inckley fox

Extraordinary. And I thought I'd seen it all. Silly me. Obviously taking the piss, I should add. If not...

Like others, you've made some strong points. I'd just add a few caveats. First, the whole notion of what a good 'tactician' means. It used to be a manager who was knowledgeable of different styles / systems / shapes, found the one which best suited their personnel, and would then occasionally make the tight tweaks for the right occasion. Now it often seems to mean much the opposite - someone who has a specific and often distinct system which is their own trademark, and which they unvaryingly impose on their players until it's well-learnt. There's no 'horses for courses' to it. And to be honest, I'm not sure how effective a tactician you are if you're so inflexible. O'Neill certainly found systems which suited his players, and it wasn't always the same shape or style from one club to the next. It didn't tend to vary much from there on in (unlike, you could argue, Pearson who went from an industrial, direct 4-4-2 to a 4-3-3, then later from a more possession-based 4-4-2 to a whole raft of experiments upon promotion, finally settling on a quick and quite attacking 3-4-1-2). Where O'Neill got himself a name for being old school and tactically unstudied was in (a) actually getting old and (b) using his platform to decry modern footballing jargon, and point out that terms like 'high press' / 'between the lines' / 'transitions' were just flashy names being applied to old concepts. I think some people mistook that for him rejecting the worth of modern changes in the game when he was really just pointing out that, for instance, the recent popularity of the long throw isn't an innovation. The second point is about fitness. You're right in what you say, but some of his 'old school' notions weren't actually too unhelpful back in the day. Part of this relates to a conversation I had some years back with a coach who'd worked in La Liga, when I mentioned that a lot of our players seemed less fit nowadays than the old O'Neill era side which Izzet once called 'the best pub side in England'. Be that as it may, they were renowned for their running and their ability to claw back results late in games, and with very little rotation. He said that it was very, very possible, simply because some managers spent so much time working on shape that fitness was largely left to other departments. This was the accusation under Sousa - every session was shape, shape, shape with fitness issues left for individuals and the sports science department to fret over, with hefty rotation the answer to any problems which came up. Consequently players complained that we spent no time working on the basics and couldn't last ninety minutes either. O'Neill might not have dedicated a great deal of time and energy to fitness either (from what I heard, Robertson / Walford spent more time coaching set pieces than anything else) but they were literally dropped off at a military base at the start of pre-season for a couple of weeks of sheer hell to make sure they were fit. That's no use to us now, but it demonstrates that even a bunch of boozers can be fitter than a set of players with cutting-edge sports science at hand, if priorities get lost. The third is when it comes to players like Winks. Yes, O'Neill could get players back on board, but it's worth remembering that they had to want to. The likes of Corica never wanted to and were quickly cast aside. As for Parker, the story went that - before the point where he got on famously with O'Neill - he 'threw the tea' at him during a half-time bust-up, and was stripped of the captaincy and even briefly transfer-listed in the aftermath. So there are no guarantees that Faes, Soumare and Winks would have the strength of character to deal with that in the way Parker did. As for whether it would ever work, or could ever happen - that's very debatable. Do we need someone to try to bring those players back on board or, given that there isn't a great deal of time left on some of their contracts, do we need to be putting any potential short-term benefits to one side and moving on from them? And, given that they've fallen foul of several consecutive managers, should even a short-term fixer be wasting time on them? O'Neill, as we all know, is capable of a very slow start when the squad needs a lot of work, so is he the right man for the task? Would he even entertain the idea when his Celtic stint makes a higher level SOS job a real possibility for him? Indeed, might the only way of attracting him to the job be to offer him a longer-term option, if he makes good progress?

Rectifying a mistake by doing something largely in keeping with all of your previous mistakes, and clearly suicidal, is hardly a meaningful way forward. Cifuentes isn't much of a manager. When you know who picked him and under what circumstances, it's no surprise. There are those who would do better out there and many who wouldn't too. While it may make sense to get rid, we can't kid ourselves that the problem is his utter incompetence. We made that assumption with the previous two managers and at some point we've got to see that the more serious problems have no quick fixes. Until there's a boardroom team with some degree of credibility, it's hard to imagine things will get any better, regardless of how fed up I am with Cifuentes. Then again, as little faith as we may have had in Mandaric to pick an effective management team, he still eventually chanced upon Pearson. So there's some hope.

Maresca specifically praised him for being quick. Maybe, like with Big Wes who was quick but didn't always show it, we're missing something. Or maybe Enzo just hadn't been paying attention.

A lot of people have spoken about the issue being that he's denied space in every game. I've not been convinced by this at all, and yesterday I thought that Derby's Brereton Diaz failed singularly to support Callum Elder at LB, Ebou Adams wasn't screening effectively either, and Fatawu was able to pick up the ball in all sorts of decent positions and run at his opponent with plenty of space, and options. He was mostly sloppy and wasteful, albeit with a glimpse or two of what he's capable of doing. There's a real talent in there, but he's got a lot of work to do to go near to fulfilling it. Most flair players don't reach the levels they could. He's a player who needs to match his talent, which is considerable but by no stretch extraordinary, with his work-rate. And be a lot less prissy about it along the way.

I'm not sure what we mean sometimes when we talk about being a good team 'on paper'. With reference to one-time price tags, wages and international appearances, yes, by those meaningless measurements we should be herculean. But almost all of our players in every position have been worse than the corresponding Derby players this season. Isn't that 'on paper' too? And when it comes to how successful our players have been at this level or any other in England, shouldn't that count towards how good we are 'on paper' too? Faes has had one decent season at this level, in contrast to the woeful one he's having now, and two equally woeful ones in the league above. Winks one good and one very bad season at this level and a dire one in the league above. Mavididi hasn't been much better. Soumare has been awful for us at any level over all four seasons, Daka over all five and Kristiansen, and Okoli, throughout their time with us. Ayew and Reid have never been any good for us either, and are pretty much past-it. Skipp has never been any good for us. Vestergard has had one decent season in the second tier and been crap in the others. Ricardo has managed one decent season (again in the second tier) out of the past five, and is also past-it. Carranza has an utterly unremarkable record at any noteworthy level. Thomas has been crap wherever he's been, at any level, for four seasons. Hamza hasn't had a good run of form for us this decade. Our youngsters, for all the hype are - with the exception of Nelson and arguably Jakob - unproven. That leaves Fatawu, with one decent season in the second season, mostly poor performances upto his injury in the league above, and a thus-far uninspiring campaign at this level. And then there's James and Ramsey. Maybe I'm forgetting someone, but surely all of this is 'on paper' too. But I do fully agree that we'll probably get spanked!

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.