MON?

[Clogger_]

Hard one to work out is Martin. Clever, great speaker, even greater self-publicist, and did *very* well for us. Undeniably one of our very best ever managers. Despite this I never truly warmed to him, but I'm not entirely sure why. Maybe it's because he's so damned chippy?! Maybe it's something about the somewhat agricultural style of football? Maybe it's because he never really bought into our club. I reckon he had/has a personal style that'd work well with a particular type of footballer, which he did *very* well to recruit in numbers at City

[Leicesterpool]

Martin is a very old school manager, if the team is winning games it's less likely he will make changes. He may not be a tactics expert but I think he gets the best of players in terms of motivation. It seems like he knows how to get on players in his side, he seems to handle players with big egos pretty well. You look back at the likes of Larsson and John Carew they just seem to love Martin. Back to his Leicester days, even the hardest players MON knew how to keep them in line. Where his weakness may fail, he's not a modern day fitness manager, he's not to fussed about what players eat or drink to Martin it's all about what you can do on Saturday. 

 

On the current situation with the Foxes he could be good working with the likes of Winks and get him motivated again. Number of players in squad that are low in confidence or high in egos that are not performing just need that MON lift. 

[Product of 84]

5 hours ago, Leicesterpool said:

Martin is a very old school manager, if the team is winning games it's less likely he will make changes. He may not be a tactics expert but I think he gets the best of players in terms of motivation. It seems like he knows how to get on players in his side, he seems to handle players with big egos pretty well. You look back at the likes of Larsson and John Carew they just seem to love Martin. Back to his Leicester days, even the hardest players MON knew how to keep them in line. Where his weakness may fail, he's not a modern day fitness manager, he's not to fussed about what players eat or drink to Martin it's all about what you can do on Saturday. 

 

On the current situation with the Foxes he could be good working with the likes of Winks and get him motivated again. Number of players in squad that are low in confidence or high in egos that are not performing just need that MON lift. 

This. 

 

I was thinking about how MON managed Parker and how Winks could be similar. If Parker wasn't fit/didn't run he didn't play. 

 

MON played Savage over 'stars' repeatedly even though we were booing his name on the team sheet. He sticks with players. Especially, youngsters. He simplified the game for Savage. Get the ball and pass it to a better player. Which gave Savage a career on ability he probably didn't deserve. I think MON would do wonders for our Youth. 

 

I can't see him needing to buy players for a while. So we need a man manager to work with what we have. 

 

I also believe, if we were fortunate enough to get MON, everyone around him would have to step up. If he couldn't make it work I don't think we the fans would be as quick to look at sacking the manager but really get on the players and hierarchy's back.

 

I simply think he'd be great for where we currently are. And if he isn't I can't see what we lose. Another season in the Championship; which I don't think would hurt? Relegation? A lot of us are stressing about that possibility anyway. 

[Katy]

Undecided. Loved him obviously, I never knew any kind of success before him (grew up in the Pleat era) but I’m not sure even he could do anything with this lot. On the other hand I’d be really intrigued to find out, he couldn’t do any worse could he?

[Nickaj]

2 hours ago, Katy said:

Undecided. Loved him obviously, I never knew any kind of success before him (grew up in the Pleat era) but I’m not sure even he could do anything with this lot. On the other hand I’d be really intrigued to find out, he couldn’t do any worse could he?

 

 

No he probably couldn't do any worse but, for me, the main thing is I have the feeling that it would all be enormously entertaining watching him get to grips with some of the characters in our team. With Rudkin too.....

[Blue ROI]

Celtic is appealing for someone like O Neill given the historical ties to his homeland.

 

And the advantages Celtic have in their league is more attractive than ours (with the exception of the hierarchy maybe)

 

The ties are nothing like what they are with Celtic and with our fools in top with no clue what they are doing why would you bother?

[BigGibbo]

We need him, or Pearson or Walsh to come back as a director and fix the club  heirarchy and structure, etc first before any manager can affect anything.

[Raj]

NO.

Hes a legend for us.

He still hates us abit because of the Sheff U game( Not the one  a few weeks ago!!).

Definitely  up there as one of our greatest managers having endured  a terrible start and some of his players will always make the greatest lcfc 11 team.

 

Let's not feck a legendary status as only lcfc can

[Muzzy_no7]

Said it multiple times already but I’d rather Pearson than MON.

