inckley fox

I'm a bit confused. He was poor and roundly criticised when we were relegated last time. He's been poor under Rodgers, Smith and Cooper at this level, as well as two different sets of caretakers. We've never been anything other than relegation fodder with Faes among our numbers at this level, and he's consistently been singled out as one of our weakest links. His gaffes would be deadly regardless of whatever system you were playing, and whoever was in charge. It's highly unlikely that any one specific manager is to blame for Wout Faes being substandard.

There's no way around it. If we go down now, and especially with 18-24 points, then people will very reasonably ask questions of the fans who pushed from day one for Cooper to go, the players who followed suit, and the board who took heed. Hopefully we don't get to that point. And Ruud will have done very well if things work out. Cooper lost his grip on things. But the poor quality of the squad, and recruitment over years, is the main issue. The coach might have needed to go, but I never got near the sense that we had a fine squad of players who could have wowed the PL if it weren't for the boss. Vichai consulting Vardy, Morgan, Fuchs, Kaspar and suchlike is a world away from Top being swayed by Faes, Vestergard and Winks. It's a poor squad that needs to humbly accept the task ahead.

There's quite a bit of overlap.

Weirdly, I don't think the three at the back, or the two surprise inclusions, were a major problem. Relatively speaking. You could criticise him for failing to address the Faes-Justin issue, but maybe the alternatives were a bit too adventurous for a caretaker. You could question Ayew's role. The lightweight midfield. And you could question the lack of pace for potential counters. But I thought he was very professional when he saw the game had gone away from us, and brought off our only two attackers who'd posed a threat, allowing the new manager to have a fit squad at his disposal in the week. If the new boss favours a 4-2-3-1 then you could argue that a switch in shape only days before his debut isn't helpful, but I'm not sure it's for a caretaker to research his successor's methods. And I doubt he'd had any input which had gone unheeded from Ruud. Honestly, I'd love to see root-to-branch change at the club, from players to remaining coaches to recruitment to football and financial operations at boardroom level, but I can more or less understand some of the decision-making today. Individually awful performances and poor application were bigger issues than management, and I sincerely hope that the new boss has a mandate to keep some of these half-arsed incompetents who'd undermined the previous manager on a very short leash. And I hope we're more patient than we were with Cooper, because these guys aren't worldbeaters who were being held back by an inept manager, as some have maintained. It's one of the poorest KP-era squads. If we end up on 18-22 points, I wonder how history will reflect on Steve Cooper's time with us, the hatred of him, and the decision to fire him. Unless things drastically improve under Ruud, that's a likely scenario.

We've been pretty rudderless with him, also.

I'd go along with that. The notion that we're a mid-table side being held back by Cooper was always utter nonsense. I totally understood his sacking, but people need to be realistic about our squad's limitations. To me, it's the worst KP-era squad since the pre-January 2012 days.

You must have been seeing something I didn't. Faes put in one of the worst top flight performances I've ever seen from a defender. Coady wasn't any good either, but there was a gulf in terms of how miserably awful the two of them were.

Clubs will show videos of Faes and Justin as examples of how not to defend at this level. Predictably substandard.

Exactly. Some of us, myself included, have found it hard to adjust to the fact that we're not where we were. Maybe the start to the season has bruised our egos a little, and we'll be a tad more grounded from now on. You could see it in the number of posts on here stating that Cooper had nowhere near the pedigree to be Leicester boss, despite several successful FLC seasons, an unlikely promotion and survival in the PL. Now we're enthusing about Van Nistelrooy and Corberan, neither of which have experienced that sort of success in English football, nor really at comparable levels elsewhere (no, I don't rate the Dutch top flight all that much, I'm afraid!). So I suppose this suggests that we're getting used to our new reality. Even so, most people who supported the sacking of Cooper weren't purely being entitled, in my opinion. It played a part, and some may have had their prejudices from the start, but I don't think it was entitlement in the end - just a creeping realisation that things weren't going to pan out well. If entitlement was an issue, I suspect that that would be more on the part of the playing staff. And, on top of that, people often confuse a sense of entitlement with ambition. Leicester fans have always been weird in that respect, going right back to my 1990s youth, and the O'Neill era. We always fancy ourselves, which is part of the reason why we ended up winning the league. O'Neill might still be sore that he left us 16 years before our finest hour, reportedly on the misconception that things couldn't ever get any better for us than they were in May 2000. I still love him though. And, for the sake of balance, he's also said some pretty damning things about Forest in the past.

