Marti IN

[murphy]

1 hour ago, Greg2607 said:

The Case for his defence - 

 

He's been handed a dud hand at a difficult period for our club.  It's clear we are financially screwed at the minute and have no "muscle" in the transfer market. 

 

We also clearly have a DOF who hasn't cleared enough of the deadwood, making our ability to bring in replacements particularly difficult. 

 

The transfers we have made, have seemed positive.  James, Ramsey, both seems decent additions. 

 

Carranza is a bargain basement loan which hasn't / won't work out. 

 

Outside of that, he doesn't have much at his disposal does he.  An impotent strike force.  An unbalanced squad.  

 

Defensive full backs who aren't going to be an attacking threat. 

 

Centre backs who none of us rate outside of Nelson.  

 

A midfield with a single attacking threat.  None of winks, skipp, soumare or Hamza provide a goal threat. 

 

Admittedly, Fatawu and Mavididi do provide attacking intent, but where else in our squad does it come from?

 

IF he had transfer windows and an opportunity to bring his type of players in, who knows what a difference that could make. 

That's not a case for defending Marti that's just a list of all the other things that are wrong. 

[SouthStandUpperTier]

Marti IN!

Marti IN O'Neill!

Marti IN!

Marti IN O'Neill!

Marti IN!

Marti IN O'Neill!

Marti IN!

Marti IN O'Neill!....

[Lesterlad]

5 hours ago, whoareyaaa said:

he started Nelson

He also started with Ayew 

Edited 6 November 2025 by Lesterlad

[AyewJoking]

2 hours ago, Greg2607 said:

The Case for his defence - 

 

He's been handed a dud hand at a difficult period for our club.  It's clear we are financially screwed at the minute and have no "muscle" in the transfer market. 

 

We also clearly have a DOF who hasn't cleared enough of the deadwood, making our ability to bring in replacements particularly difficult. 

 

The transfers we have made, have seemed positive.  James, Ramsey, both seems decent additions. 

 

Carranza is a bargain basement loan which hasn't / won't work out. 

 

Outside of that, he doesn't have much at his disposal does he.  An impotent strike force.  An unbalanced squad.  

 

Defensive full backs who aren't going to be an attacking threat. 

 

Centre backs who none of us rate outside of Nelson.  

 

A midfield with a single attacking threat.  None of winks, skipp, soumare or Hamza provide a goal threat. 

 

Admittedly, Fatawu and Mavididi do provide attacking intent, but where else in our squad does it come from?

 

IF he had transfer windows and an opportunity to bring his type of players in, who knows what a difference that could make. 

bollocks- he knew what he was getting into 

 

[gurru991]

1 minute ago, Lesterlad said:

He also started with Ayew 

Lets be honest... There are only so many deck chairs that he can re-arrange !! He knows he's on the Titanic...

[Sly]

MARTI IN …. the job centre? 

[Katy]

6 hours ago, honeybradger said:

The main case i have for Marti is that he has gotten to experience first hand how poor much of this squad is and will be well aware of where we need to improve.

 

Yes it's taken him way too long to give Nelson his first league start but now he's made it into the team hopefully he becomes a regular. 

 

Im worried that if we bring in a new manager that we're back at square one where he's trying to get a tune out of the senior pros again before turning to the academy players and we've wasted another 3 months of not integrating the young talents into the matchday squad.

 

 

This is my concern also. I say give him the next window and give it time to settle. 

[Lesterlad]

On 06/11/2025 at 00:17, gurru991 said:

Lets be honest... There are only so many deck chairs that he can re-arrange !! He knows he's on the Titanic...

Well I hope he jumps ship asap

[inckley fox]

The best argument I can come up with in his defence is that it's amazing how many baffling decisions even good managers make when they're scrambling for solutions.

 

When there is a huge amount wrong at a club, from incompetence 'upstairs' to incompetence and apathy among the players (regardless of their experience, their wages or one-time price tags) and unrest on the terraces, there's rarely a sense of clarity from a manager on the best short-term way forward. Look at some of Pearson's selections in 2011/12, when the board's big-money Sven experiment went wrong, the squad was packed with overpaid dross and the fans were growing disillusioned. It took time for him to unravel, and there were plenty of moments when people said 'what on earth is he doing now?' or 'there's no apparent improvement in the team or in individuals'.

