Yeah Hogan not Gordon
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I completely agree. If we hired him on the proviso that he would be here for multiple years, to really build something with us, and he buggers off to chase more money, it is very poor indeed.
If we have been unhappy with his performance and he’s looking elsewhere because we have told him to, that’s another story.
As for the genuine of the rumors, I haven’t got a clue. It seemed fairly solid that he was approached by Al Hilal, but I’m not exactly what to think any more.
Hughes. Edwards. Slot. That’s a lot of question marks right now.
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Anyone thinking that Jörg Schmadtke was really underrated now?
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Why? He had a very limited brief, acting primarily as a negotiator rather than decision maker on personnel issues
I’m starting to see that as a positive.
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The current set up doesn’t work. If the plan was for the Sporting Director to identify and sign good players and then the Head Coach formulates a style to get the best out of them then its been a failure. Slot has a gameplan (apparently) and the players he has can’t function in it.
Gravenberch is a good example. Hughes failed to sign Zubimendi so Slot used Gravy as the DM and he was boss. Hughes then looks at the squad and says we don’t need a DM now because we’ve got Ryan. Then Slot uses him in a different way this season and it now looks like we do need another DM in the summer.
The whole structure needs ripping up.
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We don’t know whose decision that ultimately was though - for all we know, Arne may have been the one to say he didn’t need another DM
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Unless Hughes purposely went against what Arne was asking for I’m not sure he deserves that much criticism here - most of us believe that the coach should be able to get more out of the players in the current squad than he has been.
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That is definitely true, as it was the thinking when Klopp signed. It also highlighted the areas where he couldn’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.
The problem at the moment is that I don’t think there is any synergy between the coaching staff and the football directors. They have gone out and signed some very good players, but there doesn’t appear to be any clear plan as to how they are used.
My point with Schmadtke is that he appeared to be landing players to a plan.
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That could be true mate. Complete failure on the coaching if thats the case.
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In my current role I took over a project that was about 12 months into development with about 6 months from completion. Some of it didn’t make sense to me but I was the new guy so my role was to spend that 6 months coming to understand what we were doing and why this plan made sense while I oversaw the delivery of it. We delivered what we were supposed to and found my earlier confusion was not because I was too new to understand the problem space but because the plan was in fact a pretty stupid one. Everyone executed as they were supposed to but it was the wrong direction from the start.
That is how I think about Slot’s plan to evolve this team. He had ideas about what his new team would look like, which players didn’t fit, what he needed in return, and was supported richly in that area, and it’s just landed flat
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We were also told that one of the main reasons that we went for Slot in the first place was because he played a similar style to that of Klopp and so we wouldn’t have to implement a new style of play throughout the Club.
But somewhere around the PSG defeat Slot seemingly decided we needed to change. I honestly don’t know if Slot knows exactly what he wants to do with our players or what players he wants to perform the way he wants.
When we were looking at players to buy last summer does anybody have any idea what Slot would have needed to implement the ‘new and improved’ style of play he decided on? How much does it add to the difficulty in purchasing players if even the manager/head coach doesn’t know what way he’s going to be playing through the season?
We’re almost at the end of the season and a year after those PSG matches last season and instead of a cohesive game plan we keep looking like eleven blokes playing together for the first time in the majority of games.
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I wouldn’t go that far, but it needs to be hammered into shape.
The manager/head coach and the sporting director should be aligned on what the squad needs. It should then be the SDs job to work with analysts and scouts to identify the right players to meet that need. And then the managers job to make those players work as a team.
I don’t get the impression that this is really working at the minute.
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This is pretty much how I see it. He’s trying to move the side into a different place but something got lost somewhere.
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He’s never played the kind of high-octane football that Klopp does; even last season, large swathes of the match were deadly dull. He won the title thanks to an excellent squad from Klopp and the fact that City completely collapsed; without that, we wouldn’t have been champions.
Now that he’s brought in £450m worth of new players, he has no idea what to do with them.
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I tend to disagree if I’m honest.
But the reasons why he sought rest didn’t particularly resolve themselves come the end of the season and now they just look unfit.
This is so true. It doesn’t get mentioned enough that had Man Cheaty had a normal season for them then we would not have one. Others being shit contributed more to our league win than gets often mentioned. That’s not our problem though and Arne will always go down in our history.
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They’ve had a second normal season then this season.
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No it’s a third abnormal season within the context of a normal season, once it’s been factored in that thrice in the last normal season they have been slightly above what we now consider to be the benchmark of normality, where by normal becomes the staus quo.
I think we’ll really be able to asses these years in retrospect, but this is what I suspect is the case.
I think it’s the opposite of a shit league, both last season and this season. I think it’s phenomenally strong right down to the relegation places, and while that doesn’t mean that over a longer sample the bigger teams won’t naturally finish near the top, it does mean that each game is more of a lottery. It might meant that while say, Liverpool v West Ham would be maybe 80% in Liverpool’s favour, it’s more like 60% now.
This is because there is now so much money in the Premier league at every level, every team is able to build a competitive squad, and also be much less prone to having that squad picked off by other clubs with more money.
Maybe there isn’t the strength there to have four or five teams able to twat half the league without really trying. But that, in my opinion, is because the league is just much more equitable and the quality gap between top and bottom is nowhere near as great as it was.
Looking at last year as we only won it because everyone else is was shit is not fair. We coped better with the strength through the league than anyone else did. This year Arsenal have done the same, albeit by embracing the fine margins nature of playing a team that can beat you every week and looking set pieces.