smudgerfox

Are you surprised that NDidi and Ihenacho are at the African Cup? Because if you are you must be the only person in Britain who is. These were absences which should have been anticipated and planned for. And why is Vardy injured and out for such an extended period? Through playing too long while injured. At his age injuries are to be expected and we need more cover than two strikers - one of whom is involved in Afcon. In terms of Afcon we have been lucky - all three PL squadders could have expected to go further in the competition than they have. We’ve also not played as much as we could have done while they’ve been away. We undoubtedly miss Evans and Forfana as any team would but let’s not exaggerate the difficulties - some of them are entirely of our own making.

Of course I accept that the club is at a historical high and therefore it seems absurd to many people to criticise, club, team or manager. I accept that Brighton are good and no-one should be expecting us to beat them. I also think we severely underrated our Europa League opponents - with many talking about sealing qualification on game 3 and easing the involvement of first teamers thereafter. I hate it when we dismiss teams who we know little about or who historically have been below us in English football. We shouldn’t be that kind of club.I agree that the injuries have been severely debilitating, particularly in defence. I even accept that given the urgent need for a Prem experienced defender Vestergaard was a reasonable bet whom no-one could have anticipated being so poor. BUT - I really have come to conclude that our coach does not have the skills to progress us from where we are now. He overrates the importance of tactical and positional changes at the expense of natural, instinctive simplicity. He’s looking for players to fit his system, rather than finding a system to fit the players at his disposal. The club signs expensive players with proven excellence in one role and he tries to play them in another (Perez, Soumare) . His defensive organisation is not PL standard, neither are his set piece defending or his attacking set pieces. He seems unable to do anything about any of these issues. His insistence on doing everything in his very singular way means that players who don’t fit. get frozen out to the extremities of the squad sometimes out of it altogether - Mendy , Praet, Ihenacho, Perez, Amartey, Hamza. They are only resurrected when all the options have run out. What impressed about Brighton today was their calm efficiency, their clear and obviously smart organisation and their sheer pragmatism devoted to getting a result …in these regards they were everything that we were not..

I think Brendan is an idealist. His dream is to win the Premier League or Champions League or both - with everyone saying what a brilliant team he has built. Universal admiration for not only winning but “doing it the right way..” He can’t do that with us - or at least in his heart he doesn’t believe he can - hence “overachieving”, so he’s trying to get a universally admired team that will help get him that job. And without the pressure of having to win every week, it’s perfect here for him - he’s well paid and comfortably supported while he’s conducting his dress rehearsal. I think back to Rudiger in the post FA Cup Final league game last season. He was a nasty bastard that night and we had no match for him. And we never will have under BR - because he wouldn’t want his players conducting themselves like that. Kasper, Evans, value their reputation in the wider game, Vards has lost his appetite for causing trouble …Tielemans, Maddison are too young and aware of their potential to be playing elsewhere to be strong leaders. I’m fact it says a lot that the only hint of anyone embodying the Foxes Never Quit maxim has come from KDH who has only just arrived n the team due to an injury crisis..

Ridiculous post. No one is blaming Rodgers for everything that has gone wrong. What no-one can dispute is that his teams are poor defensively, brittle psychologically, which makes them prone to heavy and confidence sapping defeats. It’s taken an age to fix set piece defending with BR using absent injured players who aren’t due to return for months as an excuse. What I really want to know is does Brendan deep down feel there is more to achieve. Or does he feel - as he has already said - that weve overachieved already and that we should just be grateful to have him..

On top of this horror show you’d need to add Bournemouth a 4-1, Newcastle sticking 4 past us, and the slow starts including being 4 down to Man City after 20mins ..conceding 2-0 leads to Palace and Napoli - it speaks of a side with a feeble defence and poor game psychology…

I think we are approaching a crossroads we can keep going if we can keep the players but if ultimately the football world concludes we’re perennial nearly men, the best players will leave and they’ll be harder to replace…if we’d got CL last season and were pushing for it again would Youri be planning to leave? if he goes won’t Maddison, NDidi, Castagne, Forfana decide it might be time for them to go too? This is why the PL finishing place last season and the Europa fiasco this season are really damaging. We haven’t demonstrated we are a club which belongs at or near the top.. the fact is we are miles behind Man City, Chelsea and Liverpool and Utd, Arse and Sperz will be tougher to compete with - both on the pitch and in the transfer market from now on. West Ham have overtaken us and Newcastle and Villa will be a different prospect in the months and years to come, All of which means we need to improve more quickly just to stand still … plus of course BR’s occasional admission that we can’t compete with the top six merely confirms that we are nothing more than a great club prior to a top six move.

