the nascent appeal of managerial competency

the context being the more-or-less agreed supremacy of mourinho among current managers, personal corruption and recent failings notwithstanding, and the uncannily similar rise of his protegé andre villas boas. that neither of them played professionlly is notable but not entirely new, since sacchi himself never did either, but both are evidently rather more intelligent and technically adept than the average, and achieve their tactical determinism by extreme attention to detail. they aren't systematists in the vein of eastern european philosopher-coaches (zeman, lobanovskyi), and their program seems responsive to general trends and not at all prescriptive about how football ought to be played.

they seem altogether superior compared to a typical old school hack like say steve bruce, a deeply stupid man with an outsized sense of his own influence and a career largely founded on knowing when to jump ship before brief successes regress to the mean. entropy catches up with them, and a new generation of venerated ex players join the carousel, linked to each new vacancy and gradually exiled to thailand or azerbaijan.

the distrust of ~professional~ managers probably comes from a suspicion that players need one of their own in the trenches/coalface/etc, yet the uncommon blood brother spirit engendered by mourinho has invalidated that notion. this could become a trend, with charismatics and technocrats drawn from other fields and general managers feeling confident with appointing their own kin, and terrible narcissists like mourinho will mix with mba types and high functioning sportssciencebros in the upper reaches of their profession.

mou did play as professional iirc. just for short time, lower divisions etc.

but besides that pedantic, and perhaps wrong, point they didn't gleen their football knowledge from playing the game.

they both started as translators and later became opposition-scouts. taking copious notes on every aspect of the oppositions play. a more scientific or technical approach to the game. more rigorous perhaps? or maybe this is pure conjecture.

ya i'm not sure it's scientific as in some grand new praxis, just that they are much more assiduous, thorough and intelligent than the average manager.

i knew mourinho got a game or two for his dad's team, but i didn't realize he had played so much, including sixteen apps for LJ faves belenenses.

both are evidently rather more intelligent and technically adept than the average

Are there any good managers who aren't "intelligent"?

no

it's p obvious that mourinho is a cut above tho

A cut above Ferguson?

To name but one

But, ignore me, it's not about A's more intelligent than B

ya it's about a different type of manager

mourinho probably more intelligent than ferguson, but he's a wily old fuck himself and a complete anomaly within his generation

wenger is somewhere between the two

ferguson was cunning until he achieved full dictator status. Now, as is the wont with such men, he's a perpetually outraged bloated old cunt

Wenger only had 1 season of professional* football.

*He was an amateur for like 8 years though.

Also Mourinho will be a wily old fuck soon enough. Just a handsome one.

Yes, I don't think he's that different... or that intelligent for that matter

everything's relative, this is football

But yes, there are so many things wrong with the hiring practices of football clubs. The biggest, in my opinion, is that once a manager is sacked, they will go head on for 1 name and try to get him within 2 weeks. No-one is interviewed about their prospective plans for the club or what they think of it already etc. - they just jump in head first and hope they get a Harry Redknapp instead of a Avram Grant.

If clubs hired like, you know, a business would, I suspect you'd see a lot more comptenent managers oft with no real footballing background.

Tom who are you saying isn't that intelligent or different? Because if it is Wenger (or Fergie for that matter) then smh.

Nah, Jose

You asked: Is jose mourinho jewish?

You asked: Is jose mourinho a catholic?

I'm confused

Is mourinho really any more intelligent or technically adept than say del bosque or paisley? etc etc Or does he just portray himself that way and the fact that he seems to have come from 'outside' football (even thought that isn't the case) it is assumed that he must be a cut above and have something different about them.

I think how he reacts this summer will be telling when it comes to Mourinho. (Lke Sacchi, Real could be the breaking point.)

The thing we need to happen is the Maradona-takes-Napoli-to-the-title thing with managers to tell how good they are. It's why Clough is seen as the best. If Mourinho, for whatever reason, is no longer Real boss come next season, I want to see him take over Leyton Orient and if he can FM his way into the Champions League, then fine, he is the most intelligent and tactically proficient manager in history.

you're picking two exceptionally successful managers there, is the thing.

Intelligent and competent managers stand out in the epl, i think that's pretty certain. But if i think of eg fishing as a male dominated industry i've experience in, it's the same. The majority of promotion occurs from within the ranks, the pack leaders get the jobs. Professional management isn't welcome, regardless of how it would affect overall efficiency/performance, because there's still a strong element of protectionism associated with having one of 'your men' in charge.

Lol ramblings tho

xp porto

I was going to say that, but they're not Leyton Orient

where i do give mourinho credit is that I really don't think anyone could have done a better job than he did during his time at inter (i'm not including in that assessment developing players etc) just purely in producing results in that time frame with that group of players. I kinda think the same with regards to Chelsea. I don't think that AT ALL in the case of Real Madrid. So far.

no, but clough couldnt win the cl with notts forest today either

He might with Porto though!

xpost to darragh - lol ok but promotion rarely happens within? in the past five years there has been... tony adams, avram grant and steve kean? and those are all a case of assistants being called something more official than caretaker manager?

xpost to... darragh again - porto are by far the club in portugal with the most money and prestige? that's like the portuguese equiv. of being... real madrid manager.

xp mourinho's done a great job at real in every aspect but one- comparisons with barca

porto are by far the club in portugal with the most money and prestige?

I would have thought that would be Benfica?

becoming champion with a team from outwith one of the big leagues is a pretty big deal.

were they playing monaco in that final?

yup, 3-0.

Who was the Monaco manager?

Also I said 'into' the CL and not 'win' the CL. The likes of Toppmoller, Grant and Svara have all managed teams who made it to the CL final in the past ten years so I think we can agree that the competition depends on a degree of luck as well as great ability.

promotion from within the ranks of ex-players, not from within the club, sam

didier deschamps

i really don't see how he's done a great job at real tbh Not that I'm saying any manager could have got them to supplant Barca this season, just don't see any big improvement in the team compared to last few seasons.

Re: Benfica - the 3 decades leading up to Mourinho's time at Porto are called this by wikipedia

# 1.8 The silver era (1970–1994)
# 1.9 The dark years (1994–2003)

for a reason.

wasnt deschamps monaco manageer?

promotion from within the ranks of ex-players, not from within the club, sam

― socks & pwns may break my bwns (darraghmac), Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:38 (1 minute ago)

if i try to rmde at myself i'd be worried about them getting stuck some how

Deschamps took over during the season, which makes my point about Svara null and void.

but would be interesting if football management went the way of head coaching jobs in nfl, where the job seems so technical and complicated, to me anyway, that being an ex player is pretty far done the list of qualifications I'd imagine. It also appears to be a necessarily collaborative effort with untold assistants, gm's, salary cap experts etc etc

i really don't see how he's done a great job at real tbh Not that I'm saying any manager could have got them to supplant Barca this season, just don't see any big improvement in the team compared to last few seasons.

― pandemic

he got real to the semi. and lost the semi in part because of the sending off of pepe in the first-leg and the disallowed goal of pipita in the second, both fairly unlucky breaks in such big games.

precisely, pandemic

Jeez, i'm getting flashbacks to my 'history of management theory model' and frederick taylor etc, but it's probably v much the same thing

fair points jim.

Reminded of this OSM article from 2007, about the influence of Moneyball and management theory on English football.

but would be interesting if football management went the way of head coaching jobs in nfl, where the job seems so technical and complicated, to me anyway, that being an ex player is pretty far done the list of qualifications I'd imagine. It also appears to be a necessarily collaborative effort with untold assistants, gm's, salary cap experts etc etc

― pandemic, Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:42 (2 minutes ago)

I wouldn't be surprised if this is closer than most think? Especially considering the debt most are carrying to see the smarter clubs go this way. (We've already seen 'Moneyball''s influence, this would be step 2?)

The examples cited there:

Aidy Boothroyd at Watford, Iain Dowie at Charlton, Alan Pardew at West Ham and Pardew's protege Phil Parkinson at Hull

Before the season was half done, Pardew, Dowie and Parkinson had all been fired after terrible runs of results. Boothroyd's Watford were adrift at the bottom of the Premiership.

Footballers no fuck all about football is the thing. See Gerrard saying LFC let go of Murphy too soon and that if Arsenal had Carragher they'd be champions.

Argh, *know*. I obviously don't no hw ot splel.

This LRB article is relevant - http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n01/david-runciman/he-shoots-he-scores - discusses Mourinho's percentage-playing managerial pragmatism, but also notes his un-routinised charisma, in comparison with the even more pragmatic Rafa:

Mourinho has got one other thing going for him that no one who has watched him in action can fail to notice. He is astonishingly good-looking. Barclay is metrosexual enough to be able to discuss this without embarrassment, but he prefers to call it ‘presence’, comparing Mourinho to charismatic but hardly swoon-inducing men like Bill Shankly and Brian Clough. What he has in common with Clough and Shankly is that the players appear desperate to do whatever it takes to win his approval, like schoolgirls fighting for an approving glance from their favourite teacher.

See Gerrard saying LFC let go of Murphy too soon and that if Arsenal had Carragher they'd be champions.

shhh didn't want to bring that up in case ahoy hoy's head exploded!

yeah, mourinho definitely inspires love from his squads. him and materazzi crying when he left inter. this may be to do with charisma, it's hard to tell what he's like with the players as i can't imagine it is anything like the character he puts on with the media, but otoh it could be because he's a gaffer that will win you things, and players naturally respond to that.

lol i'd take carragher over squiggle

Yes, I don't think he's that different... or that intelligent for that matter

― Tom D has taken many months to run this thread to ground (Tom D.), Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:09 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

everything's relative, this is football

― socks & pwns may break my bwns (darraghmac), Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:11 (1 hour ago) Bookmark

^^^^^

but would be interesting if football management went the way of head coaching jobs in nfl, where the job seems so technical and complicated, to me anyway, that being an ex player is pretty far done the list of qualifications I'd imagine. It also appears to be a necessarily collaborative effort with untold assistants, gm's, salary cap experts etc etc

― pandemic, Tuesday, 10 May 2011 15:42 (1 hour ago)

i think it is heading in that direction

villas boas' promotion to manager from the backroom staff of another successful manager is a typical nfl trajectory (although with offensive/defensive co-ordinators there are more, and more demarcated/rationalized intermediate jobs)

pardew, boothroyd, dowie et al are all terrible managers and even worse people, a grim mixture of lower league clogger and management theory cant

pardew doing alright even having sold his best player tbf

he's shit

good lower level manager, which is another debate tbh

He's done worse in the lower leagues than in the Premiership, more often than not. Poor Charlton.

sorry, i meant 'good lower level manager'

I think that Newcastle team is just pretty good and is running along on its own momentum and the Pardew era will collapse as they realise he's a clown and he loses control of the rampaging egos and thugs and stupid haircuts that is Newcastle 2011.

next year's thread title

Feel like anybody could be Newcastle manager and they'd be doing exactly the same as they are now. Maybe not Shearer.

souness, b robson, shearer, gullit, yadda

newcastle currently winning their league battle: theyre above the mackems on goal difference.

