So what's wrong?

[Wasyls Pec Deck]

13 hours ago, smudgerfox said:

The new manager , whoever he is , has to have the stature to tackle two fundamental problems at the club. A manager who doesn't have top flight experience of substance will be eaten alive as both Ranieri and Shakespeare have been. 

 

The first is the clear divide between the recruitment and the playing side of the club. We seem to be pretty much repeatedly signing players who the managers don't  want to play. Jakupovic, Dragovic, follow Kaputska, Inler. This creates a bad atmosphere as , presumably these players must have been persuaded to come by the promise of helping build on the progress of the club and thereby extending their own reputations. However they have quickly been consigned to a kind of footballing wildernesss. Another similar aspect is the signing of players who either aren't good enough or who can't be easily accommodated in Leicester's style of play. Into this category you would have to place the likes of Slimani, Musa, Hernandez, Ziegler, Mendy. It's early days but already  Iborra and Ieanacho look as though they may be quality players with no natural position in the side.  Finally, the award of new contracts to a player such as Ulloa seems to bear no resemblance to the playing needs of the manager. The squad is overloaded with strikers with too little defensive and midfield back up. A new manager is going to have to insist that he picks the transfer targets and the recruitment side are going to have to learn to act under instruction. Only a strong character is going to be able to make that happen.

 

Secondly, there are the players themselves.  The unshakeable dressing room spirit has gone - it became seriously ill at Hull in the season opener last August and died in Porto a few months later. The infamous togetherness is no more and has likely been replaced by a series of factions. Various books on the Premiership "miracle" describe a squad given a high level of autonomy, deciding when we train, what we eat and dispensing fines on fellow members for training lateness. Enforcing this tight knit discipline seems to be Huth, Scmeichel and crucially Morgan. Vardy was clearly influential, Drinkwarer too, in a more low key way. Mahrez and Slimani are among those most regularly disciplined. 

 

It's a system which to many will smack of a small club mentality - a few privileged first teamers whose place in the team is rarely in doubt, given power over players who are struggling to replace them in the side. It clearly isn't to everyone's taste - some players clearly couldn't get out of the door quickly enough - Kante, Mendy, Hernandez, Zieler , Kaputska and now even Drinkwater. Tom Lawrence preferred to stay in the Championship than push for a place in our Premiership side. All of which suggests to me that the dressing room is a comfortable place for the strong and established but a hostile place for the less confident and less well established. Troy Deeney said as much in turning us down. In two seasons, only Harry Maguire, Ben Chilwell and Wilfred N'Didi could claim to have broken through at the club.

 

The difficulty any new manager will have in dealing with an over powerful set of players puffed up on their Premiership win is perhaps most clearly embodied in Mahrez. This wonderful talent has been over-indulged first by Ranieri and now by Shakespeare. Perhaps there really is only one player at the club capable of providing a Premiership creative spark on a regular basis but the level of forgiveness extended to him can only be guessed at by players like Gray, Kaputska and many others. His recklessly listless performances have cost us many points - his loss of the ball in the final seconds in the first half at Arsenal being a primary example - but he continues to be treated with kid gloves. His behaviour on transfer deadline day was not just embarrassing but also unprofessional - leaving his team mates in the middle of a crucial World Cup qualification process. Interesting that he has paid the price at international level and that he and Slimani have been dropped for lack of commitment.  

 

Any my new manager will have to tackle a toxic dressing room and the over-inflated egos who dominate the squad. There aren't too many around who will have the character to do that.

This makes a lot of sense and is incredibly alarming... 

[moseeds]

Great opening post.

I think it's very clear the club has no infrastructure in place - I remember reading an excellent article about Southampton's setup which scouts not just players but coaches and managers too.

There's a desperate short-termism which was punctuated with an impossible premier league win. Nigel Pearson to his credit created a 'setup' but behind that there must be from the board down a professional set of processes and principles in place. These are clearly lacking and can be seen in how poorly the academy - despite millions of pounds of investment - continues to produce very little talent.
 

The same people have been at the club too long. The footballing world has changed considerably in the past 5 years with the advent of data and analytics. The club has not embraced that change since Pearson left. The result will be a merry-go-round of managers and an inevitable death march, in the same vain as Sunderland, Villa, Newcastle and many others.