 

On the other hand, I don't get the sense that Cifuentes has any sort of a handle on the chaos. We can't dominate games and yet select players like Ayew who, for all his qualities (and there are some), instantly breaks down our own counters. He did it on two separate occasions in the minutes before we conceded on Tuesday. There are individuals who needed putting in their place after having been negative influences in the past (e.g. Winks, Vestergard) who, whether they're rightly in the line-up or not, have also been rewarded with the captain's armband. There's the sidelining of most youth players, with their potential cameos instead going to the likes of Reid, Skipp, Choudhury and Kristiansen. There's a system which is slow, rigid, predictable. There's the peculiar exclusion of Nelson. There's the equally weird notion that our worst passer of the ball, in Okoli, might work as a full back pushing up into midfield. There's James being shifted into the ten role when he's done perfectly well sitting deeper, in order to accommodate Soumare. There's Carranza, who doesn't look like a footballer at all thus far. I could go on.

 

In his defence, I'd say that the mandate he was given was primarily to get the best out of a set of senior players who, the owner maintained, were at very least too good for this league. I base that on Top's language when Cooper was fired, which implied that he believed these players to be better than their league position suggested - a view shared, oddly, by some on here. I think that belief persisted, and Cifuentes has done his best to get a tune out of the established senior pros. And, while you're doing that, it's inevitable that people will find themselves saying 'how does he still get a game?' when you're dropping Soumare for Skipp, or Skipp for Winks, or Faes for Okoli, or Ayew for Daka, or Thomas for Kristiansen. You move one player out who long-since burnt his bridges with the fanbase and the next guy in line is someone else who is equally despised. And overriding it all is the fact that our recruitment, our finances, our managerial appointments have been so damaging for so long that you can't simply click your fingers and snap out of it. Did Maresca do that, or did he have better players at his disposal and the money for something of a reset? And even then, it was starting to revert to type towards the end of his tenure.

 

I have a degree of sympathy for Cifuentes on those scores, even if I'm seriously unimpressed, and strongly suspect that any man who Top and Rudkin deem ideal for the job is probably the last thing on earth that we need.

[Dahnsouff]

1 hour ago, Lesterlad said:

Well I hope he jumps ship asap

He may, but we will still be on board the Titanic

[Joe90]

1 minute ago, Dahnsouff said:

He may, but we will still be on board the Titanic

Very good 🤣

[gurru991]

4 hours ago, Lesterlad said:

Well I hope he jumps ship asap

The two clowns running the circus will just replace him with someone equally incompetent. I really don't care who the manager is as long as Bozo & Koko are in charge

[Dahnsouff]

19 minutes ago, gurru991 said:

The two clowns running the circus will just replace him with someone equally incompetent. I really don't care who the manager is as long as Bozo & Koko are in charge

Unsure which one is which, but one of them needs to sack the other and get an experienced footballing DoF in to replace them.

[CornwallFox]

On 05/11/2025 at 19:12, murphy said:

This thread is obviously supposed to be bit of fun, but it made me wonder, can anyone make a case for Marti?  Is there anything positive we could credit him for?  I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

No, I can't. But then maybe that's something that comes with hindsight when his time here ends. Not many at the time have Puel any credit but actually some of the recruitment was fantastic (admittedly Macia had a lot to do with that - he was our biggest loss btw) and he did start us down the road towards the kind of football that should have seen us champions League regulars under Rodgers if we didn't have a group of bottlers. 

[CrazyKopCorner]

He is very likeable. More than our previous 2 dip sticks but his selections and tactics have been woeful. 
 

we are the Titanic so there’s shame in it for him

[OntarioFox]

I just realised we went a full game without having to watch Boubakare Soumare pretend to play football yesterday.

 

Green shoots. 

 

Edited 9 November 2025 by OntarioFox