[winteriscoming]

Don’t tarnish the reputation of this great man. 
Absolute zero chance he comes back to this shit show of a club. Same with Pearson. 
As I’ve said numerous times Mowbray till the end of the season makes sense. 
 

[STEVIE B]

Surely any Manager with a bit of self respect wouldn't come to this basket case. Word must have got around by now that we're a circus. 

On the flip side, we would probably offer a ridiculous amount of money, even though we probably can't afford it. 

[bovril]

15 hours ago, boots60 said:

Just read his latest book The Changing Game & the game has definitely not passed him by as his interim spell at Celtic confirms.

His finger is firmly on the pulse of modern management.

Along with Claudio, the best man manager we have ever had. 

Offer him a contract until the end if the season, a few quid to strengthen in January & watch us improve dramatically.

Sadly I doubt the club would ever consider such an offer to him.

 

Thanks. To be honest I was just parroting what a lot of people say about him, perhaps in a subconscious attempt to avoid coming across as too much of a MON fanboy. Will definitely read the book. 

[Trav Le Bleu]

For anyone suggesting MON because of his recent stint at Celtic, I'd like to say this...

 

Steve Cooper, Ruud van Nistelrooy and Marti Cifuentes could all manage Celtic to the SPL title.

[RumbleFox]

I love MON. He’s one of our all time legends and I fell in love with that team completely. Many of those guys are still my favourite players and I loved everything about MON when he was here. I still think that team that beat Sunderland 5-2 (before everything fell apart) is the biggest “what if” I’ve ever seen. We looked SOOOOOO good that day. If he came back I would love it. But also. It’s probably a terrible idea isn’t it? He’s too old and been out for too long. A relegation battle in the championship is not the same as a few weeks at Celtic. And I don’t think he’d even want to come, he doesn’t need the stress. Love him, always will. But he should probably steer clear. 

[BigGibbo]

12 minutes ago, winteriscoming said:

Don’t tarnish the reputation of this great man. 
Absolute zero chance he comes back to this shit show of a club. Same with Pearson. 
As I’ve said numerous times Mowbray till the end of the season makes sense. 
 

Mowbray is not a bad shout at this point when you understand how broken the club is. 

 

At this point we need a whole team of people with deep footballing knowledge, who can ignore Top, shitcan Rudkin, & rebuild the club, before we can dream again.

 

Even if they are only willing to do it as an SOS/interim job. Something like:

 

Director of Football (basically need to do the MDs job as well re everything that affects the football/club structure): MON/Pearson

Chief Scout: Walsh

Manager: Mowbray

Chief medical/physio: Dave Rennie

 

[sulfoxide]

1 hour ago, BigGibbo said:

We need him, or Pearson or Walsh to come back as a director and fix the club  heirarchy and structure, etc first before any manager can affect anything.

Pearson the man who wouldn't play Albrighton, despite the team really needing his passing ability?

[5waller5]

On 27/12/2025 at 10:15, oz was my hero said:

I don't think it would  work anyway. When he was with us he had players that would run into a battle in walsh , players that wanted to win on the way up like lennon, muzzy, elliot, Heskey.  They were all progressing.  This bunch of shit is regressing. On their ways down picking up pay days. Half on their way out in may with no ****s given. To play all the kids may destroy  them. The club really is in the shit.

Apart from Walsh he signed or debuted those players. He didn’t have them from the off

[BigGibbo]

30 minutes ago, sulfoxide said:

Pearson the man who wouldn't play Albrighton, despite the team really needing his passing ability?

Is that your takeaway from his reign? Really?

 

I didn't even put him as manager either - just a no-nonsense man who understands football and the club and probably already knows exactly what went wrong and where and how to fix it. 

[inckley fox]

11 hours ago, Leicesterpool said:

Martin is a very old school manager, if the team is winning games it's less likely he will make changes. He may not be a tactics expert but I think he gets the best of players in terms of motivation. It seems like he knows how to get on players in his side, he seems to handle players with big egos pretty well. You look back at the likes of Larsson and John Carew they just seem to love Martin. Back to his Leicester days, even the hardest players MON knew how to keep them in line. Where his weakness may fail, he's not a modern day fitness manager, he's not to fussed about what players eat or drink to Martin it's all about what you can do on Saturday. 

 

On the current situation with the Foxes he could be good working with the likes of Winks and get him motivated again. Number of players in squad that are low in confidence or high in egos that are not performing just need that MON lift. 

