ClaphamFox

Gerrard would be a ****ing disaster.

That was before he catastrophically failed in the PL with Southampton. As useless as our owners have been in recent years, I can’t see them choosing somebody who has emphatically proven that he cannot manage a club of a similar size in the PL.

No it won’t.

He starts every game because he’s our best striker. It’s a very sorry state of affairs for a PL club to have a 38-year-old as its best striker, but that’s on the club, not Vardy. And as for getting managers fired, can you name which managers we’ve sacked during Vardy’s time that we shouldn’t have done?

I actually think Ruud’s one concession to making us more attacking tonight will be to replace BDCR with Facu and play Ayew on the left.

I agree that it doesn’t seem very obvious at all, which is why I’ve been in the camp that has wanted Facu to start ahead of him. And I’m still in that camp. But Ruud comes across as a fairly rational person - the type of coach who likely pays attention to data. So I still wonder if there might be some method in his apparent madness. I’d be interested to see any stats showing how many goals we’ve conceded with/without Ayew on the pitch, for example…

@StriderHiryu, who tends to analyse these things in some depth, has suggested that Ayew is indeed better defensively than either Buonanotte and Mavididi. Not necessarily because he makes lots tackles or blocks, but because he works harder off the ball and is better aerially, which is very useful when defending set pieces. His ability to hold up the ball also gives us an outlet when we’re under pressure. Presumably Ruud and his staff will have access to tons of data about each player’s performance that we do not. Maybe that data shows that Ayew is one of those players whose work rate helps the team in a way that isn’t always obvious to the naked eye? This is not to say that Ayew should definitely start - we need to win games and that means we need to create more in attack. Personally I’d prefer to see Buonanotte ahead of him tonight. But maybe Ruud’s persistence with Ayew isn’t quite as incomprehensible as some people seem to think?

We kept a clean sheet for 75mins when Ayew was on the pitch on Saturday then conceded twice soon after he went off. The introduction of Mavididi immediately weakened us defensively. That does not necessarily mean Ayew should play (especially as we need wins, not draws), but surely you can see Ruud’s dilemma?

Vestergaard won’t be playing.

Two more losses would basically wipe out our very slim chance of survival. In that circumstance, there would be no real pressure on the club to act until the summer. I suspect they'd let RvN have it until then to see how he finishes the season before making a decision.

Hence the phrase ‘under Khun Vuchai’.

If there is room on the bench for two strikers I would much rather it was Jake Evans than Odsonne Edouard.

Ah. Was he asked whether he's likely to change things up in attack on Friday?

Where have you seen the quotes from the press conference? I can only find injury updates...

Is that a direct quote from Ruud from today's press conference?

This is an emotional statement, not a rational one. We will almost certainly have one of the strongest squads in the Championship next season - likely stronger than either Burnley's or Sheffield Utd's this year, and they're both in contention for an immediate return. I agree relegation is depressing and it makes it worse that it was avoidable with better recruitment last summer, but this idea that we'll be thrown into an inexorable downward spiral if we go down isn't based in reality.

I agree that his weird reluctance to use Okoli and Buonanotte are major red flags. He has belatedly changed his mind on Okoli and we have immediately looked more solid at the back. My only explanation for his persistence with BDCR and Ayew is that he is prioritizing trying to make the team more disciplined and harder to play against, and he believes that they give us more solidity than Buonanotte and Mavididi, etc (even though many, including me, would regard this as a flawed assumption). What he does next will tell us a lot. It's clear that scoring goals is a major problem for us and that if he doesn't try to correct that very soon (eg by starting Facu and including Evans on the bench), we'll just slip quietly down into the Championship without causing any ripples. I suspect he will change things, though - he has to.

Are you attempting some kind of record for the amount of hyberbole you can fit into one post? Everything Clever Fox said is correct. It is undeniably true that RvN has had to work with a horribly-assembled squad that isn’t good enough for this division and into which he had zero input. The club did not back him in January. It is also true that RvN had had to work with key players absent through injury. And it is also true that there is more structure to the team and more coherent patterns of play under Ruud than under Cooper. We do seem to be more well drilled and have more of an identity now than we did earlier in the season, when we were reliant on periods of chaos to score goals and gain points. However, nobody can deny that so far the results have not improved under Ruud. More structure has not yet brought us more points. And while he has taken steps to improve the defence by reintroducing Okoli, his persistence with Ayew and BDCR either side of Vardy in attack has been baffling given how poor we’ve been in attack. If he refuses to roll the dice and change things up in attack, we will go down with barely a whimper and it will not reflect well on him as a coach. For me, the jury is still out on Ruud. He’s been given a crap hand to play with and he has made the team look better without actually delivering better results. I understand why people have serious doubts about him (particularly over the Ayew/BDCR thing), but I think it’s far too early to conclude that he’s a terrible manager who will plunge us into obscurity. I suspect the club sees it this way too and will give him the summer transfer window to start the rebuild – if of course he wants to stay.

There is a more worrying (and unfortunately more likely) explanation: that the club really has become consumed by a toxic combination of corporate arrogance and managerial incompetence. From the outside it seems like they have tried to become more ‘professional’ on the commercial side of things (aggressively pushing mobile tickets, treating fans as mere customers, banning people without sue process, dodgy sponsorship deals, etc) while completely losing their grip on the playing side (terrible recruitment, PSR issues, weird manager appointments). It should be the other way around, and indeed under Khun Vichai it was: the club went out of its way to make the fans happy and was much more savvy in the transfer market, which brought success on the pitch. We'd be in a far better place as a club if they'd focused on becoming more professional on the playing side (eg, a new Director of Football) while keeping the fans onside by continuing to treat them with respect. They've just got their priorities completely messed up, and any company or institution that does that invariably finds itself in trouble.

I get the impression that this is pretty much the way that both RvN and the club see it, too. I don’t think our results over the rest of the season are going have much influence on whether Ruud stays or not - it will likely come down to whether the club is happy with what they’re seeing behind the scenes. Cooper wasn’t sacked primarily because of results, but because the club felt he wasn’t building anything at Seagrave. If they feel that RvN is actually building a culture that will eventually lead to success, they’ll stick with him irrespective of whether we stay up or go down.

If Ruud leaves, which I don’t he will, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they went for Rohl.

Having gone in a completely different direction with Cooper and been badly burned, then pivoted sharply back to a Maresca-style appointment in RvN, I’d say there is virtually no chance of them undergoing yet another volte-face and going for Dyche. RvN will very likely still be manager next season, but if he isn’t it will be another young manager with a reputation for playing ‘progressive’ football. It won’t be Dyche.

I think Moyes would struggle to get a tune out of our squad. That’s why he didn’t want to touch us with a bargepole.

I thought it was inevitable but after Saturday’s game Joe Cole was saying on the telly that he’d seen enough from us to convince him we can stay up. And who are any of us to argue with Joe Cole?!