inckley fox

I must admit, I feel that way about a good few 30, 40 and 50 year-olds that I've worked with! What gives them the 'base to vote with understanding of what the choices mean' after they turn 16/17'? Many things, you'd hope, but in theory being recently educated on some of these issues - e.g. a multi-cultural society / the perils of fascism and communism - should give 16/17 year-olds the edge over 70 year-olds who haven't learnt a thing in decades. Maybe they will be more likely to vote Labour, but the part of that which comes from enfranchisement won't last for long. The part of that which stems from understanding the historical issues which make solutions proposed by right-wing populists sound somewhat less appealing than they do in the British press might. I totally understand where you're coming from too, and am perhaps playing devil's advocate to some extent with my previous comments. But as for being 'out of step globally' - I really would prefer to see the UK leading the way with democratic reform rather than dragging its heels. All around the West there is a groundswell of feeling that we need to bolster democracy and that this might be one of the ways of doing it. Like you, I suspect it's political opportunism, but I'm not 100% convinced that it's wrong on this occasion. If we can develop a cross-party and politically-neutral consensus on how to prep youngsters for the decisions they're going to have to make (yes, I know, fat chance!) then it could work out. You have to hope.

What are your reasons for not being a fan, out of curiosity?

I sincerely hope that one of the boxes he ticked in the interview process was not the 'with me you don't need a striker!' box. My great fear with Cifuentes is that he was the cheapest, most malleable, most 'Top', most convenient option. I think we need the opposite of many of those things. On the upside, he's a bright guy and I actually find his record every bit as impressive, if not more, than Rohl's. It'd be a pleasant surprise for me if he worked out, but I'll be patient with him (because I have a feeling he'll need a bit of patience). I just have to wonder whether our owners' criteria for a manager aligns with the qualities you might require for long-term success.

I have it on good authority that he's one of the humblest and most personable characters we've had at the club in recent years. He wouldn't be a Walsh-esque captain, but may well make for a more Elliott/Morgan-esque one. I suppose Justin would be a candidate in that mould, as much as I'd like to see us move beyond him and some of the other more established names. For me, if we intend to build the side around him, Nelson would be the forward-looking choice. Ricardo, who has a great many leadership qualities but is likely to be absent for much of the season, is the more conservative option. If it's Faes/Vestergard/Winks/Coady, I'm going to plug my ears, shut my eyes and wait until it all goes away. I already dislike this squad more than any other Leicester squad I've ever known. That would tip it over the edge!

Turia is a (darkish) lager, and it's from Valencia isn't it?

I think we're in agreement, to be honest. The only possible caveat is that, while you and me will see how things are on August 10th and adjust expectations accordingly, there's the danger that some others will still expect him to match Maresca's achievement if things take a turn for the worse. Which, when it comes to player sales and poor recruitment and points deductions, they may well! It's an interesting debate as to whether the squad is stronger or not. We're missing the player-of-the-season and the top scorer, and on top of that Ricardo and Vestergard are a couple of years older. If we were to keep Mads and Bilal, and if Monga / Evans make a major impact, then I'd say it was a close run thing.

In a way, you asking that question is proof of the point I was trying to make about expectations. It all depends on what happens next. If that consists of a huge deduction, followed down the line by the threat of another, the sale of numerous key players without replacement, further widespread unrest... then that might be the sort of scenario in which a club could easily implode. When Enzo came in, we were the clearest favourites there had ever been to win the division. That's not the case this time. As you imply, it could be that the pundits and bookies are wrong - only a few may leave, we could make a shrewd signing or two and the kids could step up. But are you sure that the squad will be as good, or better than it was two years ago? The addition of promising young talent (and the better 2024 signings) is counterbalanced easily by the losses of KDH and Vardy, likely to be followed by the losses of Ndidi / Bilal / Mads etc. You can't guarantee it being such a 'done deal' on this occasion, and fans who expect it to be - and get unhappy when it isn't - could pose a problem for the boss. I see a lot of people confidently stating that, even without replacing those players, we'll be fine. Maybe we will, but there's little question that, if that did happen, we'd be a lot weaker than we were two years ago. In the coming weeks and months that may well change for the better. But it wouldn't be a huge shock if it changed for the worse. When we finished 4th in this division under Little, or 5th under Pearson, these were far greater managerial achievements than - in spite of all the praise he deserves - Enzo delivering a widely-anticipated title. It's not unthinkable that a set of circumstances unfolds from hereon in which makes a mere play-off push in 2026 an achievement which is comparable with finishing first in 2024. In that case, it's important that people appreciate that managers can't always be judged by how high they finish in the end-of-season table. My suspicion is that a great many won't.

