Finnegan

I also don't think he'd come back to work with Rudkin as DOF.

We genuinely don't really know what anyone at the club does and I'm not being funny. The corporate structure and the responsibilities of staff at our club do not seem consistent with well run, modern clubs. We (fans) throw blame all over the place but we don't actually know where it truly belongs. Especially with our dubious relationship with agents and agencies muddying the water.

If we've learned nothing and we try and recruit yet another manager to play the exact same way as Ruud and Cooper then, yeah, it's going to be dreadful. What we need is our equivelant of O'Neill going back to Celtic or Shakespeare taking over after Ranieri. A back-to-basics, galvanising figure to come in as an interim coach and just get everyone fired up and doing standard things like running and pressing with some intensity. Everyone will laugh at the notion of this but there actually IS enough quality in this team still that if it was working hard and running hard it'd still pick up enough points to be easily top half.

It's pretty normal to not send teenagers away from home on loan deals tbf. Monga isn't even allowed to go on loan yet, is he? I doubt many other clubs are sending 17 year olds off round the country away from home and their education to go play at other clubs? The most effective loans we've sent players on were in their early 20s ready to break in to the first team around 22/23 which is fair? Obviously different if you have a Walcott, Rooney, Bale kinda prodigy but Barnes and KDH weren't that. Even Monga isn't really, for a start he's far too small.

Ian Holloway would probably have this team further up the league.

Just ****ing sack him. Please. Ffs.

I would, in all seriousness, leave Hamza at full back and Ricardo in the middle.

Well that's the season over.

Booooooo

Oh my days

Two nil up and they're all bombing forward to get involved in every attack with no fear. God I wish we had a manager with some courage.

Scenes

Oh christ, yeah, sorry. Read that like a moron, you're quite right.

Jesus ****ing christ. Imagine losing Guehi, Eze, Olise and Mateta and having to live with the fact it was all traded for Eddie Nketiah and Tammy ****ing Abraham. No wonder Glasner is off. That's business to rival some of our nonsense.

I hate to bang on about Enzo all the time but it is difficult when he was our last competent coach. But this is exactly it, night and day, under Enzo we were exceptional in the transition and it was really obvious we practiced this a lot. Fans moaned all the time about us playing risky football out from the back but quite frequently we'd turn possession over whilst trying to build something but we'd immediately have several players closing in to recover the ball because we were well set up to anticipate that. We have none of that now, we have a directionless mess. Modern footballers need and expect extensive coaching. Most of them have had freedom of thought coached out of them, they get drilled from a young age to follow specific patterns of play and only those patterns. We don't have a team full of instinctive, clever footballers, we have a group of guys that really need to be told when to breathe and when to wipe their arse and that's exactly why they liked Enzo. He was thorough, he was detailed, he coached them down to the specifics, meticulously, studying every opponent and telling them what we were going to do. The players have spoken occasionally about this and about the lack of it since he left. It's the level of detail and preparation that makes football in the world of the hyper-systems driven game. Shit, it's even why England women are so good, because Sarina Weigman is an absolute master at that drilling and prep. We just don't look well coached, we haven't in a couple of years now.

Honestly, I think too many people took the Fiorentina game to heart. His tactics almost certainly hadn't properly bedded in and he also sent us out needing to get match fitness for a new year. It's just one match. Everything else here is the normal Cifuentes. There's plenty of write ups on the internet about his tactical approach at Hammarby and QPR and they all describe a system that aims to shut down the centre of the park in a mid block that forces opponents wide and puts pressure on our own full backs to be defensively competent and win possession actively or else have the midfield intercept attempts through the middle. RVN had the same approach and JJ suffered enormously for it last year whilst Thomas is suffering for it this year. In both instances we have full backs who are far more comfortable on the ball than actually defending and we're deliberately channelling play towards them. Historically, when we had actual success, deliberately pushing teams wide it was with the likes of Danny Simpson at full back (who, for as much as he's awful on the ball was a great defender) and then Morgan and Huth inside defending any crosses that got by. Now we're inviting that pressure whilst we've got awful defensive full backs and central defenders who have terrible aerial challenge win rates and we're going all surprised pikachu when we concede. I genuinely feel for Thomas like I felt for JJ last year because they're being hung out to dry by their managers' incompetence exposing their weaknesses.

The Alisha Lehmann thread in the main forum will be longer than the one for any of the men's team and it'll all just be the usual old ****s from the Birds Off The Telly thread embarrassing themselves.

Oh, she's awful. As a footballer she's not particularly impressive even by the standards of our mediocre squad. But she'd be the women's equivalent to us signing, say, Pogba in his peak. It'd definitely be a coup. Although what's sad about it is it isn't young girls and genuine fans of women's football following her because she's a truly inspirational sporting figure, it's dirty old men wanking off over her cake.

But our defensive problems are, in my opinion, in part because we don't press. At this level, against teams in the Championship, you put people under pressure on the ball and they're going to make mistakes, they're going to find it hard to build up and create chances. The problem with a mid block is that invites teams to try and pass through you. You're saying "sure, have the ball, pick your pass, we think we're good enough to shut down the space." But we aren't. We're inviting that pressure on to ourselves and backing ourselves to handle it when we can't. You could compensate for that a lot more by aggressively defending much further up the pitch where we do have genuinely athletic players who can cause problems for the opposition before they even get to our box. Enzo had the same shit centre backs that Marti does, in fact Marti arguably has better by virtue of having a bit of choice here with Nelson and Okoli. But they've been thoroughly exposed this year because we're not making it difficult for teams in front of them. On the contrary, we're inviting them in. It's ****ing awful.

Too much of it isn't about the personnel available to him, it's about his general style. The work rate and pressing stats, the lack of high turnovers, the overall low xG, there's no excuse for it when you've got Mavididi, Fatawu, Daka, Reid and James available to you as attackers. Enzo would have those personnel closing down all over the park and creating a solid amount of chances. Not because he's a tactical genius and I just love him so much I'm biased but simply just because his approach would suit those players. For whatever faults Mavididi and Daka have, they'll press when they're told to and they're quick, Fatawu is a hard working kid despite the flair JJ will run himself in to the ground and BDCR isn't anywhere near the donkey Ayew is. We don't have to be playing this way, we're playing this way because it's what Cifuentes believes in. He's used a passive mid block through the vast majority of his career.

If thousands do it they can't and won't ban everyone. You either disrupt or there's no point. Doing anything half arsed isn't going to bring change it's just posing.

1. He's shit. 2. Fab claims Chelsea have recalled him to sell him. That's not going to be to us.

The thing with Ashley is he's got no interest in building anything. He's not going to go out and hire brilliant DoFs, recruitment teams, etc. He's going to just let the club fester with what it's got now and slowly leech money out of it. So we're not going to be any better off, we're not going to benefit from any kind of great decision making we don't have now. The difference being that one thing KP have done is inject their own money. So, sure, we'd probably stop spending ourselves in to PSR problems with Ashley but that's because we'd stop spending full stop. He'd be an absolute ****ing disaster and anyone thinking otherwise needs to go talk to a Newcastle fan. I don't think the "grass isn't always greener" / "it could be worse" argument outweighs wanting King Power gone at this point, I do wish Top sold up. But, to be clear, it definitely COULD be worse. The thing is, it could always be worse and you shouldn't let that stop you hoping for better.

**** off no he wouldn't. I'm not having that kind of revisionism. Top is incompetent, Ashley is proactively and deliberately a leech.

r/alishalehmann has more followers than r/lcfc