Any side with Soyuncu in it is a loser. Amartey and Hamza for me - HC our best defender by a country mile last night …Soyuncu needs a long time out to get back to learning the basics

We had two experienced international defenders in a three man back line and our best defender was the one playing out of position! I’d play Amartey and Hamza on Sunday - I agree with many on here Cags is a spent force ….

Top post. Watch bottom half sides - even relegation teams and they simply don’t allow opponents so many clear efforts on goal as we do. Spurs waltzed through us at times and some great last ditch blocks, tackles, clearances, saves, prevented those moments turning to goals. But tactically we shouldn’t require that many last ditch savings. You can blame defensive injuries but the set up of the midfield and defence just don’t make it hard enough for the opposition. Rodgers teams are always defensively weak and liable to complete defensive collapse - 50 goals conceded in the season his Liverpool team finished second. He really does need to up his game in coaching a defence to defend.

We forgot that you exist we forgot that you exist to Peter Sarsedt where do you go to my lovely where did you get to oh forest when we were winning the league the foxes are ruling the Midlands and you’re nowhere to be seen haha ahahaha

I think one giveaway that there is something wrong in the injury assessment dept is the number of times players are injured in the warm up or shortly after the start of matches. What used to be a rarity is now a commonplace - Evans, Bertrand, Ricardo spring to mind.

I’m not denying the defence was patched up. But only Albrighton at RB was a player out of position. All four are members of the first team squad and three of them were playing in a position that is their usual position. In a squad that is drilled in a system which offers a strong defensive base that ought to be enough to put in a respectable defensive performance. Our club captain is goalkeeper and a minimum consequence of his constant presence should be defensive stability and effective on-field defensive organisation. We have a high profile defensive coach and a goalkeeper coach. There is literally no excuse for being 4-0 down after 25 minutes to anyone - it’s a relegation mentality to think there is.

Vestergaard - a Danish international, an experienced EPL player and an £11-million signing three months ago. He hasn’t played much but he has been given plenty of time to assess the problems from the bench and prepare himself to play and help solve them. Thomas - first choice left back I believe, possibly only because Bertrand has been such an unmitigated disaster.. Amartey - oddly given little to no game time by BR recently even as Cags commits error after error. Certainly not perfect but in my view a respectable stand in. Makeshift, patched up, yes. Disastrous no. If the squad has been working as a squad - they should be able to come in and work under a system they understand.

The key thing to take from this game is that we were 4-0 down after 25 minutes - that’s right after less than a third of the game we have not only already lost but are facing a season- defining, humiliating, never-to-be-forgotten thrashing. Records are about to be set. What happened next Is the upside of the crowded fixture list. Man City soft pedalled to conserve energy and inadvertently lost control of the game for a brief spell. It’s fair to say we exploited that well. But even then we didn’t have the tactical nouse, the resilience, the game management, the defensive strength to make them pay. Let’s be clear about this - worse teams have gone to the Etihad and been completely outplayed and outclassed. What hardly any of them have done is concede 4 goals in the first 25 minutes. Even if that means parking the bus. Even if it means sacrificing every coaching principle they have to stay in the game for as long as possible. Teams that accept conceding four goals in 25 minutes end up getting relegated - maybe not this season - but eventually. They are not winning anything. Because the knowledge that a team can concede 4 goals in 25 minutes encourages opponents and demoralises teammates and supporters. It is simply not acceptable at any ambitious football club and I can’t hide my dismay that fellow supporters are queuing up to say it’s just another bad day at the office on the road to inevitable success.

Precisely no-one is wondering that. What we’re wondering is how many goals Man City might have scored had they continued trying to score. Because I honestly believe they could have scored ten..the defence we put out today is makeshift but every player is a first team squad player - not players plucked from the obscurity of the under 23s too early. The defence is poor organisationally and was left wide open for the entirety of the first half. That has been the case for most of the season and it hasn’t made much difference who the individuals in the defence have been. I don’t think it’s too much to expect our “elite” coach to make us more difficult to beat, more difficult to score against. You can’t spend half a season wishing your best defenders weren’t injured and saying things will improve when they return. You have to do your best to build a solid base from the players you have…the returning players will benefit from the establishment of that base and hopefully make it even more solid…

Yes - RL taking consolation from the second half fight back but 1 fails to take account of Man City turning off the gas they’d already won the game. City paid a price for freewheeling but they only had to marginally increase the pressure on our hapless defence to restore their superiority 2 the second half improvement merely confirms how bad the first half set up was - at times they literally walked the ball up to our six yard box unopposed 3 the seemingly routine first half/second half analysis of performances in which we take heart from the better showing and regard the poorer one as an aberration ..I’d say virtually every game this season. has one appalling half and another that’s an improvement…

Does that excuse the witless defending ?