Do people expect Ricardo to be available often enough to be an effective captain? Nelson is a very interesting suggestion. Not quite Nish-esque, but getting there. If he's going to stay, and we aim to build a side around him for years to come, then that's the forward-thinking option. Not an extremely injury-prone 33 year-old who, it's been implied, wants to leave.

You never know which manager is going to click with your club. I'm happy that we have a young boss with a decent record who wants to be here. I have serious doubts, of course. Firstly, simply because of the people who have picked him. My gut instinct, based on recent years, is that whatever they take to be in our best interests most probably isn't. Secondly, it was mentioned on one or two occasions that, among the criteria for our manager, was his preferred 'malleability'. While I didn't want Wilder or Dyche, the last thing I think we need is the most malleable candidate. We need a very strong hand, with players and the board. If they've gone for the easiest option (and it's perfectly possible that they haven't) then it will end very badly. The final concern, and one which would have been equally problematic for any appointment, is the timing. Our club is in an awful state but expectations are as high as ever. A manager could get us to 7th or 8th and, depending on the changes in personnel that we may or may not see in coming weeks, jt may be every bit as impressive an achievement as Maresca's in sealing the title. But I doubt this will satisfy people who think we should be walking the league with relatively minimal effort. Will this section of the fanbase turn on the board with renewed vigour, which might create an atmosphere in which success is unlikely, or do they - even worse - apportion a good degree of blame to the manager? I don't expect this to work out. But he's as good an appointment as we could have made and, as we've seen in the past, the right manager at the right time can surprise everyone.

If it were, then it'd be of the 'Rosemary's Baby' variety.

I was speaking last night to a fan of another club who said he reads this forum from time to time and thought that our fans decided they were down the moment Cooper was appointed and did everything they could to make sure that's what happened by turning on him instantly and creating a toxic atmosphere. My argument was that while people could see it wasn't the right appointment, very few fans would say it was the single crucial factor in us going down, that the 'toxic' atmosphere was already building up because of the club's mismanagement and that, fans being fans, they did give him a chance, albeit not for long. And then I read this post. And I just know that he's read this post too, and I bet I'm going to hear about it by the end of the day.

To me, that sounds more like he's not (as things stand) on his way here. Maybe he's not interested in going from one troubled club to another. Maybe we've been put off and looked elsewhere. Maybe we've been slow in getting the recruitment process underway, and may yet get round to looking at him. Or, equally likely, those BBC comments are based on scant information and we shouldn't read too much into them. But the implication is clearly that nobody is currently waiting on Rohl.

I agree, but it's not necessarily a choice for him between a really poorly-run club slipping towards the abyss and the most poorly-run club of them all, which is already in the abyss.