Sven to Newcastle sounds plausible.

sven to cut off his head for £3m sound plausible

I wonder just how rich Sven actually is? He hasn't let a gift horse pass by in decades.

is that a saudi prince reference

nba becoming more like nfl in (theoretically) having coaches to manage these things is a v. interesting development to me.

― call all destroyer, Thursday, May 26, 2011 12:22 PM (47 seconds ago) Bookmark

wondering if the ubiquity of social media/blogs plays some role in highlighting the importance of coaching. so many blogs out there breaking down games and teams and analyzing, intense amateurs playing along as armchair coaches.

― dayo, Thursday, May 26, 2011 4:26 AM (15 hours ago) Bookmark

Reposted from ILHoops, because it concerns both increasing specialization of coaching roles in American sport, which was already touched on itt, and (implicitly) the potential infiltration of the closed-shop player-manager axis by amateurs (or legit/accredited Fourth Estate members, I guess) who make tactics or statistics their specialty, and gather their credentials by blogging about top-level football rather than managing a lower div. or youth side. NFL/NBA/MLB have a head start in this regard but I can envision it becoming a thing in Europe as well.

The subtext of that post I copied is, I believe, that the intense amateurs are already being added to team payrolls, and that it'll be only another few years before they move from behind-the-scenes "analyst" roles to being visible presences on the court/pitch during play. And potentially only another generation after that before they become legit candidates for head jobs.

Stories about Mourinho and Villas-Boas have focused on fortuitous elements in their trajectories, like their getting into the club setup as translators, Mourinho's family connection, the coincidence of a teenage Villas-Boas living in the same apt. block as Bobby Robson. In 2011 all these pieces don't necessarily need to fall into place in that way, because there's an outlet for anybody as precocious as AVB apparently is/was to make a name for himself without any club affiliation at all.

dream job, where do i apply

I think the fact that we broadcast whatever microscopic kernels of insight we have here, rather than hoarding them for monetized publication on our influential blogs or Twitter acct.s, means we don't have the cutthroat mentality required. If you see some of your own wisdom repackaged elsewhere as new content, that's the guy to watch out for in the big club managerial openings of 2022.

Funnily enough with basketball a lot seemed to happen through gambling - guys who could consistently beat Vegas were seen as people worth employing.

And football gambling websites are starting to publish advanced-analysis pieces, are they not? It's not an aspect of the sport I follow closely but I've read pieces by the Zonal Marking author on betting sites.

Compare the CV/career path of Damien Comolli (Liverpool) with his American analogue, Theo Epstein (Boston Red Sox). Both employees of John Henry/FSG in positions of comparable importance, and both very young for that level. But Epstein reached the highest level much faster despite being much less credentialed - from 1992-95, he was editing the sports section at his university newspaper while Comolli was coaching Monaco's U-16s.

Which is to say, American ownership of European clubs could accelerate the rise of young overachievers.

The executive who gave Epstein his first high-level job is not part of the Liverpool ownership group, but the guy who poached him from a smaller team and installed him with the Red Sox (a Wigan-big 4 level jump, I'd say) just a couple years later, still under 30 y.o., is.

No-one is interviewed about their prospective plans for the club or what they think of it already etc.

I believe Celtic employ this interview method, but it got us Tony Mowbray, who talked a good plan but completely failed at putting it into practice. Also wasn't given time to put his longer-term plans into practice (see last-ditch salvage attempt to buy/borrow nearly a whole team halfway through the season, which failed completely).

Neil Lennon was doing press conferences with the Chief Exec just before he got the job full-time, where a lot of emphasis was put into long-term strategy and vision rather than just "we'll throw money at Robbie Keane and hope we can score our way into the CL".

When did the term 'project' enter the managerial phrasebook? Who coined it? Was it when Mourinho joined Chelsea? You hear it all the time now, pundits talking about 'the project', 'Mancini's project', 'Mourinho's Project'. Does it say anything about the role of the manager in the modern game, if indeed the role of the manager has actually changed over the years, or am I overanalysing?

No, it's definitely a thing - a sort of businessspeak, forward budgeting, brand-awareness type of affair. I associate it with Chelsea too, but more with the whole line of hiring Hoddle, signing Gullit, and keeping going from there. Not sure when the word itself started to be used, though.

A thread for failed Football Projects?

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/no-more-freddie-ljungbergs-1418128.html

the other big one of the last few years, slightly off topic, is "we are in a good moment"

caught ray wilkins trying to get away with it on sky sports one night "they're in a good moment"

That's a definite Ancelotti thing, just a verbal tic. Glenn Hoddle favoured 'situation'. Think Vialli had one as well.

'In a good moment' pops up in the English of various native Italian, Spanish and Portugese speakers, there must be an equivalent across all those languages.

yeah, that's been pointed out before. Mourinho def used it on occasion, big jack too

How does the search function work on dis ting? Trying to find the first appearance of "in a good moment" on ILX just gives me a load of Ronan's posts from 2001 talking about Thing X being 'good at the moment'.

shudder

capello loves "in a good moment" too...

I will admit that I am still entirely in the dark as to how football mgmt works in Europe after seeing countless mgrs hired amidst fanfare and then fired 6 or 12 or 20 months later after few signings and little time to build a team or adapt a built team to a new style of play (or both).

I think we all just saw Mou's week point; his antics may have given him some cover but flipping out over bad calls isn't exactly an example of the sang-froid of a great leader.

I wouldn't laugh too much at 'good moments'; I believe they definitely exist, if only in the minds (and self-belief) of an organization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG16jv-itYw

This is the earliest I can find:

It's wrong to mock non-native speakers of English for their mistakes, but the expression "he's in a good moment" (to describe a player on a good run of form) is starting to get on my nerves.

I just worry that it's only a matter of time before it rubs off on the English lads and you get, say, Joe Cole saying Yeah, Didier's in a good moment, ya know.

― Daniel Giraffe, Monday, February 8, 2010 10:28 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Not ILX, but the earliest dateline that appeared in a quick Google search was a Jose Reyes interview from 2005. He was using it correctly though, because he really was only good for a moment.

It definitely feels latinate to me.

xps, whole lotta wrong in here probably:

In Europe I think 'managers' are more head coaches who work within an entrenched management structure. They manage the players and to some extent give direction to how the team plays at the time, but they don't really do strategy insofar as controlling signings, youth development, financial things, etc.

In Britain, though, the system at least until very recently seems to have been almost totally arbitrary - the manager comes in as an autocrat and has immediate full control over everything, but without much structure other than what he brings in himself. Meaning that he's basically a charismatic autocrat, and the only way to tell how well he's doing is by results which are to a fairly large extent down to form or chance. Which seems a bit ludicrous but never really gets questioned.

The notable exceptions are where:

• the club has made an effort to build a structure with the manager being more the face of that collective than an autocrat (Liverpool from Shankly to Dalglish I, arguably Chelsea since Hoddle, possibly Arsenal depending on what exactly Wenger's done there)
• particularly strong individuals have managed to entrench themselves and an actual culture appears to establish itself from them (Busby, Revie, Clough, Ferguson?) but depends so much on their charisma that it doesn't survive long afterwards.

Charisma's probably the most important factor for any manager, provided you allow a fairly broad definition of that word. Especially for outsider types who don't have the aura of a legendary playing career surrounding them, I think. No amount of tactical genius will compensate for lack of belief on the players' part.

If Wenger were at a richer club, would he have more silverware?

How have Fergie's signings done on account? I always think of him as a savvy tactical buyer but I know there have been some duds, and some disappointments.

Was Greece's Euro win a tactical or charismatic win?

Mostly the former, probably? Afaict the players Rehhagel had suggested the style he employed, he didn't come in with a rep as an "anti-football" manager and have to corral a bunch of creative attacking players with big egos into a preplanned formation. But it's hard enough to figure out what club managers are up to, even harder with international sides.

I mean, we can't deny that there was a lot of 'good moment' and a lot of luck in that win but it's since been derided as the 'anti-football' yet as you say, he didn't exactly have a wealth of exciting attacking options.

Yes, and that probably meant that getting his players to carry out negative tactics much easier - they knew they were suited to them. Whereas if Mourinho can get next year's Real Madrid team, which scored 102 league goals this season, to continue to play in a reactionary style against Barcelona (and win this time), it'll be largely a product of his personality/man management abilities.

I think Ferguson and United's utter dominance of the Premiership era has let to a load of entrenched received wisdom about "the right way" to manage a football club vs all others but Fergie kinda got lucky being the best team at the right time and having the right kids at the same time and his reputation has lived off that for a long time.

Real were utter shit during the first leg at home. They looked like they were either cowed (hard to believe), had lost Jose's script, or had started to believe in Barca and not in themselves.

That come-back against Bayern wasn't 'having' the right kids was it, Matt? Solskjær was practically unknown before signing and Sheringham was brought in 'cause Cantona had left and it showed the kind of grit that Ferguson insisted on.

That's true but I'm not really talking about winning Champions Leagues, I'm talking about building a philosophy of how to successfully manage in England. And in England there are only two - Ferguson and Wenger, and the shine has come off the latter a bit.