Obviously if some players were unwilling to let go of Maresca's style of play - and that looks to be the case - then it was always going to pose a problem for anyone trying to implement a less possession-based approach. Especially when transfer business was so restrained. Personally, I feared we'd have been mauled if we tried to do in the PL what we'd done in the FLC, so I'm pretty dismayed by the allegations of a lack of professionalism on their part. It also indicates a lack of realism. Even so, I agree that the writing seemed to be on the wall with Cooper, and even under the circumstances his decision-making was seriously uneven. But if you're dealing with people who aren't willing to toe the line, or who have exceptionally inflated senses of their own worth, then you're bound to see decisions which are, on the surface, nonsensical. It happened early in Pearson's second reign too. And the fact that many of these players were involved in a wholly unexpected relegation in the recent past suggests that something is amiss with their application. There's a consensus in the journalism right now that there were four principal problems with Cooper: performances, form, player response and fan response. I thought the decision to get rid made sense because of these issues, but the truth is that many of us fans contributed to one of them. It's understandable for the most part, but at times it can't have been helpful. Plenty of fans are crowing now about how right they were, but their judgement was based on prejudice rather than giving him a chance and evaluating that it wasn't working. The number of things I heard and read related to his looks and his Forest connections, two entirely irrelevant matters, didn't reflect well. As for the relevant gripes, well, performances were indeed poor but we were in a respectable position in the league. He does have limited pedigree as a top boss, but then again many of those who've made a big deal of this would prefer Van Nistelrooy or Corberan, who have even less. That's just where we are as a club now. Again, some realism helps. It will be interesting to see how things work out, given that we're out of the relegation zone right now and fan pressure was likely a contributing factor to his sacking. I hope for our sake that those brave souls who've dedicated these past months to a Cooper Out campaign feel vindicated come May.

Getting a club promoted to the top tier, especially when it surpasses expectations, and then keeping them up, immediately makes you better than the average Championship manager. Look at the bosses in that league and you won't see many who have achieved that. And he did a good job in his other FLC post too. There is a valid argument for us starting to look elsewhere. But it isn't (a) that this squad would be soaring with any other manager or (b) that Steve Cooper is a bog standard second tier level manager. Both of those are non-starters which have been repeated over and over by people who were never willing to give him a chance in the first place. Plenty of them will claim to have been more astute than the rest of us, when in truth they were calling for a brand of football which would have seen us mauled with this personnel, and didn't even have us on promotion form in the second half of last season. Poor form, poor points per game over an extended period, discontent from fans to - you suspect - the players, inadequate line-ups and tactics in the early phases of games, a failure to either establish ourselves as an organised, hard-to-beat side or anything beyond that - coupled with the fact that all is not lost and we may still tempt some decent managers - constitute a sensible case for asking whether we can do better. But I do think that some of the anti-Cooper viewpoints are so flawed that they actually strengthen the opposing argument.

It's nowhere near that. Of the regular squad, Ward, Justin, Pereira, Kristiansen, Faes, Thomas, Vestergard, Soumare, Ndidi, Vardy, Daka all got relegated with us last time in this league. Maybe they shouldn't have gone down with Maddison, Barnes and KDH among the ranks, but without them they'd have sunk without a trace. And of those eleven players, eight of them have featured fairly regularly in both campaigns. After the additions of last year's signings, we were below promotion form for the second half of last season. Since then the transfer business has hardly been dazzling. The wingers - Mavididi, Reid, Fatawu - have been inconsistent at best, and one is out for the season. Under three different managers, since Congerton's exit, we've invested 160m on players. It hasn't been good enough. And it was nowhere good enough for years before that either. The highlights of that investment have been Hermansen, who has done very well, and Winks, who has been up and down this year. Mavididi and Fatawu have shown flashes at this level. Ayew has had a good cameo or two. The jury's out on Bilal. Facundo is impressive, but on loan. And then it's all downhill from there - Cannon, Coady, Reid, Edouard, Kristiansen, Souttar, Faes, Okoli, Skipp; 70m or so on players who haven't added anything as of yet. We have one available RB, who is awful. None of the CBs have peformed with any consistency. Our LB options are all poor. Our most highly-rated winger is out for the season. Our star man is nearly 38. I just don't see how, considering all of the above and the performance levels this season (and in the past) of these players, you could conclude that but for Cooper we'd be a top-half PL side. No, he's not doing a great job with what he's got, but it's crazy to think that this squad isn't roughly where you'd expect it to be.

Vardy had nothing to do with it. I didn't even know how to assess a striker who was that badly cut off.