You're right that there's no need to limit ourselves, and any one of those names could well come to English football and do well in the future. As a rule, I'd say that that a manager's track record only tells you so much when employers have a good sense of what their current squad needs, and where they want to go with it. And by that, I don't necessarily mean obsessing over whether we should be an attacking side, a possession-based side, or other preferences over style. The most eyebrow-raising of appointments can be sensational when you have the right person at the right time. In our history alone you have loads of successful managers, going all the way back to Hodge in the twenties, who had little on their CVs to indicate they'd do so well. You could say that about Gillies, O'Farrell, Bloomfield, Little, Pearson, Maresca. Even Ranieri. On the other hand, you might have expected better things from the likes of Holloway, Sousa and Sven. Most managers are seasoned, experienced pros and capable in circumstances that suit them. It's just that they rarely find those circumstances and, when they do, often let their ambitions get the better of them. As for those names you mentioned, I guess the concerns are whether their style of leadership will manage to bridge the language gap (though if they're Danish, it shouldn't be too hard!) and footballing culture gap. A lot of people have mentioned Richie Wellens, but the second of those risk factors would linger over him, or Dave Challinor who has an absolutely insane record in the lower leagues. Are they both purely made for the lower leagues like, say, Martin Allen, Barry Fry, Steve Evans, Paul Sturrock? Or are they essentially top level managers who are doing so well at those levels because they have the quality to do so much more, like Martin O'Neill? It's gone wrong more often than it's gone right, but if you know what you're looking for as a recruiting club, you'll identify the characteristics. Sadly, I doubt we have people who can do that. There are a couple of other problems, I think, when it comes to these sorts of names. The first is that we're often drawn to unknown quantities. Very few of us have seen much of Hjulmand's or Svenson's football, so we haven't had chance to be put off in the way we have by Martin's or Dyche's approaches. We haven't heard them espouse their philosophies, and had the chance to disagree with them. When you do, a foreign accent can cloud a lot of things. Is the manager in question a luminary with a bit of a broken accent, or would they sound like the equivalent of Big Ron if we spoke their language? These things can kid us sometimes. Okay, so they shouldn't kid a competent interviewer, but... The second is that, typically, these managers haven't achieved any kind of sustained success. You don't need to have, of course, but people made a big deal over how Cooper had only kept a side up once and that didn't make him a specialist, and how Ruud's success had been over an even shorter sample period. And I understand why these concerns exist, to a degree, because football history is full of one-hit wonders. When people complain that we should be going for someone with calibre which is proven over time, they might not realise it but they're asking for a Dyche of sorts. And when you look at some of those managers you listed, there's a big risk that many of them were flashes in the proverbial pan. After a quick glance, Hjulmand bombed at Mainz, his only post in a major league, albeit after a good start. Svensson did brilliantly at Mainz, but struggled at Union Berlin. Thorup did brilliantly in Scandinavia and Belgium, but was mediocre at Augsburg. Palladino was promoted from within and did well at Monza, and may have been unlucky to get fired by Fiorentina, but the picture's still far from clear. Imanol was fantastic at Sociedad, but again was a long-standing coach there before he made the step up - how wi a guy in his mid-fifties fare in a new league at a new club after a decade-and-a-half in one place? Vanoli did okay in Russia and won a promotion at Venezia, but his season at Torino was deemed a disappointment and, again, this is a guy in his fifties who spent much of his career as a coach. Given his lack of knowledge of the FLC, his age etc. would you bank on him to thrive at this level? It's true, nonetheless, that any one of these people may prove to be the right man. You'll see some of them, I'm sure, do well in the future. But if your managerial recruitment is conducted by people with apparently limited knowledge of the game and a very loose grasp on what the club needs, you have to be wary about their ability to pluck the ideal candidate from the ether. Even they may be learning (given that their one admirable 'find', in Maresca, got his promotion but did so with a lot of short-term fixes that left us without much of a chance of staying up) that, for them, the safer bet is to go down the tried and tested route. It doesn't mean we have to like it. I don't, for one. But until there are changes in the people that recruit our managers, it may be the safest bet.