His annoying moments of cecity aside, I don't think Wenger's all that different than he was 'at his peak'. I think that with the influx of foreign money and players and managers (of which he was a def harbinger), the league is much more competitive and his relative spending money compared to other clubs is down. Also van Injury etc... The draw against Newcastle was a disgrace, though, so maybe he deserves some of his present lack of lustre.

He's not really made signings of the quality of Vieira/Anelka/Henry over the last few years though. A concurrent decline in French football might also have something to do with it.

Winning the Cup Winners' Cup with Aberdeen answers any charges that good fortune played a part with Ferguson. He'd've been an amazing success anywhere. That generation of great kids was an absolute freak, but without them he'd just've won things a different way (see e.g. this season).

xpost re: Wenger - As has been pointed out many times, heseems to be trying to protect his legacy by moving the goalposts - defining the club's success in terms of achievement given certain limitations, mainly the youth of his teams and the relatively low transfer expenditure (balanced by a high wage bill), but also the stylishness of the football they play.

Maybe Wenger's less comfortable judging talent from outside Ligue 1, which could help account for the sizeable gap between the France-sourced invincibles and the likes of Rosicky, Hleb, Arshavin. I still think his current French gambles (Nasri, Koscielny, Chamakh) could end up being successes. And Eduardo was just bad luck.

Wenger's best three signings didn't come from Ligue 1.

One thing I don't get about the Fergie legacy is the fact that he won so much with a well developed youth team doesn't seem to be taken into account. It is all in the cult of Fergie personality and although lauded players like Beckham, Scholes and Giggs obviously grew up living and breathing the Utd way, it is rarely spoken of as an important quality. (Maybe because the two best players to play under Ferguson were Schmiechal and Ronaldo, leading people to not focus so hard on it.)

although lauded players like Beckham, Scholes and Giggs obviously grew up living and breathing the Utd way, it is rarely spoken of as an important quality.

Uh, it's spoken about all the time

cantona, for a start.

yeah cantona surely the key signing, more so than ronaldo certainly.

Still baffling why Leeds let him go to their main rivals. It's impossible to imagine an equivalent transfer happening today.

Supposedly Fergie asked Houillier if Cantona was as much as a headcase as was rumoured at the time and Ged told him that the stories from France were exaggerated and that cantona hadn't been treated that well by the federation and that he'd been fine for Fergie. Thanks Ged.

Top ten key signings in order, something like this imo:

Cantona
Keane
Schmeichel
Ronaldo
Vidic
Ferdinand
Van Nistelrooy
Stam
Rooney
Sheringham

Crikey, they've signed a lot of top players in the last twenty years.

I might put Yorke and Ince in there as well. Yorke was incredible for a couple of seasons. Oh and Andy Cole.

Solskjaer?

Evra, Hernandez, re-signing Hughes, it just goes on & on.

Wenger's best three signings didn't come from Ligue 1.

Bergkamp didn't, but it's fair to say that Vieira and Henry did. Their Serie A performances aren't what made Wenger buy them.

It's appropriate that this conversation took a Ferguson/United tribute detour - something to cheer them up when they read it. They did play a great first half.

Did wenger even sign bergkamp? Thought that was Rioch.

correct

i suppose of the recent french hypes, he got nasri, missed menez, gourcuff couldn't really be accomodated alongside fabregas, and benzema was out of his price range after a few months in lyon's first team

lloris, sakho, m'vila, sissoko are probably all feasible if he's prepared to cough up

fyi i meant ljungberg, henry and cesc

ljungberg was a great signing alright, but could you put him ahead of vieira?

vieira wasnt technically a wenger signing - he came before him.

did not know that

Wasn't signing Viera and Garde part of Wenger's conditions for taking the job?

Not conditions - he recommended them to Dein while discussing signing.

an ffs give them to him

How does the search function work on dis ting? Trying to find the first appearance of "in a good moment" on ILX just gives me a load of Ronan's posts from 2001 talking about Thing X being 'good at the moment'.

― Ismael Klata, Friday, 27 May 2011 16:12 (3 months ago)

steaua bucharest manager ronny levi says 'we are now not in a good moment' on romanian stream of porto/benfica

im too ineloquent to express what ive been thinking lately. well pondering. it's not an original thought, and even managers themselves sometimes hint towards it, perhaps in moments of false humility. essentially my musing is this: is the role of the manager in football greatly overstated, and in fact can they be credited in any major way with their teams success? you may answer yes, many managers perform well wherever they go, or perform well over a long period of time at one club with many different teams. there are lots of anecdotal examples which show that there is such a thing as managerial excellence. id counter by saying that equally there are a thousand examples of managers who go from the highest heights to the doldrums within a very short period of time. who are fabulous one season and shite the next, with very little visible change in the set-up/squad they're managing.

let's take the example of pep guardiola, one of the highest rated managers in world football. his style of play is the style of play of the club he is at, he's merely the inheritor of it, though perhaps if you were being generous you could say he's brought about the apotheosis of this quick passing, possession football. it is a style he was taught as a player, and which is inculcated in the players of the barca cantera, of whom he has many in his squad. he also has perhaps the greatest starting 11 in world football, and in xavi and messi two of the more or less undisputed top 3 players in the world. yet this season his team has a terrible away record, and barring a miracle is not going to win the league. is this his fault? and if so how?
marcelo bielsa on being praised as a manager: "they praise you for winning, not for deserving to win". are football games not often determined by luck? by a player, from either side, taking a chance or not? how is the manager to be praised for winning a game 1-0 when an opposition player has skied the ball inside the 6 yard box on 90 minutes? the team i support, celtic, have won something like 15 games on the trot in all competitions, in a number of those games they've been fairly woeful and the opposition has squandered chances that wouldve meant a draw or possibly defeat for the team. he is currently beloved by the support and won a manager of the month award, but i can't honestly say the team is playing much better than it was earlier in the season when we were dropping points and people, myself included, were calling for his head. e.g. in october we drew 0-0 with hibs at home, we had a few chances to win the game, we didn't take them. we recently beat st mirren 2-0 away, both shots were from outside the box, st mirren had the better play and the better chances. how can lennon be credited or blamed for either of those results?

avb: the subject of this thread, its inspiration. great at porto, highly rated, no-one can deny he's a disappointment at chelsea. we can talk of transition, of an aging squad, we can say that given time he may be able to introduce his ways of thinking, his style of play, bring in players he wishes to work with, get rid of the deadweight he inherited. but equally he may never fulfil his promise, and maybe having hulk and falcao up front is p much all you need to win the portuguese league and the europa league?

another chelsea example: avram grant. a bawhair away from being a winner of the champions league. did nothing more at portsmouth than embarrass himself being caught at a massage parlor. is now managing in serbia.

el flaco menotti, won argentina their first world cup, incidentally leaving the 17 year old maradona out of his squad, at the age of 39. he became something of a managerial journeyman. later in his career, yet not quite in his dotage or anything, he would have a stint of something like 6 weeks at sampdoria before being fired.

i know this is all really pretty remedial stuff but im just wondering out loud.

there's a book, which i think is somewhat trolling really, called "football, dynamic of the unthought" by dante panzeri, which i don't think has been translated into english, but which i might buy in spanish, if i can be bothered paying like £30 for a book, in which the case is put forward that managers are not an indispensable part of football. he says that managers can contribute around 10% towards a victory of their team, and that systems of play don't really exist. yes, this seems a little far, but his main thrust, that football games are won and lost by players adapting to and improvising collaboratively with the unexpected turns in play, which is not something the manager can inculcate or a system can dictate, appeals to me.

that football games are won and lost by players adapting to and improvising collaboratively with the unexpected turns in play, which is not something the manager can inculcate or a system can dictate, appeals to me.

I think the point about Brendan Rogers counts a huge amount here.(And remember BR studied under Jose.) Rogers didn't introduce a new tactic to Swansea or buy superstar players* and instead focused in training on making the right decisions under pressure. He comes across more as a motivational coach than a typical football manager when you hear or read about his tactics. And it has worked! Honestly, getting footballers to *expand their mind* and *think* has turned journeymen into team people love to watch and that are exceptionally hard to beat.

And part of the reason Pep is struggling now is that he has a bunch of players who have won everything. Pique is the poster boy of this, having supposedly stopped thinking abt how to play and just going along for the ride.

Another example is one I read in the paper today - Wolves had 8 shots on target and so did we. We scored 7 of them though and Wolves hung on by a thread. Arsenal have a long history of a manager known to work on decision making and thinking about what you are doing, whereas Mick isn't exactly the most high minded of footballing brains and I'm sure we've read NV go into detail abt this. This has been the art to Utd over the years - think about taking your chances with confidence and you'll get them. No other team in the country has that swagger to *feel* they deserve points regardless of how well they've been playing or how they've been tactically. Fergie has got to be the best long term motivational life coach about, in this regard. Celtic players surely have a similar swag.**

I don't think it must always come down to 10% - maybe that 10% is motivational dressing room speeches or tactical awareness. Sometimes I think getting dudes to actually *think* and prepare is the huge pink elephant in the room. Indeed, Pep got rid of Deco, Ronnie and co. because they couldn't give a toss and assumed natural ability would win them everything, while instead keeping maybe less naturally talented guys like Keita and promoting Pedro because they worked for the team, thought about what they were doing and were passionate abt it. Maybe he needs to have another shake up right now for dudes who have become as blase as Ronnie was.

*Scott Sinclair might count for Swansea, idk.
**Wonder how much of this is to do with the *club aura* too.

some good points. maybe it's more that managers matter more for the things youve talked about, working with the players, motivating them, rather than the tactics and substitutions etc.

then of course there's behaviour in the transfer market, although that of course differs from club to club, few managers truly have free reign i wouldve imagined? even someone like ferguson must be given a budget.

i am being a little simplistic here in many of the things i say, i have always conceded that i understand little about the actual mechanics of the game of football. i think i can understand individual player performances and such, but not the bigger picture.

management theory is basically all about, to a larger or lesser extent/mix, the installation of systems of decision-making, feedback and control, motivation.

across any sector or discipline

oh i think only jose and mancini have free reign in terms of both being able to spend what they want, on who they want and knowing they'd want to go.

i think it is more obvious in special managers what they do when managers can be important, as opposed to having importance just by being a manager, you know? Take McLeish. He doesn't seemingly *ADD* anything to a club that he manages. Not tactically, not mentally, he doesn't have a track record in improving teams technical ability or *development* of players and seemingly no real effect in duties like transfers.

this isn't to say McLeish is a bad manager. He's done more than most managers will ever do. He just kinda *controls* his team, makes sure he has 11 appropriate players to play and sometimes his team wins, sometimes they lose. Nothing seems to happen that couldn't happen with someone else. It is the McLeish's of the world that make being a manager look a little pointless to the process although I'm sure just having 11 appropriate players to play is a hard responsibility in itself.

