing, stack with Cifuentes. But I'm slightly hesitant when it comes to Nelson, simply because the whole thing seems so odd.

It might end up being quite disjointed. Not to say it's a bad suggestion, more that a simple, effective, unifying gesture which doesn't require fans to part with something they've already paid good money for might get a stronger response. I saw someone suggesting the idea of bringing/giving out cheap whistles, and while I don't know whether that's practical or not, I could imagine it working. To organise a large scale sacrifice by not coming - and there must be plenty of fans who held on during previous questionable regimes like that of Shipman, or the final days of Elsom, and wonder what's so different now - could be tough.

That depends who the players in question are. Pearson was very big on including players in the decision-making process, right up to recruitment at times, and that way of working has persisted since then. It was a great way of doing things when the influential voices were characters like Morgan, Fuchs, Vardy, Huth, Schmeichel, Wasilewski etc. Not so good when the characters in question are less trustworthy, which is really the fault of those who brought them in post-2015. Even some of Puel's signings were arguably, in terms of their moral fibre, lacking the steel and mental resilience of their predecessors. Should we be sidelining some of those influences in the current climate? Yes, I think I'd agree with you on that one. But I don't see that we can blame Vardy for having been a positive influence who was rightly given a prominent voice. And that he's on civil terms with the owner is neither here nor there.

He's done an incredible job pretty much everywhere he's gone, just at lower league level. Perhaps employers have wondered if he's a guy who might not be able to make the step-up, but having heard him speak I think he's not a Martin Allen / Steve Evans type. The transition from League One to FLC probably isn't as great as the step-up from some foreign leagues. The big problem right now is that the squad needs a serious overhaul and it looks like that's impossible in the short term. While I strongly doubt that Cifuentes is the right man for the club, I can also sympathise with anyone who fails to get a tune out of this squad. Maresca managed, for a while at least, but he did have significantly more talent, and funds, at his disposal. I honestly doubt that anyone could turn that side into a force now.