Like others, you've made some strong points. I'd just add a few caveats.

 

First, the whole notion of what a good 'tactician' means. It used to be a manager who was knowledgeable of different styles / systems / shapes, found the one which best suited their personnel, and would then occasionally make the tight tweaks for the right occasion. Now it often seems to mean much the opposite - someone who has a specific and often distinct system which is their own trademark, and which they unvaryingly impose on their players until it's well-learnt. There's no 'horses for courses' to it. And to be honest, I'm not sure how effective a tactician you are if you're so inflexible.

 

O'Neill certainly found systems which suited his players, and it wasn't always the same shape or style from one club to the next. It didn't tend to vary much from there on in (unlike, you could argue, Pearson who went from an industrial, direct 4-4-2 to a 4-3-3, then later from a more possession-based 4-4-2 to a whole raft of experiments upon promotion, finally settling on a quick and quite attacking 3-4-1-2). Where O'Neill got himself a name for being old school and tactically unstudied was in (a) actually getting old and (b) using his platform to decry modern footballing jargon, and point out that terms like 'high press' / 'between the lines' / 'transitions' were just flashy names being applied to old concepts. I think some people mistook that for him rejecting the worth of modern changes in the game when he was really just pointing out that, for instance, the recent popularity of the long throw isn't an innovation.

 

The second point is about fitness. You're right in what you say, but some of his 'old school' notions weren't actually too unhelpful back in the day. Part of this relates to a conversation I had some years back with a coach who'd worked in La Liga, when I mentioned that a lot of our players seemed less fit nowadays than the old O'Neill era side which Izzet once called 'the best pub side in England'. Be that as it may, they were renowned for their running and their ability to claw back results late in games, and with very little rotation. He said that it was very, very possible, simply because some managers spent so much time working on shape that fitness was largely left to other departments. This was the accusation under Sousa - every session was shape, shape, shape with fitness issues left for individuals and the sports science department to fret over, with hefty rotation the answer to any problems which came up. Consequently players complained that we spent no time working on the basics and couldn't last ninety minutes either. O'Neill might not have dedicated a great deal of time and energy to fitness either (from what I heard, Robertson / Walford spent more time coaching set pieces than anything else) but they were literally dropped off at a military base at the start of pre-season for a couple of weeks of sheer hell to make sure they were fit. That's no use to us now, but it demonstrates that even a bunch of boozers can be fitter than a set of players with cutting-edge sports science at hand, if priorities get lost.

 

The third is when it comes to players like Winks. Yes, O'Neill could get players back on board, but it's worth remembering that they had to want to. The likes of Corica never wanted to and were quickly cast aside. As for Parker, the story went that - before the point where he got on famously with O'Neill - he 'threw the tea' at him during a half-time bust-up, and was stripped of the captaincy and even briefly transfer-listed in the aftermath. So there are no guarantees that Faes, Soumare and Winks would have the strength of character to deal with that in the way Parker did.

 

As for whether it would ever work, or could ever happen - that's very debatable. Do we need someone to try to bring those players back on board or, given that there isn't a great deal of time left on some of their contracts, do we need to be putting any potential short-term benefits to one side and moving on from them? And, given that they've fallen foul of several consecutive managers, should even a short-term fixer be wasting time on them? O'Neill, as we all know, is capable of a very slow start when the squad needs a lot of work, so is he the right man for the task? Would he even entertain the idea when his Celtic stint makes a higher level SOS job a real possibility for him? Indeed, might the only way of attracting him to the job be to offer him a longer-term option, if he makes good progress?

[Leicesterpool]

2 hours ago, Muzzy_no7 said:

Said it multiple times already but I’d rather Pearson than MON.

I'm not sure Pearson is in good health to take the Leicester job or any manager's job. Wouldn't be surprised if Pearson is done with football now.

[VLC86]

His flat in the area has recently been redecorated apparently, as it does every year when we need a new manager.

[oz was my hero]

3 hours ago, 5waller5 said:

Apart from Walsh he signed or debuted those players. He didn’t have them from the off

I know that, but what im saying is this lot if entitled  pricks don't give a monkeys and he'd only have to work with the lot he's got. We're not replacing 90 percent of this team in January.  

[Chrysalis]

He isnt a Top type manager so wont even be considered.

[TamuffFox]

8 hours ago, VLC86 said:

His flat in the area has recently been redecorated apparently, as it does every year when we need a new manager.