But compare to O'Neill. We know Sunderland are field with some god-awful shite and yet isn't there a stat to say they'd be top if the season started when MON took over? And now they play a game worth watching? He hasn't radically changed the tactics and has only changed a few players. Most importantly, this seems like more than a new-manager bump before settling into 'oh well sometimes we win/draw/lose.' He has given the club overwhelming direction and spirit without having to spend loads of money and using most of the same people. There is more than 10% to O'Neill, he can't have just found McClean and Sissegnon locked in a cupboard being played by imposters. He must have done something tangible behind closed doors that proves him a great manager with these guys.

field? filled! my brain is more fried than usual.

O'Neill is certainly a prime motivator. Jim will know better than me, but I remember hearing about him introducing himself at Celtic by asking the players if they thought they could win the league this year, getting a lukewarm few hands raised; then telling them he knew they could win the league, before going on to convince them they could, to eventual great enthusiasm; all in the first session! I assume they did win the league that year, it'd be disappointing to find they finished eighteen points off the pace after that.

That his default mode seems to be in producing fairly lumpen football is a puzzlement to me. Aiui he's not a coacher himself - you'd think he'd be keen to seek out more adept coaches to work with, rather than the few trusties who seem to only produce variations on the same thing.

given that

(i) almost any player that reaches squad epl level has the ability to perform at least adequately in at least one

(ii) as alluded to, tactics will only really ever increase the chances of certain occurrences on the pitch, and will never decide the outcome of even one of thoseindividual occurrences

it follows that motivation is the most important of the functions of a manager.

o'neill has a template that he v rarely deviates from, probably because he is a first-class motivator and communicator and has found that tinkering about within his limited tactical abilities isn't worth the payoff for him.

mourinho has both, obv.

think pep maybe derives his legitimacy from his technical prowess? slightly different dynamic imo.

"in at least one position"

I always assumed that with most managers (big names excluded) they simply managed in the same way as a CEO manages a company - eg appoints the right people, decides what the general strategy of the team will be, impart a personality or style of play onto a team, then lets his subordinates actually do the work. We then have one guy who is responsible for tactics (one in-game, one pre-game maybe? I don't know if being able to look at numbers and patterns of play on paper would equal doing it in real-time looking at legs), one guy responsible for transfers, one guy for fitness, one guy for technique etc etc.

i'm sure i've said elsewhere that as a speculative rule 10 percent of managers improve a side, 10 percent actively worsen them and the other 80 percent probably don't make a lot of difference (cf. theories of the "good enough parent") here. to make things more complicated, i'd suggest that for most managers you can't guarantee which of those bands they'll fall into at any one club - there is also a question of "fit", plus external circumstances, financial mostly, often beyond a manager's control.

i've no doubt that in the Football Manager era tactics have become over-hyped in some quarters. but an historical overview of the game will tell you that tactics do evolve and mutate. maybe we could think of it as an arms race in which the team that innovates significantly in a way that unlocks opposition teams has a brief window of opportunity before the majority of teams either adopt or adapt to the new tactical orthodoxy. thinking about the development of Catenaccio or Ramsey's "wingless wonders" or Total Football or the flexible 4-5-1 - you could account for this partly as fashion but i think partly as the arms race i suggested.

(thinking about fashion without thought - how many EPL teams at the moment play with a high defensive line without pressing the ball, as if they know a high line is the thing but don't really know why they're doing it?)

perhaps tactics function most obviously and immediately as a method of negating the opposition rather than creating. there seem to be managers who are very good at that.

agree that the auteur theory is pretty bollocksy tho and that the manager's key role is to build a good team (backroom and players). most managers are probably skilled in 1 or 2 areas, motivating or talent-spotting or coaching. the secret is to fill the gaps in your own abilities.

i wanted to avoid dragging the Wolves into this but i wd suggest that McCarthy is a bad manager inasmuch as he tries to create a backroom in his own image - instead of covering his own deficiencies, he looks for staff who emulate them. players too, to an extent.

avb showing intelligence and competence aren't quite so well correlated

not an attack on lfc, so please

but

if rodgers couldn't use the bulk of talent lfc have spent such large amounts on in recent times, was it a bad decision to appoint him?

not is he a bad manager, more is he not the right manager for a club that find it politically/financially troubling to get rid of the players he isn't inclined to use?

yes this is a little about how awes andy carroll is when used correctly

srsly when was the last time a player as limited as andy carroll ever did anything for a team not trying for 14th in the epl in a good year

will answer all day, but idk if you'd consider any player of modern times as limited as andy carroll

he is just a £35m lodestone for the return of the repressed in english football, the basic and comfortable assumption that you don't need anything more to win than passion and relentlessness

all the worse coming from a team with adebayor who is so much more of a player than carroll it's untrue

we're not finding the middle ground here

much like a big sam team with carroll in it tbf

yes adebayor is more of a football than carroll, but far worse in the air and as a central physical striking presence

these are aspects of the game you mightn't have much time for, but they exist

re rodgers -- i think he may have a slightly ~political~ idea of how football against my description of his supposed inspiration mourinho itt as' responsive to general trends and not at all prescriptive about how football ought to be played'

that said i don't think a more pragmatic manager could have any use for charlie adam who is just straight dogshit

they might try to use carroll, but only as a subtitute and not as the focal point, which thanks to his ludicrous price tag would be such an admission of failure that it would be preferable to try to preserve/enhance his resale value by putting him in the right downhome shop window

his suggestion of playing downing at lb may be unorthodox but if he does it, and it works even reasonably well, then he is using resources well

these are aspects of the game you mightn't have much time for, but they exist

― darraghback (darraghmac), Saturday, September 1, 2012 12:20 PM (6 minutes ago)

oh come on this is ludicrous piety

they exist in the championship, the 1980s and in international teams trying to emulate greece

adebayor is physically as powerful as carroll, while being a lot faster and more agile (probably the most agile 6'3 forward there has been)

he doesn't spend as much time trying to beat up defenders because he doesn't have to

the distinction between carroll, crouch, cole and other cunts and drogba, benzema, ibrahimovic, adriano is that the former basically succeed via 'knockdowns'

is there even a term for 'knockdown' in spanish idk?

someone like drogba is infinitely more valuable because they can actually CONTROL a 40 yard pass while fending off a defender

the idea that a top level centre forward can succeed by knocking down headers for an onrushing lil man and heading in crosses, with basically no speed, no control and limited shooting ability is not just a political one, it's simply how things are

Still baffling why Leeds let him go to their main rivals. It's impossible to imagine an equivalent transfer happening today.

― Number None, Saturday, May 28, 2011 10:39 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

re rodgers -- i think he may have a slightly ~political~ idea of how football against my description of his supposed inspiration mourinho itt as' responsive to general trends and not at all prescriptive about how football ought to be played'

yeah, absolutely.

i'd love for adebayor to be this centre forward you describe, as is he's as well to be 5' 10" for all he uses his height. losing out aerially to defenders isn't a badge of courage in playing the right way or anything

adebayor scored an amazing header vs fulham a few years ago, and when he played for madrid he only seemed to score headers iirc

A side more renowned for its grounded, flowing football than an ability to crunch headers into the net from crosses into the box have developed a new dimension with Adebayor, 6ft 4in but armed with the ability to hang in the air as if plucked from a Jet Li movie, offering a focal point.

His headed reward on Saturday was emphatic, the African towering above, first, the left half and then the right of Fulham's flustered back-line. "He's a monster," said Jimmy Bullard. "A standing jump as high as the crossbar? No one in the Premier League can mark that."

moot now rip big man

after croatia won 3-2 at wembley (then mclaren/umbrella game) bilic said he told his defenders not to worry about competing with kraaaatxi for headers, because he has such poor control once he actual 'wins' them, then they could make sure on collecting the second ball

lord knows if this shit was going to work, nikola zigic would be playing for real madrid

remember when 'bullard 4 england' was kind of a thing?

yeah, bullard briefly promised a golden future of cheeky chappy banter, third rate le tissiers and soccer AM uber alles

then landfill indie died

tbh idk why i've raised the q as i haven't time to answer nilmar, not even sure i have the answers tbf, good rebuttals all but i feel the drive behind them is in large part political, using your own descriptor

adebayor starts on the bench ffs

carroll will have a season in the next ten years where he scores 15+ epl goals, basically does as well as grant holt last season, and some other cunts will spend a fortune on him and the cycle will repeat

i'd love for adebayor to be this centre forward you describe, as is he's as well to be 5' 10" for all he uses his height. losing out aerially to defenders isn't a badge of courage in playing the right way or anything

― darraghback (darraghmac), Saturday, 1 September 2012 13:54 (4 hours ago)

did this just happen at spurs? his time in madrid he was killer in the air. at city he was really good too.

clearly he must have shrunk

he doens't really seems to challenge much in the air, i can only remember him scoring two or three headers last season and he's leaves cb's to it mostly. see his lack off challenge for the aerial ball that led to the norwich goal today, in fact.

tbh, he's never actually in the box nor at the end of a cross so it's maybe uncharitable for me to straight up denigrate his aerial ability, it's not like with crouch where any fool can see the cunt's just shit in the air for all his trying, adebayor is on some 'It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt' trip, but just re: heading a football

this isn't to be deemed a go at adebayor, he should have started today and we were even worse before he came on, like

i really dislike this thread title now

nah it's good imo

top clubs have mostly appointed competence even if it didn't appear in the form of technocratic determinists like avb

further down the pyramid they still appoint from the old boys club, hence steve bruce STILL getting a job in the championship, no sign that being completely fucking useless is any detraction

no denying any of it

this summer brought a huge leap fwd in the epl tho, in terms of a changing of the guard.