The way fans respond to Puel has always confused me a bit. At the time, I disliked the football and considered it to be a slightly outdated, one-dimensional take on the possession game. But I was also impressed to see us building for the future again and greatly reducing the squad's average age for the first time since 2012. Of course, the Levein era serves as a reminder that assembling a 'younger, hungrier' set of players, as he used to put it, doesn't necessarily mean that they're any good, but by early 2019 we were still aiming for a 7th-place finish and the likes of Maddison/Pereira were looking the part. Even when form dipped, we got to see Youri added to the squad, albeit on loan, and the emergence of Barnes, and there were many more unknown quantities waiting in the wings. So, in spite of all the bad stuff, I was still a bit surprised to see people so keen to get rid of him. The upturn when Rodgers arrived seemed to confirm that the squad was healthy and dispel the idea that Puel had taken us nowhere (even though he left us in the same position we'd been in when he took over.) However, if I didn't fully understand the hatred for him at the time, I certainly didn't get the revisionism that took place later. Perhaps Puel became a stick to beat Rodgers with - because Brendan didn't build that side, his success came largely on the back of what he inherited, and his own recruitment was nowhere near as good. Even the likes of Soyuncu and, in his early cup displays, Ward seemed to indicate that Puel's team-building had been even better than many thought it had been at the time, so a narrative developed that Puel had been the mastermind behind a bright new era which Rodgers benefited from but couldn't build on. And yet it was clear that Puel didn't have it within him to make the step-up to CL and trophy contention, whereas Rodgers did, and as time rolled by there seemed to be more questions - not less - about his recruitment. Ward turned out to be awful. Benkovic - largely due to injuries - didn't make the grade. Neither did Diabate or Ghezzal. So there you have 40m down the drain. And what about the good ones? Did they have the ruthlessness and character required to deliver real accolades? Again, there were more questions than answers. Maddison's form seemed to trail off in the second half of every season. And when things started to go awry the resolve of Evans, Youri and Soyuncu also seemed lacking. He'd brought in good technical players, but the part where previous recruiters emphasised the 'right sort of character' had been overlooked. And personally I think that needs to be a priority right now. When you look at where our post-Puel success came from in terms of personnel, it's hard to give him too much credit. We got to 5th in 2020, and Maddison and Youri (despite the latter struggling to regain his form early in the season) had a big part to play in that, even if both went missing when we blew the top four spot. But Evans, Pereira and Soyuncu were also major players for us, and the consensus was that Puel's team-building had turned out very nicely. Yet you looked a bit deeper and there were also Sven-era (Schmeichel), Pearson-era (Vardy, Albrighton and to a lesser extent Morgan / Fuchs), Ranieri-era (Gray, Ndidi, even Mendy) Shakespeare-era (Iheanacho) and academy products (Chilwell, Barnes, Hamza) who made up the bulk of that squad. Not to mention all of Brendan's signings. When you look at the high water-mark of the Rodgers era, and the FA Cup Final, it's impossible to argue that it had Puel's fingerprints all over it. Evans came off early. Maddison and Pereira were subs. Only Soyuncu and Tielemans played a prominent role in the game, and maybe it was the fact that Youri got the winner which again redirected so much of the gratitude towards Puel. Then we began to decline and, at the same time, so did his St. Etienne side, and it mystified me more than ever when people started to wonder whether he might have been the real hero of the day. Perhaps even a candidate for the DoF role. What, with his notorious communication skills? With his penchant for spending huge sums on fairweather players, or just plain dross? His man-management skills which saw Vardy sidelined at his peak, in favour of Gray? His often-mentioned 'negative vibes'? His failure to improve on our league position? It never seemed to add up for me. Yes, he'd been a slightly underrated boss at the time, and yes he'd brought in some key players, but there was a hint of mythology in the way that people, looking back, positively reassessed his team-building.

I've done it for almost ten years! It is literally a case of compacting a full timetable into four days, so I haven't lost a penny or gained a minute. I end up with some odds and bobs to do at home on a Friday morning, but largely manage to give myself a three-day weekend. I briefly went back to five days around the time of Covid and found it incredibly exhausting, so I suppose that tells you something.

I don't think either of those were b-sides, but I get your point. Personally I thought Blur were the better b-sides band, but I don't want to reignite that old debate!

They have a history of expressing support for managers under pressure. It happened with both Nige and Claudio (although they were both fired within weeks/months), and unless I'm mistaken Rodgers. The absence of any sort of manifestation of support suggests he's going to be fired as soon as it's possible to fire him. Perhaps if we managed to shift a player early on (though I don't get the impression that anything's imminent) it'd bring it forward. But it's not unprecedented that we delay a change. When Holloway left, for instance, albeit in the pre-KP era. It's very hard to believe that the plan could be to keep Ruud when nobody has offered a word of reassurance about his position.

Good point. The Prime Ministers and Presidents of the second Spanish Republic were totally rubbish. It doesn't mean they needed forty years of Franco.

So he had one season with Southampton when he arguably met expectations, before having a shocker the next. Other than that his record is just slightly below par. That still doesn't sound very good.

