saintwbu

Like when we appointed Hughes, and sent down the club he’d come from? Also parallels with an FA Cup tie against lower league opposition round the corner too!

Or the previous manager’s training methods given that Bamford and Phillips were repeatedly injured all last season, and he’s known for having had a pretty intense approach.

Exactly. Marco Silva, Sean Dyche, Eddie Howe and David Moyes all have PL relegations on their CV’s but i’m sure most would take any one of them with open arms.

The last time we appointed a recently sacked Premier League manager it was laughed at by his previous club. He kept us up and they went down…

Thought it was Crocker who’s off? Think it’s widely accepted that Jones was Ankersen’s man given his admiration for him when at Brentford, if our interest in JM predates SR’s arrival then it feels to me like we probably always fancied him as Ralph’s successor (as did I when he got the Leipzig job) and now maybe that element of the board had the push on this one.

Is it fair to say this was an appointment that maybe allowed Semmens to get back involved? It’s basically Ralph lite, and considering this weird 5 at the back obsession we seem to have had since the summer, this feels like maybe a move back to the old way of doing things because the new way was shit.

It’d be great to get a more impressive hire than Marsch, but it’s not the reality of the situation we’re in. If you framed it as ‘we’re going to get a manager with Champions League experience at two different clubs, as well as managing in two of the top 5 leagues in Europe with PL experience’ people would wonder how we’ve managed to pull that off in our current predicament. Don’t get me wrong I have my doubts over whether Marsch is as good as I thought he might be when he first got the Leeds job, but equally i’d be sure he’s not coming here for money but for a chance to prove that he is in fact PL level and it’s probably his last chance. His style is something a lot of our players will be familiar with, he’s not going to play 3 CB’s thankfully, and i’m fairly confident he won’t fall out with one of our best CB’s and leave him in the B team. So if he can put an 11 out that mostly resembles our best 11, can bin off Bednarek, and can bring some kind of feel good (as much as is realistically possible in our current state) back into the fans then he gets the nod from me.

Not a fan of Premier League football then?

That’s obviously fine

I really can’t believe people are entertaining the idea of Gerrard - thankfully i’m pretty sure he won’t be hitting any statistical tick boxes for the board, unless ‘number of wins in a shit league’ really is the top one (it might be, given Jones got the job).

The think that probably works in our favour now as opposed to last season with this style is we have better quality on the bench to bring on. We now have genuine alternative in most positions if we were going to play 4222 and the ability to use 5 of them.

Apart from the fact that analytics is an integral element of his approach to football, to such an extent he’s been caught sending coaches to spy on opposition training…

If we appoint another manager with a back 3 as his favoured formation then it was definitely the board making Ralph work on a back 3 all summer and for the first game of the season - it must be.

The squad is a fit for Marsch because he plays a similar brand of football to Ralph, who has presided over this squad for the last 4 years or so. Many of the players were bought with 4222 in mind, and many of the newer players (Edozie, Sulemana, Alcaraz in particular) all seem like they would suit a set up like that. We don’t have a squad capable of playing 5 at the back, as has been proven repeatedly, and it’s not a formation I could ever see Marsch wanting to play. That’s why it’s potentially a decent fit…

He kept them up last year (Bielsa look like he was definitely taking them down) and they’re outside the relegation zone currently - they also had two games in hand when he got sacked. The fans there never wanted him (or anyone other than Bielsa), but actually I think his job there has been about okay overall.

Some of the reaction to him has been pretty embarrassing to be honest - I said it on here before, it’s not his fault he isn’t at the level required, he should never have been appointed by the board. It was the wrong man at the wrong time, and his career will pay the price for it so it’s not like he’s played us and going to ride off into the sunset. He came with good intentions, tried his best, and just wasn’t good enough ultimately. I’m not sure why people are trying to create some feud with the guy, the fans weren’t great to him and he wasn’t great to them back, it is what it is. The board need to get the next one right otherwise faith will be well and truly lost, if it hasn’t been already for most.

Pellegrino the worst for me, and the worst manager the Premier League has seen imo. Took over from a manager who got us 8th and nearly won a cup, whilst juggling Europe. Would’ve relegated us for certain, and then signed his mate for a record fee when he should’ve been sacked long before, then to compound it gets to take him on loan to whatever Spanish minnow he went to next - couldn’t write it really.

I’m pretty sure it did mention that Jones also scored high on it - i don’t think i’m imagining this, but maybe I am!

Doesn’t that Knutsen guy score really high in some kind of algorithm that clubs use to judge managerial suitability - i’m sure I read a headline about that once which is why he regularly gets linked with jobs. Maybe he’d be next, definitely attainable I would’ve thought.

You only had to be in the stadium a few years back at home to Watford when we were 1-0 down to know that atmosphere definitely can have an effect. I’ve never seen someone wanting the ground to swallow him up as much as McCarthy when he put the ball out of play after lots of fan pressure to stop messing about with it at the back. I’ve heard plenty of managers and players talking about the impact of crowds during games, and nervousness/confidence that come and goes as a result, so it always seems perplexing to always see people who don’t play at that level saying it doesn’t - presumably they’re people who boo and shout abuse during games.

Which isn’t anything i’ve disagreed with, but some on here are suggesting he hasn’t been up against it and that fans not being behind him won’t be a contributing factor to failure, which i’m sure it can be.

It is possible to think Jones probably won’t be a success here, and maybe shouldn’t still be in the job, but still also acknowledge that he has been up against it from day one. I think a lot of people wanted Ralph out in the belief that he might be replaced by someone a bit more of a name (which was unlikely to ever happen) who may galvanise the fanbase. As soon as it became clear that wouldn’t be the case, the mood changed. A lot of the rhetoric around NJ has been about ‘giving him a chance’ rather than openly backing him to be a success. That isn’t to excuse some of the performances, team selection and comments, but i think it would be disingenuous to suggest he’s had it easy since he walked in the door and to me there’s no doubt that some of his behaviour has come out of the way he’s felt treated by the fanbase (and sections of the media). Even the top managers have moments of madness in interviews & press conference - Klopp particularly - when things aren’t going their way, and that’s without feeling like 90% of the fanbase want you out and even sometimes are wishing you to fail. Jones probably won’t last much longer here, but it feels he has felt the brunt of a number of years of frustration from a pretty worn down fanbase, and I sympathise with him for that - he didn’t appoint himself, if he’s not up to it then that’s not his fault.

They’d have Bielsa back in a heartbeat and they used to get pasted regularly under him

He didn’t fail at Bournemouth, he did fail at Burnley - so his record was essentially the same as Jones’, except Jones didn’t have the huge spending power Howe had at Bournemouth. If Jones had taken over the unified and buoyant fanbase that Howe walked into at Newcastle, with a huge cash injection a month or two later, who knows how he’d have fared. If people were sceptical about Jones’ appointment then they would’ve been justified in being sceptical about Howe too (pre-Newcastle).

We seemed to have cut out the ‘collapse after conceding’ habit, no shock it’s back the last two games when he’s started. He is dire, I can’t believe he’s back.