I don't think Moyes is really renowned as a possession-based manager. If that's our priority - and it shouldn't be, given our squad - then Russell Martin might be available sometime soon. Like you, I'd prefer Moyes to that. Also, I'm not sure getting the best out of Ricardo is going to be on the agenda if we're appointing a new manager anytime soon!

Maybe another manager would do a bit better, but I honestly don't know where this notion that we're comfortably PL standard comes from. It's certainly not the 22/23 season. And it's certainly not the second half of the 23/24 season (at a lower level). And it can't be based on our summer transfer dealings either. Many of these players aren't good enough. We have one right back and he isn't good enough. Two LBs and neither are good enough. None of the CBs have been good at this level, ever. Soumare and Ndidi weren't good enough in this league last time round in the centre, and I doubt they'll be revelations now. Skipp and Winks meanwhile have been up and down. Our wingers have been mostly poor, and the main right-sided option is out for the season. The star man is nearly 38. His deputies are proven failures at this level. 'We're comfortably good enough' just seems to be a thing that people say, based on no evidence whatsoever. Yes, Cooper is very, very questionable. But beating him with that stick kind of undermines the entire 'Cooper Out' argument. Which is, that with an admittedly very poor hand, he's still seriously struggling to make us competitive.

I'm definitely not arguing with you there. The team selections don't suit the style of play. Subs are late, and often bizarre. We don't play to our strengths. It feels like it's not working. We could be better, no question. But I disagree strongly with the idea that 'Enzoball' would have worked at this level with these players, and the degree to which some people expected us to dazzle the league with our purists' football muddied the debate about Cooper a bit. The real question with him was whether or not he could work with limited resources, and craft an organised, direct, physical and 'pragmatic' side who everyone hated playing against. The jury was still out a month ago, but it's beginning to look like he's not going to make us that hard-to-beat side. I agree that someone else might do a better job of that, but I doubt very much that anyone who comes in and wins plaudits for his dedication to good football will actually get results. Because, simply put, I don't think the squad is up to much. Most of these players got relegated the last time they were in this league. More of them weren't even on promotion form in a lower league in the second half of last season. But yes, absolutely. A good manager with a 'results-based' philosophy might do better. Especially if there's some rejigging behind-the-scenes which ensures that recruitment does more to address the manager's needs. I'm not sure we did that in the summer, even with a limited budget.

Exactly. Of those 1,929 top flight appearances, a good 300 belong to a striker who'll be 38 early in the new year. 400 or so to Ayew and BDCR. The best part of a hundred for Vestergard. Between Ward, Justin, Pereira, Thomas, Faes, Ndidi, Vardy, Soumare, Daka, Iversen and Kristiansen there must be 300 appearances that ended in relegation. And some of these players have been relegated elsewhere. We have barely any options on the right, and the less said about Justin's performances the better. Our left back options are poor. The CB options aren't much better. The talismanic striker is on borrowed time. This isn't a squad that you'd expect to be thriving.

How many of those appearances ended in relegation?

I wouldn't write the guy off. He definitely has potential. But in all honesty I thought he was crap today.

Everyone was demanding that people who voted 'keep' explain themselves. Someone does that, in great detail, and they're told not to bother!

We do have previous when it comes to waiting until after a break to change manager, relying on questionable interims at the start of a congested run of fixtures. And it worked out wonderfully last time.

And perhaps he should have sent Wilf off too. He made several big errors at both teams' expense, and fell for every tumble a Chelsea player took. It doesn't change the fact that we thoroughly deserved to lose. But the ref was awful, once again.

I think it's starting to look more and more likely that things are going nowhere. If your judgement is based on how the season is evolving, rather than simply negative preconceptions about Cooper, then you're probably still coming to that conclusion. But I totally understand why people might say 'we have limited options, we're not in the relegation zone - which is the aim - and we've just narrowly lost to Chelsea, with all the talk about a crucial controversial refereeing decision against us.'

It feels like he's getting further and further from any potential magic formula. McAteer, Soumare and Bilal are all eyebrow-raising selections. He's unlikely to be sacked on the back of today's result, but I get the creeping sensation that things aren't working out. I was a little surprised, given the poor performances of our wide players - and lack of them, that he didn't use the break to work on a 3-5-2. Didn't he use something along those lines when we came back against Southampton, or did I imagine that? Anyway, thankfully I'm watching this from afar. I'm trying to treat the game as a curiosity rather than as something we actually stand a chance of competing in. Hopefully I'm wrong.

Have the Americans really 'got racism right'? I do understand what you're saying as regards freedom of speech, and would agree that we've gone too far in some respects. I'm just not sure that, at the extremes, abuse doesn't equate to assault. Nor that the Americans are the ones who have got this right.