maybe

steve clarke seems to have surprised a lot of people but west brom have generally hired (and fired) well since, mowbray, di matteo and hodgson

swansea too did well to avoid panicking and giving it to curbishley or someone...but then they were building on martinez and rodgers

tottenham could have gone for a more old school manager in moyes but chose avb (though that neglects what an adaptable thinker moyes is)

i like the way domestic and foreign managers don't seem to be separate tribes any more, rodgers possesses the skills/ideology that you used to only find abroad, or you can appoint a lazy chancer like sven who is more inculcated into the english old boys club than anyone

yeah sven is p much archetype 'english' manager

oh hull, i never noticed you took on that prat.

bar hughes, pulis and big sam, the premiership is looking p decently stocked of intrestng managers imo, even the ones who look like they may have a shitty season (houghton, adkins, avb, lambert) at least seem to have a bit of integrity and understanding of what they are trying to do. it may not correspond with what i like about the game or anything near success for them, but at least it isn't a breed dickhead chancers

judgement reserved on avb tbph, chelsea may have been a fluke, but then so may porto

gotta admit i'm still struggling to list all 20 teams in the epl this season let alone remember eg clarke is a manager in this league. lots of 'oh...yeeeah' moments

stretching right now to remember who this clarke is.

oh that guy.

ikr?

gotta admit i'm still struggling to list all 20 teams in the epl this season let alone remember eg clarke is a manager in this league. lots of 'oh...yeeeah' moments

― Randy Carol (darraghmac), Saturday, 1 September 2012 19:46 (28 minutes ago)

really since venkys left i think we all just lost the love

bar hughes, pulis and big sam, the premiership is looking p decently stocked of intrestng managers imo, even the ones who look like they may have a shitty season (houghton, adkins, avb, lambert) at least seem to have a bit of integrity and understanding of what they are trying to do. it may not correspond with what i like about the game or anything near success for them, but at least it isn't a breed dickhead chancers

― a hoy hoy, Saturday, September 1, 2012 6:39 PM (35 minutes ago)

yeah pretty much

what about mcdermott? idk him at all

i really should have put him in instead of avb, but BANTAH and all

reading don't play esp enticing or exotic football but if it wasn't for a few gk cock ups and an offside goal they'd already look like a steady midtable team. mcdermott had a better season than reading or anyone last season, by which i mean he coached a kinda hopeless boring lot to an insane clean sheet record and winning games. he could turn out a moyes type imo - he won't bring any special new ideas or be even v memorable but he looks v good at his job

http://i.imgur.com/HUgwt.jpg?1

rmde at scandalized bawheids going on abt ~thuggery~ directed at fucking stoke players

otm

Nevertheless, it is interesting to consider that a club such as Porto readily appointed Villas-Boas while Burnley discarded him as too cerebral. Fletcher's explanation that Villas-Boas's language and concepts were too complex to be understood by the club's players appears to be based on an assumption that football is a simple game for simple people. It's not just that his ideas were deemed overelaborate, it's also that the players were not considered to have the faculties to understand these ideas.

From this perspective, Burnley's dismissive attitude towards Villas-Boas's language may be more reflective of a clash in footballing culture. And this culture clash is not necessarily one that opposes the British to their continental counterparts. The same attitude can be seen with regard to Brendan Rodgers, a manager who only last season had been praised for his progressive views on football, but whose insistence on sticking to a particular tactical philosophy in post-match interviews appears to be wearing thin with some fans.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2012/dec/20/andre-villas-boas-avbinglish

that's a really good article, the comparison with mourinho is quite succinct too

yeah i'll read the rest of it later, but it's a little too fukn succinct to cosily/smugly suggest that the reason fans are falling out with rodgers is that they are pigshit-ignorant of how awesome his philosophy is as opposed to being more than sufficiently cognitive to spot that it's not fucking working and he's not proving in any way adept at adapting it.

avb's vocab is immense

The British press's favourite managers, Redknapp and Fergie, pretty much never talk about tactics, but no one gets mocked as mercilessly as a loser who also doesn't appear to know what they're doing - Keegan, Ince etc.

Rogers is doing alright.

deems its not about rodgers' success or otherwise it's about the communication

most managers in his position would be giving it the digging in no surrender etc stuff but he is just sticking to a script, which may be brave or foolhardy or neither but is still fairly distinctive

so would be the wearing of a green feather boa in all public engagements, no reason to laud it at the expense of the perceived footballing intelligence of the masses

P'shaw, perceived footballing intelligence - this is just the rules of the playground. Christian Gross would've been bullied in any British school, Tony Pulis would not. Mourinho would be the pied piper anywhere. Sure you can do it differently, but you're pulling off a highwire act and when you stumble, the little rats pounce.

lol deems you are too clever to be giving this the fanfare for the common man treatment

the article is about the language used by managers, it has nothing to do with whether joe allen is worth £15m or jose enrique is a winger, nor is it laudatory about rodgers (though it is guardedly so re vyash bwash)

you will have known this by the time you have read the damn thing

article also implies that those avatars of plebeian knuckle dragging, the players themselves, are more intelligent than the mill-owner ideology of trad british fitba hierarchy would allow

ffs ok i'll read it

havent seen an irish this crap at reading since noel hunt

Boom

glass everywhere, inla denying involvement

klats otm, the article gets right to the point of mourinho and then seems to pass it by as it were just smoke & mirrors

communication (w/ players and media) is manipulation is managing

not to mention communication not just being talking a good teleprompter game but the subconscious inculcation of what it is u want

results is results, brit footer was happy to wet itself over rodgers when the wins rolled in, less so when replaced by indifferent lack of penetration and leadership conference guff

maybe 'communication' is more valued here than in the countries that produced van gaal, benitez or mancini because managers are omnipotent (no sporting directors), often entrenched for years and the cult of the leader is more numinous

see all of the fuss about captains -- ~the armband~ as metonym for a set of cherished values compared to countries where it is essentially an honorific function exercised in turn by the most senior players

ferguson and mourinho are the best at all of this but they are also great at the more technical stuff

i think villas boas would seem quite distinctive in most of europe, even where there have been studious managers obsessed with discussing tactics like zeman or bielsa or whoever

v-b is not really a stunningly innovative tactician, he is just a clever articulate ardent young manager who is happy to talk fairly openly with the media and likes to assume that are at the same level and interested in the same things

they are happy to play dumb and gently patronize him as an uppity dork with questionable emotional resilience and lack of 'football man' background, while hedging slightly cuz he has shown signs of significant talent and may well turn out to be successful here

rodgers seems quite different temperamentally, a bit more of a charismatic than v-b, with his weird soulful lugubrious intonations about character and slightly mawkish avuncularity towards his players

he has the kind of absracted 'natural confidence' that public schools try to instill whereas insofar as v-b is confident it's as a function of his demonstrated aptitudes and achievements, so when chelsea started playing like shit he looked like a cornered fox

if deems is right and the liverpool ship sinks, then rodgers will still be cooing and spewing portentous folk wisdom as the rats jump into sea

I'm sitting absolutely cunted in a pub, thinking about a girl who's just left for Blackpool, feeling more or less festively despondent, and just declared to myself "fantastic post". An accolade that will be rigging down the pisser of this Brentford pub for years to come. Karleigh Osborne says hello.

ringing.

She will come back. Believe.

I'm trying to upload a photo a photo of Karleigh Osborne's signed Brentford shirt. it's not going v well because I can't operate my phone v easily.

fantastic post

xxxp

i'm not declaring rodgers a certain failure i'm merely saying that the collegiately cosy insistence that there is unquestioned ~progress~ happening along some defined line towards 'success' is hardly a bedrock position.

No i've not read it yet fuck off

surely nakh is avoiding the concept of "progress" and saying that here is an example of the notion of non typical non fatalistic manager speak, admittedly as self-sustaining in its own way as the nugatory crypto-philosophical content of... and I can't remember the anti-Rodgers name I was going to use. totally arseoled tbqf.

I can't believe I'm not the only person on ILX with a signed Karleigh Osborne shirt. What do you have to do to carve out yr own niche, ffs.

Find Rodgers a bit creepy if I'm honest.

http://e1.365dm.com/12/11/660x350/Brendan_2859497.jpg

http://i2.wp.com/metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/rodgers.png?w=544

you're not going to condemn him for that, come on

I can't believe I'm not the only person on ILX with a signed Karleigh Osborne shirt. What do you have to do to carve out yr own niche, ffs.

― oppet, Saturday, December 22, 2012 11:13 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/2012-12-21192926_zps7d4b3cf6.jpg

only in the pub. speaking of which, apologies for sprawling all over this thread last night, bursting into conversation with blurred and noisy incoherence, while people look embarrassed into their pints.

you assholes don't post enough ffs

surely nakh is avoiding the concept of "progress" and saying that here is an example of the notion of non typical non fatalistic manager speak, admittedly as self-sustaining in its own way as the nugatory crypto-philosophical content of... and I can't remember the anti-Rodgers name I was going to use. totally arseoled tbqf.

I see where i went wrong. It was using the word 'crypto' after 'nugatory' - what i meant (hmmm) was 'admittedly as self-sustaining in its own way as the nugatory philosophical content of a.. well a more conventional manager' - I think the grinding poverty of Pulis's interviews meant he was foremost in what there was of my mind. That said of course, their to be fair at the end of the day 'common sense' formulations provide a good shield in interviews (articulating thought is open to analysis), while speaking in terms that are too dead to be seriously offensive to most people, unless they are particularly alert to the irritations of monotony and whingeing about refs. These formulations do not in themselves bespeak any meagreness of thought, but it can be hard to tell a hawk from a handsaw, or an Arry from a Pulis.

In different ways AVB and BR discard the shield and open themselves up with either Quixotic folly or inspired genius, depending on whether they're successful or not. The nature of the success probably also has to reflect their articulation of it, but then again, to a certain extent, if the nature of failure or lack conspicuous success reflects the manager's articulation of their vision, then it seems to me they're likely to be cut more slack than a more guarded manager.

