Ex Lion Tamer

Are you sure?

According to Transfermarkt, Piroe has been playing as an attacking midfielder, which seems bizarre

I don't have any detailed justification but it didn't feel like a penalty to me. I'm very much enjoying the absence of VAR. I do wonder if it's because we're now a big team in this league and getting all the favourable decisions.

Alcaraz has underperformed my expectations even relative to the other players around him. He doesn't look the player we saw last season

Adam is now halfway to target 😁 Can't say much for my other predictions, of course

Pochettino was a great systems manager who got us overachieving and laid the ground for Koeman. The fact is that if you look at our squad, it probably is playoff level. We've got too many players with big potential but who aren't ready now. Maybe our new striker will make a difference, but at the moment we've got Sulemana, Edozie, Bazunu, Charles, Alcaraz alongside some decent Championship players like Smallbone, Bednarek, Manning. So while i'm not sure the system is helping us to overacheive, I'm not sure it's the big hindrance people think it is. We are where we are because that's the level of our players.

I'm still in the dark about what actually happened

I forgot all about this kid. Looks like he's finally nailed down a starting spot in the Swiss Super League by going on loan to FC Winterthur.

We've had four managers in 15 months, we can't keep going like this

Not sure about previous seasons but i can believe that this summer he just found the idea of a transfer exciting and now he's had to stay he has lost some motivation

Saw this on Twitter. Looking at the replies, can it really be true that Chivers, Bridge and Benali are the only options? You'd think the city would have produced a lot more

So playing a posession game isn't the problem, it's doing it well

What Leicester do?

How do you propose that we break down teams that sit back and defend against us?

I agree that passing can football can be boring. I got pretty tired of watching Barcelona although at times they could be thrilling too. Do you really not understand the point of having goalkeepers and defenders passing though? It's to draw the opposition forward and out of their shape to leave spaces to attack. Breaking teams down who've come to defend is something we've been woeful at for several seasons, and while it can look silly when it doesn't come off, it's a tactic we need to learn

Mourinho had a lot of success with counter attacking football but tactics evolved to nullify it, which is why he's a lot less successful as a manager these days

Passing football isn't a guarantee of success. But it's a way of playing that can be successful. Our failure to be top of the league doesn't mean passing football doesn't work. It means we're not well drilled enough, or we're not doing it quite right, or the players aren't good enough. No one ever said 70% possession stats would mean we win. That's a straw man that has been invented on this forum. However it can enhance your changes if you do it right and your strikers stick the ball in the net when they get the chance. It's the blanket dismissal of passing football that I find strange, especially given it has been around for decades

Does it work for Man City? Did it work for Liverpool in the 80s?

Fans not liking passing football and thinking it doesn't work is one of the more surprising things I've seen on this forum

The passing game is the one thing that Bazunu is good at! And he hasn't had that many shots to save in recent games, he just lets in too many of the ones that do come to him

And yet you think we have a team that should be getting automatic promotion. How do we mount a promotion push with a poor goalkeeper, wingers who don't have a final ball, a centre back prone to bad errors (Bednarek), and so on and so on. How is it Russell Martin's fault that he's been given these players to work with?

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/54/8/480

I think we were only prepared to spend the money on Piroe if Che left. That didn't happen, so we went for the cheaper, riskier option

Is our team really promotion worthy though? If you compare like for like then it's significantly worse than the one that we got promoted with before. I'm on the fence about Martin but I'm not sure fans are being realistic about the squad we have either. It's got lots of potential in it, but it's quite far off where it needs to be. Really it's a playoff team. Then you come to the fact that their keeper played a blinder and we could easily have won 4-1, and I'm not sure it makes sense to lay it all at the manager's door