Although BR says he likes a small squad he effectively reduces the squad further by “freezing out” players periodically. This means they don’t get any game time and effectively when they get a chance it’s in an emergency which leaves them rusty and over exposed. Take Hamza. What possible use is he now Soumare has been signed as back up to Wilf? But let’s say Soumare gets injured while NDidi is at Africa Cup - suddenly Hamza is a starter without kicking a ball in anger for months. Kelechi is in the same position… other teams keep players fresher by little rotations and canny subs - BR has a set way of playing - finds the 11 that suits it best then plays them till they drop.

Very good data but is it the point? Perhaps I should have said that our defensive “form” is relegation form. We also need to factor in the annual collapse of form in the second half of the season. It would take a lot to get us relegated I admit but aside which routinely concedes two goals a game is a team which is playing with fire.

Our form isn’t far off relegation form and we are so easy to beat it’s frightening. We struggled to beat Norwich, drew with Burnley and devoured a poor Newcastle at home. We beat Watford but still conceded 2. That’s a game which might have gone against us. The defence is the source of the problem but the injuries don’t fully excuse that. Even when fielding a respectable back 4 say - Castagne, Evans, Soyuncu and Thomas - we have consistently leaked goals. We’ve improved at defending set pieces but boy did that take a long tome to fix. There are Premier teams who field players of much lower calibre than ours but they still manage to restrict opponents’ scoring opportunities and keep goals conceded down closer to the league average. We have too few defenders in the squad, have signed a couple of defensive donkeys in the summer and like many others I’m sceptical that the return of Wes and JJ will fix the problem immediately.

Another of BRs “quirks” is that he says he likes to have a small first team squad to work with - a chicken that has come home to roost in this injury and illness ravaged season. I know there are maximum squad sizes for most competitions but they can be supplemented by young players. Having half a dozen of these around (including countless keepers) is simply not enough. The fact that we have literally run out of centre halves tells its own story. Injuries and fatigue in the midfield could have been managed better with Praet in the squad. This squad mismanagement was summed up last season when we didn’t name a full squad fot Europa League , gave a place to KDH then promptly loaned him to Luton for the season .. The keeper situation continues to baffle - behind Kasper who plays every time anyway despite his shortcomings - we have Ward, Stoyz (whatever his name is) , Jakupovic and Iversen on loan at Preston (and apparently doing brilliantly). When are we ever going to need that many goalkeepers?

While on international duty Castagne said the players were unhappy at being told at half time to sit on a 2-0 lead v Palace -which they subsequently failed to do. I agree with the players - we don’t have a defence capable of protecting a lead and we’d have more points if they ignored the manager and continue to play in the way which earned us a lead in the first place. That’s quite a toxic situation where the players have more tactical nouse then the manager..

I’d have more sympathy for Rodgers if he fully utilised the full squad available to him. How useful would it have been to have had Praet available tonight and in recent weeks while Youri has been out? He’s been treated appallingly. So has Kelechi - last seasons top scorer can’t get a game? Choudhury’s defensive prowess blunted while BR tries to turn him into a box to box player. Perez has played in his best position in about five games. Soumare is being asked to play a role which he wasn’t playing when we signed him. Ward deserves a chance to show he can do better than Kasper. Soyuncu has repeatedly been selected ahead of Amartey even though he’s having a highly public nightmare and Amartey is far less error prone. As a consequence he relies on the same squad within a squad even when they’re playing terribly and/or recovering from injury and/or trying to reach the level needed for the Premier League. Brendan seems incapable of accepting the limitations of the players he has at his disposal and devising a system which covers up their deficiencies and allows them to play to their strengths. He has his system which he rigidly adheres to and the players have to fit into it. The results seem to him just of passing interest. His main priority seems to be to show he can replace Pep Guardiola or some other elite manager by demonstrating his tactical skill each week.

Not sure I agree with that. Yes we did create chances but we gave the ball away so often it was unreal. The first goal was the direct result of a dreadful,ball from Soyuncu. Plus we are not ruthless - Barnes and Castagne dribble the ball virtually to the six yard box but there’s no one to provide the finishing touch - or if there is they fluff it.

But is he really an on pitch leader? When we conceded against Southampton he just stood silently staring into the night air. He didn’t berate the person who made the mistake, he didn’t encourage, he just stood in exasperated silence. As captain and with vice captain Evans Kasper should be ensuring everyone in the defence is in their right place and doing their jobs - especially at set pieces - but they plainly aren't doing that…you can’t hang all this on Brendon - he isn’t out there organising the defence for an incoming corner - the problem is no one else is doing it either