The perception of managerial competency then has something to do with the age old problem of rhetoric as put forward by Quintilian - how you inescapably ensure good rhetoric is also good truth/morally good (so consequently the better it is, the truer/morally better it is).

Following that line suggests that despite the rather canny or prudent approach of the platonic ideal of a Scottish manager (say), in fact yer AVBs and yer BRs may, despite appearances, actually have a greater inherent strength/longevity - if they can get project their rhetoric (rhetoric in the strongest sense, as accurately reflective of thought) onto the team.

At the end of the day it's a results game tbqf tho and 'ah that man's reach shd exceed his grasp' is not an argument that will be tolerated for long.

hmm. now, i'll be thinking the alcohol hasn't quite worn off. I'm hieing me awae to the Natural HIstory Museum.

*if they can get project their rhetoric

breaking my curfew again (actually I'm thinking of breaking it for good but with a different username, only boards viewed ILB, ILM and ILF) to ask, are you Gamaliel Ratsey? just wondrin yknow. also your posts itt have been wonderful as usual

that's him and yeah, he has been appointed doyen of ILB (is that honorific or plenipotentiary idk?)

lmao at that photo of rodgers titsniffing

kind of imagine him spending a lot of time on away trips sitting in underlit corners of hotel bars

you might not speak english but with love, just like football, the language is international

oh, the girls of makhachkala
they're not called sue or carla
but to a lonely ulster boy, ohhh

yep, that's right, oawia - thank you!

charitable sinecure only, Nilmar.

Would you join us for ILF book club, Fizzles? It'll be Fever Pitch and I've been meaning to schedule it for a while but've been busy. Middle of January is possible.

only a game? or gtfo

http://images.angusrobertson.com.au/images/ar/97805525/9780552562454/0/0/plain/tj-and-the-hat-trick.jpg

oof, Fever Pitch? go on then. I have read it years ago. I don't remember having a v high opinion of it, but it might be interesting to revisit. xpost

I've read some of that! Not sure it'd stand up to this more verbose turn that ILF has taken overnight.

Argh! I was talking about Theo's book there.

Isn't it enough that I read about Liverpool not winning the league every day on ILF? Now you want me to re-read an entire book about it?

If you want a book about Liverpool winning the league you'll have to check the sci-fi section. Heh heh

Whereas Utd winning the league ones are to be found in True Crime.

more like Art History. Or something

nicely done

read the article. vegan.

cryptic

mistranslated, maybe

vegan?

vegan

http://i.imgur.com/sOZYc.jpg

http://www.animalsuffering.com/resources/photos/images/Meat-Free-Zone-or-Vegan.jpg

http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=301288.0

first line is pretty special

“I am a manager, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all, I am a man. Just like you."

i am none of those things fwiw

tried to watch some of being liverpool tonight and couldn't make it past a line about 'liverpool will need to perform strongly if james carragher's father is to ever win a league medal' or soemthing. rodgers seemed alright- not v comfortable with cameras about, none of them were rly

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2307095/Paolo-Di-Canio-Sunderland-training-scenes.html

Interesting article on pdc's training style. Hands on showing players exactly what he wants is I suppose no less valid than the more old man impart wisdom from mountain top default setting.

everyone should re-read this thread every couple months imo

this probably a better place to extend my comparison of moyes and martinez and why the latter while more flawed has greater upside. it isn't just about the notional aesthetic comparison between maloney vs anichebe. rather it's because what martinez doing is really rather unusual, today he played a formation that confounded manchester city. the use of wingbacks, even converting a dmid to the position because all of his other options are injured, and two forwards attacking from the flanks caused regular overmatching. zabaleta is the best rb in the league but he couldn't contain it and got booked twice, leading to the late surge that brought the corner and the goal.

sacchi described the multiplier effect as the aim of all tactics, getting players to play beyond their skillset via formation/coaching etc. moyes' success depended to a greater extent on physicality and aggression, midtable sort of strategies which top teams seldom rely on as an end in themselves. they depend on the particularities of the players, like having a £15m 6'4 nuisance capable of outmatching an adjunct centreback (how everton won 1-0 at goodison last year). and as such they are more predictable and more easily neutralized, like by putting phil jones on fellaini in the next game. martinez isn't dependent on his players to the same degree, most of his squad are interchangeable journeymen who he has to deploy in innovative ways vs more talented teams.

it's like how 'natural goalscorers' in the afonso alves vein fail to transfer to higher leagues because their 'instinct' reflected the naivete of the opposition, whereas a player like thierry henry with an unremarkable scoring record can become great because his exceptional physical and technical skills were not contingent in the same way. martinez succeeds via tactical determinism in the manner of the greatest coaches, rather than the dogs of war spirit of most lower table success stories.

i still rate moyes pretty highly but i think his best achievement is buying midpriced defenders -- jagielka, distin, baines, coleman, lescott have all easily outperformed the for money spent on them. he is certainly better at it than martinez but the differences would probably be less apparent if they both had £60m to spend and finding undervalued prospects was less important. other than that i rate the way he plays 4-2-3-1 so well (if crudely) and the solidity of his attacking midfield, players like arteta osman pienaar are much better drilled defensively than a lot of amids. chelsea could learn from him.

Good posts.

Martinez's control of that game today was embarrassing.

didn't see the QF where wigan won 3-0 at goodison - apparently that was a total outplaying too

with all that said it is fairly amazing how wigan constantly seem to outplay a side (like swansea last week) and still lose

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2013/oct/08/english-coach-anthony-hudson-bahrain

I'm a bit pissed bit for some reason I found that quite moving. think it was the bit about watching the Chilean games. intense dedication to skill + professionalism rather than bogus notions of "heart".

yeah, almost to the extent that i bought this bit of diplomatic evasion

More troubling for family and friends back home was the wave of violence that erupted during pro-democracy protests in the wake of the Arab Spring two years ago, an issue highlighted in the sporting world by the controversy over the staging of Formula One Grand Prix on the island kingdom.

Yet the national coach feels cut off from the disquiet. "It'll be hard for people to believe this, but since I've been here I've not seen any problems. Where I live is very peaceful. But I'll freely admit my life is immersed in football, a very one-track existence. I'm in a bubble which means I don't see much outside of football."

a real football man

yeah, the "sport is separate from politics" stance is never not bullshit.

The nascent appeal of snake oil marketing.

FOUND OUT

If you are a young turk technocrat genius wunderkind manager that cant change formation then impale u imo and onwards to the next victim

but he's so dreamy

he isn't a genius and only half a dozen in the history of management could qualify for that (not mourinho either) but he is 2 or 3 points behind where tottenham ought to be right now, and that is optimistic given the player turnaround

Strikethru needs to sort this, chelsea fans otm about this inflexible fraud

― 30 ch'lopping days left to umas (darraghmac), Sunday, 24 November 2013 14:38 (1 hour ago)

EMPRERS NEW CLOTHES M8

E's all too aware of wot e's fackin doin guv

problem is the overprioritisation of that aspect vs player form and what's happening in front of his eyes. He tweaks when slashes are called for. And he looks like howard moon.

http://i.imgur.com/HUgwt.jpg?1

that's beautiful

"Inflexibilty" isn't the problem, a sudden shift to 4-4-2 or use of an attacking central midfielder isn't going to solve the problem, it's an issue of squad balance and personnel. Priority #1 in January should be more physical threat in attack.

The criticism from the dressing room is that his highly scientific approach overlooks the human dimension, which is ironic, given that is one of his buzz phrases. The players, technically, ought to have been ashamed after City but, on a human level, would that soundbite not have been better kept behind closed doors? Other managers might have accepted the blame in public, albeit as a diversionary tactic.

Villas-Boas has struggled to manage the transition since the sale of Gareth Bale and the influx, for a second successive summer, of a host of new faces. Some of the existing players have been bumped down the pecking order, which has led to gripes.

tell you what nakh, sandro is a big strong boyy but he's absolutely griking there

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/nov/29/andre-villas-boas-tromso-fan-sacked-chant-ejected

occurring to me more and more that Roberto Martinez would be a perfect England manager. discuss

With the current squad? In the context of the World Cup at least (maybe up to Euro 2016) I think we're gonna be limited by the ability of the players more than their deployment. Obviously an attacking free-flowing England side would be lovely to see, but who mans the right flank in Martinez's system? Walker? urggh

oh, Milner I suppose, maybe.

Mcmanaman obv

it'll sort itself out. genuinely can't think of a more appropriate candidate to succeed Hodgson, but would he leave Everton?

Would have Lambert as England manager actually, the man's ability to craft hit-and-run victories against superior teams armed only with 20% possession and hard-running is admirable.

isn't English but has spent most of his adult life here; plays smart football with limited resources & can demonstrably beat any other Premiership team; much-loved personality; absolutely no risk of controversial media embarrassment; a foreign manager we can call one of our own with some justifiability

hahaha never a Scot, never

not because I h8 scots (they're usually gr8) but because...it'd just be wrong, it'd throw everyone for a...

actually I like the sound of it more, on consideration

No patience with under-performing big names, willing to give promising youngsters a chance. Who am I kidding, he's not that good and it really won't make much difference who manages England for the next few years at least. Reactionary Roy probably going to get us as far as anyone else could manage next year

just watching moyes' interview, and every other interview, he doesn't seem to be very intelligent

not that the best manager is the cleverest but all of the better ones at the moment just seem to be quicker than him, even rodgers when he talks sententious nonsense you can tell there is a certain craftiness, moyes has no guile or subterfuge at all, i don't think there is a current epl top half manager who /less/ resembles ferguson in this respect

David "wilf Guinness" moyes.

Mc

notice EMPRERS NEW CLOTHES has three wins and a draw since he was forcibly disrobed after city fucked over spurs like they do ever other team that isn't bayern munich at home this season

The draw was a good performance the wins all smelt of fortune, with only bare bone hints of quality showing late today. Opposition dross and still threatened throughout.

deems you will have noticed i am not especially enthusiastic about villas boas any more than i am of the other portuguese manager cited in the first post, but he certainly isn't a charlatan and he was right to disparage the shitty hack who pretended he had achieved nothing

Agreed, but not so politely

I'm intrigued by the current problems that spurs are facing and avb's approach to dealing with them tbh. Maybe best xharacterised as a confusion over whether the issue lies with the personnel or their instructions (both seem to be coming in for a bit of a shellacking recently).