[brucey]

5 hours ago, Ric Flair said:

What are you inferring to here? 

That a complete revamp may sound good on paper but may not actually work out.

[Ric Flair]

6 hours ago, brucey said:

That a complete revamp may sound good on paper but may not actually work out.

So just because it might not work we should keep vastly underperforming executives and directors? Why keep getting rid of managers if that doesn't work either? Whether our owners have enough about them to replace these shit balls with genuine football people is a worry but it angers me they don't seem to have to perform to keep their jobs. Just as long as they're loyal ay?

 

Also are Everton really that bad off the field? Had we had this discussion last season we'd be raving about them. On the field they badly need a proper striker and another defender or two to replace Williams and Jagielka. If they get that they'd quite comfortably be back in the top 7. Koeman won't make it to January though and then you risk a new man changing way too much in the squad.

[Buce]

13 hours ago, Col city fan said:

I bet Adrien Silva is really happy at the moment! No competitive football until Jan, at a club with no boss AND watching Sporting playing away at Juve in the Champs League.

 

And living on JSA...

 

Life can be so cruel.

 

 

 

[Vocey]

The more I think about it, the less I blame Shakespeare, and feel he was harshly dealt with.

 

the general running of the club is awful, and if it doesn’t change, we will get relegated in the next 3-5 years. You cannot continue having awful transfer windows where the squad gets weaker with each one, we are going backwards. I don’t see how any manager could get long term consistent results in these circumstances. 

 

The club needs a shake up from top to bottom, unfortunately I don’t see it happening, so we will continue to slowly slide down the league. Yes we won the league a couple of years ago, but instead of using that as a platform to be a solid consistent top 8 side, we are using it as a crutch to hold up staff members making ever increasing bad decisions with no reprocussions. 

[FoxonMaui]

what is wrong? There are two parts to this question for me. First the simple issue, recruitment. We lost Kante, who was a game changing talent of such quality that he was virtually irreplaceable. To get him to come to us we were forced to give him a release clause and at the time it was at a number that seemed to be a safe bet. You cannot blame anyone for that, literally “who knew” we had probably  the best player in his position in the world at that the time of signing!! We had the chance to sign the second most (statistically) effective player in that position in our title winning season (Gueye) for a measly seven million and Walsh was rumored to want him signed and we signed Mendy!! MASSIVE mistake. Walsh leaves, MASSIVE mistake.

 

This transfer window we made only ONE massive mistake. The  sale of Drinkwater for $35m was good business ONLY if we brought in a better cheaper option. We signed  Adrien Silva who fits the bill, but we were 14 seconds late and if we had got him in in time it’s highly unlikely to me that we would be sitting on six points and have Shakey holding his P45. I feel we would be at least four points better off and exactly where we should be in the League. 

 

The second part part of the answer to the original post is more murky as it requires us fans to rely on guesswork as to how we wasted our good fortune to assemble a team that won the league by TEN points. For me Shakey is the sacrificial lamb here, it’s just not his fault, period. For me it’s so obvious. We have played since the start of the season without a proper midfield and paid for it every time. Without Silva we have no identity in the middle of the park. We all hate Henderson of Liverpool, but he was the difference in that game, we do not have anyone who can wrestle control of tight games for us. 

We look brittle and have no personality when it’s needed. Who is to blame for this? Recruitment, Macias, Rudkin, poor organization , failure to understand the fundamentals of what is needed to win at the PL level. Naievity on the part of our owners? All of these could be contributors. Even our senior players? Somehow I doubt the latter as they proved last season after Ranieri wa sacked that they could win when allowed to play to their strengths. You cannot blame the players for screwing up the Silva purchase, something that hobbled our chances for a good start to the season. 

If it was me in charge I would fire Rudkin and or Macias ASAP. The business man in me would have no choice. You cannot run a successful operation without accountability at the top. Failure to make you senior executives accountable destroys moral in the rank and file. Our owners must take action or the rot will consume our beloved club. Gary Lineker is right, it’s a shambles , Marco Silva was the manager we should have brought in and we should have kept Shakey as his number two if at all possible. This was our third major mistake and now we are going to pay heavily for it.