I think some of it on here is a sense of resignation that any path forward plotted by the current leadership is almost certainly the wrong one. And, to be fair, I can see why this move looks like the wrong one, regardless of which set of owners might be contemplating it. Aside from scraping Southampton back into the top flight, the guy has a middling record. And he was pretty much the only manager this season who did a worse job than the manager we are firing, and the one we fired before him. Yes, it'd be nice if fans would give him a fair crack of the whip were he to get the job, but he isn't Leicester manager yet, and doesn't need to become Leicester manager either, so now seems like a fair time to have a moan. The chanting at the ground is people trying to tell the board to think again in the only way they can. The board made a contentious appointment last summer, even if there were plenty of people who thought it shouldn't have been all that contentious, and things got very nasty very quickly. Negativity in the stands quickly spread to players who were skeptical about his methods, and that's likely to happen again. I don't believe most appointments would be as divisive as Dyche or Martin, and at a moment in time as sensitive as this, the club would be unwise to do something so unpopular. It's not 2011, when you off-set unhappiness at Sven's dismissal with the fact that it was Pearson replacing him, or 2015, when we accepted Ranieri because we were ecstatic to even be in the Premier League. Whether we like it or not, patience with Martin will be wafer thin before he even gets going and that doesn't need to be the case. I'm not advocating for full-on fan power by any stretch, but when you've just seen a manager hounded out of the club by popular demand and the season promptly go up in smoke in the aftermath, you'd think that at least one eye should be on the fans. Partly because there must be a doubt or two creeping into even their heads by now about their own capacity to make these key decisions - so wouldn't it make sense, then, to take in as wide a range of perspectives this time around, instead of lurching into another unpopular decision? In other words, not only is their decision likely to be the wrong one, but also - even if Martin ticked all the right boxes, and was indeed a steady appointment - the appointment may be doomed to fail just because of how divisive it is. I also, for what it's worth, believe it looks like the wrong appointment for a whole host of other reasons. The biggest, though, is that I think in some key ways he's the opposite of what we need right now because (a) very few in the current squad have met basic standards of commitment and professionalism - on the pitch and at times off it - and I don't think that requires a reassuring arm around the shoulder, or the reintegration of Vestergard or Winks. I think we need to go the other way. And (b) I think we need a far longer-term approach at the club. Appointing a manager who might win a promotion but is unlikely to be up to the task - and whose style of play may well need overhauling in a few short pre-season weeks - if we do, seems like the definition of short-termism.

This sounds like advocating for more short-termism. What happens beyond Year One is today's problem if what you do in Year One makes Year Two less likely to be successful. If we want to plan for the future, then surely that begins now and extends beyond a single season. Whenever we have gone up and stayed up in the past we have been able to maintain and build on a core of players: Walsh, Izzet, Parker, Lennon, Heskey and Claridge in 1996, then Morgan, Schlupp, De Laet, James, Drinkwater, Mahrez, King, Vardy and Nugent eleven years ago. In the case of the latter, we went up with a young side and the conversation was frequently about having the right things in place to be successful in the PL. It wasn't an old school-era 'one side gets you up, then a totally different side keeps you up' approach. Last year we came up with too many players who weren't going to make the step-up. We'd already seen that many of the core of the team weren't PL-standard, and on top of that played a style and system which was going to be hard to sustain. It wasn't even all that hot in the second half of the FLC season. Relegation wasn't all about the mistakes Cooper and Ruud made, or the limitations on the budget, it was also about how much work we'd given ourselves to bridge the gap by not previously making decisions with the long-term in mind. Bearing in mind that Martin's non-PL record beyond that final full season with Southampton isn't actually very good - and that you'd have to say that, with a weaker squad than the last one we went down with, it's far, far from a shoo-in that he even takes us up - I'm not sure that a club seeking promotion should be appointing a boss who is up-and-down in the FLC, and awful when he gets out of it, is a good plan. Not if we want to establish ourselves in the top flight again. It feels like yet more doubling-down on this board's footballing ethos, at the expense of making sensible decisions with the long-term future in mind. Even though, when they've been successful, it's often been because of a willingness to compromise on those ideals.

I don't think he's done as well as his predecessors, has he? I could be wrong, but my impression was that - regardless of the promise, which may well be immense - he's not actually made a blinding impression. A bit like Cleverley, actually, who has been hyped a bit (albeit at a lower level) without it being backed up by outcomes. Funnily enough, the same thing applies to the vast majority of Martin's career.

I'm not sure Alves has. He was in and out of a side that collapsed and got relegated while he was there. If he can't establish himself in Cardiff's side, we can't expect him to be good enough for us. That doesn't mean he won't become good enough, of course.

It feels like that, doesn't it?