For instance width - is the problem that eg Townsend has fuck all tactical discipline and therefore continues to cut inside every time even when he's been told to stay wide to open up the middle a bit, or that avb is actively encouraging the cutting in as the most effective role for Townsend as an individual?

I think what I'm trying to work round to is that I'm not convinced that a manager like avb, who made his reputation on compiling incredibly detailed analyses of the opposition, had just failed to consider that certain combinations of players fail to provide the requisite width in attack or w/e.

Answers on a postcard, would basically like youse lot to explain how a guy who clearly knows so much about football remains stubborn in the face of evidence that most armchair analysts can agree on . Apologies if this is all nonsense, zinging from the puv

I think that the level of detail and proximity to the pressures and problems considerd by any coach (allied to interpersonal politics and mid to long term agendas) allied further with a mishmash of ego/belief in their own tactical genius and the necessity of bringing same to the game every time to necessarily justify position can lead to some very strange decisions, oftentimes decisions that fly in the face of armchair expertise, not always ignorant or unaffected by the knowledge of this, oftentimes to the detriment of team/individual performance.

That said trying to coordinate eleven or twenty five similar egos in concert in what must needs be often counterproductive methods to the personal talents, traits and instincts that have brought a twenty year old to the top of their profession has to be acknowledged as a smoky mirror through which to direct affairs.

Back from pub, will attempt to condense whatever it was I was drivelling on about upthread into a semi-coherent post.

AVB is a man who has previously earned his corn (and apparently forged quite a reputation) off the back of composing detailed and thoughtful reports on future opposition, taking into account everything from all-round playing style to the specific heights and jumping capacity of their target men at set pieces.

Questions:

- on his undoubtedly numerous re-viewings of Spurs' matches from this season, has he really failed to spot all the issues that the armchair pundits complain about on a weekly basis? Is this guy who is apparently a savant of technical football analysis incapable of spotting that e.g Townsend could do with working on his final ball in the last third rather than tonking it at every given opportunity? Will AVB not have mentioned this?

- do ppl think that he is actually content with the resources that he has at e.g. full-back in his current squad?

This is of genuine interest to me. This is no mere ex-pro with 15 England caps and a semi-decent track-record as a player with 3 or 4 Premier League sides; here we have a man who has been employed from the get-go on the basis that he understands football on a more sophisticated level than yr average punter (and has provided some, if not ample, evidence that this is the case). Is he really such a flawed, insecure personality that he will stubbornly stick to his guns re: team selection and tactics at the expence of team performance, if he feels that he's getting unnecessary shit from press / fans? Are we expected to believe that the various ideas that occur to Johnny Spurs Fan have never occurred to one of the most celebrated young managers in Europe? Is all of this all relevant to any underperforming manager operating a high level of the modern game? Idk, I'm just particularly in AVB bcuz he's meant to be this young Turk genius who has devoted his life since adolesence to understanding this sport, as opposed to say, Steve Bruce, who remains a good centre back that took up management once his body gave out

xpost- sorry Darragh, just typed all that out before I knew you'd posted, and I'm bloody well going to post it now it's finished. May be that you address all my points in yr post, we shall see

Fair points and a boot to this thread at an interesting time imo

Possibilities worth considering imo

Players dont believe in tactics

Players dont believe in manager

Manager goes through huge tactical analysis of oppositioneach time, decides indepently on every occasion that the perfect formation is 451 with dawson in a high line and withno focus on end product
Tactical genius was overstated and lack in other areas (flexibility, confidence, relationship management, w/e) is reverting to a natural performance level for this coach

Tactical brilliance in general is overrated and the lacks above are showing in the longer term with same result

more im sure

Discuss: the reason we have a vested interest in AVB (or Rodgers, Mourinho, whoever) sorting all this shit out is that we like the idea of a guy who thinks of football in the same way we do schooling all these ex-pros and demonstrating that you don't need to have been a great player to get this shit. When in actual fact it could v. possibly be very useful to have direct experience of what it is like to be on the pitch in these high-pressure scenarios, to have a decade + of dressing room experience where you learn how to approach these fcking entitled cunts and how to tell 'em to do their job properly, etc., as per Steve Bruce who I so disparagingly referenced a few mins ago. That the reason I want the likes of AVB to succeed so badly is that I'm fucking good at Football Manager but fucking shite at football.

NB. aware that all of these issues have probably been addressed in this thread, also that the last few lines may explain my own devotion to the likes of AVB Rodgers Mourinho but don't necessarily count for anyone else, but fuckit and fuckyall, firmly believe that the Inverting the Pyramid approach to football dialogue definitely overlooks the element that it would fucking help to have someone that has actually been through all of this before in charge and giving you your instructions, if only that person wasn't a total fucking moron

Players don't believe in tactics - think this is entirely possible and mebbe not entirely wrong-headed provided it's not taken too far. What really is the difference between a 4-4-2 and a 4-2-3-1 where the manager yells at his wide men to drop deeper? Difference between "tactics" as a manager's responsibility (i.e. instructions for each individual player and the team as a whole) vs a player's own perception of "I am a winger, the manager tells me to try to cut in and shoot, close down opposition full-back when he's on the ball", not really taking much responsibility for wider team ethic but forming part of a larger whole that the manager is solely responsible for.

Note - formation comparisons in that post might not be very precise, but the point stands. There's only so much space in which to distribute 11 guys, and discussions over whether this is a 4-3-3 with one central midfielder advanced high up the pitch or a 4-2-3-1 with the bloke in the hole occasionally dropping deep aren't worth having imo

Discuss: the reason we have a vested interest in AVB (or Rodgers, Mourinho, whoever) sorting all this shit out is that we like the idea of a guy who thinks of football in the same way we do schooling all these ex-pros and demonstrating that you don't need to have been a great player to get this shit. When in actual fact it could v. possibly be very useful to have direct experience of what it is like to be on the pitch in these high-pressure scenarios, to have a decade + of dressing room experience where you learn how to approach these fcking entitled cunts and how to tell 'em to do their job properly, etc., as per Steve Bruce who I so disparagingly referenced a few mins ago. That the reason I want the likes of AVB to succeed so badly is that I'm fucking good at Football Manager but fucking shite at football.

NB. aware that all of these issues have probably been addressed in this thread, also that the last few lines may explain my own devotion to the likes of AVB Rodgers Mourinho but don't necessarily count for anyone else, but fuckit and fuckyall, firmly believe that the Inverting the Pyramid approach to football dialogue definitely overlooks the element that it would fucking help to have someone that has actually been through all of this before in charge and giving you your instructions, if only that person wasn't a total fucking moron

― Windsor Davies, Sunday, December 8, 2013 3:11 AM (8 hours ago)

important post imo

also important: regardless of how great and thorough a tactical mind avb may or may not be, he just seems a bit of a wet fish when it comes to motivation or conveying his ideas. i hate that up and atom football focus way of solving everything but it cant be ignored as an essential element of getting shit into the brains of 11 millionaires playing with each other

even if he is telling andros to stop cutting in or dawson to stop hoofing it, are they listening to him? when it is going right and bale is doing whatever he wants to score 2 in every game, no-one has to pay attention to him not staying where avb wants him but it shows a hell of a lot more when it is lamela looking bored doing nothing

Great set of posts, Win.

Dressing-room group dynamics is a really interesting angle on this. ime a bunch of early-twenties guys are as likely to be into slacking off and taking the piss as they are likely to buy into management-speak. Unless you're lucky enough to have a Class of 92 group of self-starters (and any group driven enough to reach professional ranks may skew this way quite naturally) then theory seems maybe a bit unnecessary next to motivation, shouting, establishing hierarchy etc. and even the Class of 92 had King Bully at the helm, so they disprove nothing.

L

fuckin phone

The players running over to hug AVB during the Fulham game suggest that the relationship with the dressing room is rather better than the papers suggest. Suspect that a lot of hacks have just decided that his face doesn't fit in English football and have never forgiven him for taking over from Our Harry, or freezing out JT and Frankie Lamps Baby when at Chelsea.

I don't think it's the case that he's complacently unbothered about the lack of goals either, he's tried a frankly ridiculous number of offensive combinations already this season. Think people are just yearning for a return to 4-4-2 but that overlooks the fact that we haven't really played like that for years, even in the latter days of Redknapp's tenure we would usually play with Crouch or Adebayor as the lone striker.

Pretty sure the wide players have been instructed to cut inside though, if only because neither Soldado or Defoe are big or physical enough to get on the end of whipped in crosses, and AVB evidently doesn't really trust Adebayor. I get the sense that what Villas Boas actually wants is a front four who pass it around the opposition and create chances through guile and movement but it isn't working yet because Eriksen, Lamela, Soldado etc are all new to the Premiership, not properly used to playing together, and are smaller than most EPL defenders and therefore not used to its ahem more robust aspects.

I wonder how different things would be had we signed Benteke in the summer and I suspect AVB would rather be playing with a big striker he can rely on.

That we're three points off second is a miracle really, but it shouldn't be overlooked that we've picked up a lot of points from largely unmemorable games. We're one point ahead of the same time last season with an almost entirely new team. And everyone we signed in the summer is a quality player - the team will only get better IMO.

Do agree that we are likely to improve but the points we've gotten are masking some really poor stuff and we've been lucky- now, longmay it last obv and we spent long enough the other way, but if the combo of playing poorly and getting lucky are avbs gameplan or anything he wants to take credit for then im callin bull.

The three points against west ham is fourth gone, regardless of where we are vs last year or where we currently are in relation to second.

