coalman

By tying down Stephens, Smallbone, BBD, Armstrong to new long term contracts?

Can the future be being sold, loaned or having their contracts run down, please? Though keep Armstrong for this season.

Nobody hit more 2 yard passes than Bednarek last year.

He's getting the bravery in possession going sooner than expected

Too right. If the mods have to hound people it's going to get ruff

Sorry. Wasn't suggesting you were just saying that giving Stephens a new contract is akin to extending Armstrong now.

Whole lotta no and it depends for Stewart and Taylor

In the same way as with Stephens that doesn't mean we should be offering them new contracts ahead of this season.

At some point we'll realise our players look so good in training because of the standard of opposition.

He appeared in 19 out of 38 premier league games last season. He was suspended for 9 matches of the season. Not sure you can afford your captain to be unavailable for a quarter of the season. 6 of those matches were for a combination of hair pulling and mouthing off to the referee. Is that the example you want to set to new and inexperienced players? The season before he started less than half the games (17). The season before none because he was out on loan. Season before 13 starts. Season before 9 starts. It doesn't exactly scream first name on the team sheet. I don't see how he needs a new contract to talk about the importance of the Pompey games.

If he's trying to assess leadership and influence he kind of does. And if he's rocked up and had everyone bending his ear about what a great leader Stephens is he needs to do his due diligence. One of the key parts of his job is trying to understand "why were we shit?" because he can't come up with a sane plan until he understands that. It turns out that you can't do that if you're alienating people by having them think you're not giving people a fair chance.

Part of the trouble of going into a low performing organisation is that no one thinks they are low performing which leads to an inflated opinion of the people in leadership roles. I have taken over teams where the initial feedback from people in the team about a particular person is that they are great. It takes time to work through that but you kind of have to operate on trust until you can verify it. In some respects you can't rock the boat until you have data. That being said - I always assumed that low performance comes from the top and I have yet to be disappointed in that viewpoint. The old saying that "As hire As and Bs hire Cs" probably applies here. It's one of the reason why turning around a broken organisation is so hard because the people doing the hiring ARE the problem. By the same token you also run into the Dead Sea Effect where your lose your best talent and keep your mediocrity and thus mediocrity becomes institutionalised.

Even if they aren't jetlagged when they play us - they will be jetlagged when they're training to play us.

https://www.thewrexhaminsider.com/transfer-news/phil-parkinson-comments-on-whether-wrexham-would-fly-potential-signings-to-australia/ Wrexham have very generously flown out to Australia for their pre-season games. Have to wonder how that's going to affect their physical preparation as Australia jet lag is no joke.

Dead on the inside.