Signing so many new players at once seems like one of these strategic mistakes that always takes an extra year to put right. Especially where the new blood has to compete with each other. Spurs maybe even overperforming a little in face of that disruption?

i really dislike this thread title now

― Pretty Girls Max Bygraves (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Saturday, 1 September 2012 19:03 (1 year ago)

just in mitigation, it does seem like the era of appointing completely incompetent managers to epl roles has now past, the era of stuart pearce or paul ince or like the season after curbishley left charlton

i remember stuart pearce pleading after signing a late career bernardo corradi who predictably did nothing, that he was 6'3 and had played for valencia and had previously been transferred for £7 million so who was to know he would fail, as if reading his wikipedia page was due diligence

today i remembered that alan shearer was once an epl manager, and that after he had relegated newcastle, he was still 'linked to a series of managerial vacancies' and at one point his people briefed that shearer would even be prepared to take over a championship club, as if that was some sort of contrition

but hughes, pulis

then again it can't change overnight. and even bruce shows signs every now and again of knowing as much as an average fan

yeah though pulis has some sort of 'proven track record' of five seasons in the epl, and even then only got the 20th team who were favourites for relegation, he was bought mostly on the likelihood that they would be in the champo next year, no established epl side would touch him

hughes made sense as a manager who could use all the shitty players pulis had overspent on, while gradually adapting to more of a football oriented playing style with cheap signings like muniesa arnautovic pieters etc

Corradi said: "The manager is typically English. He expects you to go out and beat the other team without knowing how they play. There's no preparation. It has been a nightmare."

can we eke out a thread connecting those managers that are oft the scorn of ilf yet clearly have epl function- yr hughes, yr pulis (maybe) yr pardew- are these managerial competents or what are they living off at this level (assuming that there is something other than purely non-managerial connections/reputation going on)

allardyce pardew and hughes are all living off the munificence of english owners, and once allardyce is fired by west ham he won't get another established epl side

all of them are born survivors

steve bruce has done well considering he was in the RIP camp not so long ago. promotion to glory is the only option for a few

allardyce used to collect door-to-door to keep limerick town fc afloat iirc

pardew has had runs of seeming competence with more than one club, he is an interesting case imo

he's generally been a success. there is one exception

well ya but that one exception holds true for most managers historically iirc

Former Bolton striker Kevin Davies has warned West Ham against sacking Sam Allardyce, despite the team’s current poor form.

The Hammers are on the precipice of the relegation zone after winning just one of their last eight games.

And while there are calls to bring the manager’s time at Upton Park to an end, Davies - who played four seasons under Allardyce during his reign at the Trotters - believes the east London side should stick with the boss.

“I wouldn’t like to see Sam leave West Ham," Davies told Drivetime.

“You speak to any player who has played under Sam, regardless of whether they have been in the squad or not, they’ve had nothing but good things to say about him, they've loved playing for him because he knows how to get the best out of players.

davies clearly feels that with the right wind blowing in december he could well find himself an epl player in january

Pulis and Allardyce and Bruce and whoever are not good managers but they're all the choice of chairmen who value merely staying in the Premiership above all else and they have by and large succeeded in that brief but I'm sure no one thinks they'll ever be leading anyone to even limited Martinez-shaped glory. Pulis won't save Palace any time soon but he'll probably be the go-to option for Championship clubs for a while, like a very uninspiring upgrade on Mick McCarthy or Neil Warnock.

Really you need to look at these clubs in the context of Swansea or even Wigan to see how different (and how much better) things could be.

Pardew is a very limited fairweather manager benefiting from an excellent talent scout but he is fine for Newcastle for the time being, assuming Newcastle don't get a couple of injuries and lose more than two games in a row, then the wheels will come off. Ashley is a cretin but it's obvious that he doesn't really trust him.

Add Southampton to that list as well, and although the money helps it didn't exactly help QPR.

Wd argue against martinez-level just yet. They've all had bursts of glory within a season.

I was talking about Wigan winning the FA Cup.

lol oh yeah

hope ur all aware that i take as personal insult any mention of hughes suggesting he is anything other than a fraudulent cancer of a useless cunt

mangerial cuntency

Feel like hughes has worked within a framework of having decent excuses to fail when it happens, not saying that in itself is proof of competence or anything but

Well it's a skill of sorts, but who'd want it?

Hughes is a unique specimen though, he's a Bruce who still entertains mad delusions of being a Mourinho, purely for being in the right place at the time all the Qatar money came flooding in. Except Bruce actually has a bit of humility and good humour whereas Hughes appears to be almost entirely devoid of redeeming features.

Feel like hughes has worked within a framework of having decent excuses to fail when it happens

There's no excuse for what happened at City and QPR, it's pure incompetence on his part. I cherish fond memories of watching Spurs beat City in December 09 and singing "you're getting sacked in the morning" and have it actually happen for once.

Plenty of managers held in high regard would have done no better at city in time given imo

There was a twinkle in Tim Sherwood's eye when Tottenham's interim manager began talking about the enigmatic figure that goes by the name of Emmanuel Adebayor. It was a brief lesson in man-management, the sort of insight that can only be passed on if you have shared a dressing room with some tricky customers down the years.

Sherwood has seen it all before after an 18-year playing career and more than 500 appearances for six clubs. You can't just enrol on a UEFA technical workshop and pick up this kind of stuff.

For that reason Adebayor is putty in Sherwood's hands, playing as if his life depended on it during Tottenham's gung-ho victory at St Mary's.

....neil ashton on the nascent appeal of tim sherwood

what possessed you to read neil ashton

why not, i read a lot of the tabloid hacks? where else do you think i get this content, i don't have an errand boy to summarize martin samuel columns for me

abh convictee and avb unconvincee rob shepherd is always worth reading

haha well you're a bolder man than I

I suppose it is revealing insofar as the pernicious narratives of 'a real football man' are firstly cogitated in such abject vales

v-b is not really a stunningly innovative tactician, he is just a clever articulate ardent young manager who is happy to talk fairly openly with the media and likes to assume that are at the same level and interested in the same things

they are happy to play dumb and gently patronize him as an uppity dork with questionable emotional resilience and lack of 'football man' background, while hedging slightly cuz he has shown signs of significant talent and may well turn out to be successful here

rodgers seems quite different temperamentally, a bit more of a charismatic than v-b, with his weird soulful lugubrious intonations about character and slightly mawkish avuncularity towards his players

he has the kind of absracted 'natural confidence' that public schools try to instill whereas insofar as v-b is confident it's as a function of his demonstrated aptitudes and achievements, so when chelsea started playing like shit he looked like a cornered fox

― things that are jokes pretty much (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Friday, 21 December 2012 17:41 (1 year ago)

the whole thing happened again, i can't help but feel if he didn't bite at ashton and samuel and the fans and implicitly at levy and baldini, he would still be there, his error (apart from sniping at the fans which was just idiotic) was in being too candid and ~logical~

even so, it's interesting how brad friedel, whose career as a first choice player was ended by a manager half a decade his junior, said that he was generally liked by the squad precisely because of that candour....

"I think all the players in the changing room really wanted things to work out for Andre," the veteran goalkeeper said.

"From day one that he came to the club, (he had an) open door policy, very good communication with the players. None of us were happy to see him go

and most accounts say he is much more congenial around his players, so there isn't an incommensurable gap there despite his being the exact inverse of the real football man

avb struck me as a man with a long-term plan which presumably included fostering good relations with the players & attempting to build a nucleus - the eventual goal to have a team that'd stay together for 5, 6 years

he needs to go to a club with patience and there aren't so many of those around. weirdly enough manchester united would have perhaps been ideal, think he's better than moyes

maybe a midranking la liga team. mind you who's even midranking any more, it's the big 3 and then mulch

yes, even you, valencia

avb at one of the milans might work too

actually no italy distrusts the young manager

anyway it'll be v funny when he winds up at west ham

could see Monaco reuniting him with his fellow Porto alums if/when they finally ditch Ranieri

the whole thing happened again, i can't help but feel if he didn't bite at ashton and samuel and the fans and implicitly at levy and baldini, he would still be there, his error (apart from sniping at the fans which was just idiotic) was in being too candid and ~logical~

The last interview where he refused to deny that someone else was buying the players, that was quite key in his sacking I reckon.

Everyone knows someone else was buying the players, that's what Directors of Football do. He might possibly have allowed it to get out that he didn't want some of the players he did get, and when there's £100m of investment at stake...

I read that he didn't want I think it was Eriksen, Chiriches, Chadli or Lamela - when it gets to leaking actual names, that starts to look like a power struggle with blame-shifting. Not good terrain for avb really.

Refusing to organise a tactic acknowledging that these were the players he got was where he needed sacking tbf

especially when the players he did supposedly want werent exactly easy gimmes (moutinho, hulk, oscar, derek, willian, villa, damiao, coentrao... )

They just missed Moutinho over Levy haggling for 500k to boost his ILX rep.

Joking aside that is apparently true.

this probably a better place to extend my comparison of moyes and martinez and why the latter while more flawed has greater upside. it isn't just about the notional aesthetic comparison between maloney vs anichebe. rather it's because what martinez doing is really rather unusual, today he played a formation that confounded manchester city. the use of wingbacks, even converting a dmid to the position because all of his other options are injured, and two forwards attacking from the flanks caused regular overmatching. zabaleta is the best rb in the league but he couldn't contain it and got booked twice, leading to the late surge that brought the corner and the goal.

sacchi described the multiplier effect as the aim of all tactics, getting players to play beyond their skillset via formation/coaching etc. moyes' success depended to a greater extent on physicality and aggression, midtable sort of strategies which top teams seldom rely on as an end in themselves. they depend on the particularities of the players, like having a £15m 6'4 nuisance capable of outmatching an adjunct centreback (how everton won 1-0 at goodison last year). and as such they are more predictable and more easily neutralized, like by putting phil jones on fellaini in the next game. martinez isn't dependent on his players to the same degree, most of his squad are interchangeable journeymen who he has to deploy in innovative ways vs more talented teams.

it's like how 'natural goalscorers' in the afonso alves vein fail to transfer to higher leagues because their 'instinct' reflected the naivete of the opposition, whereas a player like thierry henry with an unremarkable scoring record can become great because his exceptional physical and technical skills were not contingent in the same way. martinez succeeds via tactical determinism in the manner of the greatest coaches, rather than the dogs of war spirit of most lower table success stories.

― there is no special cathexis with mini fried donuts (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Sunday, 12 May 2013 00:16 (11 months ago)

that post is incredible btw. im not usually one to think much of someone to repost themselves but nakh finding nakh otm.

nakh otming nakh is vmic

great post all the same

maybe jury is still out on AVB but his tenure at Spurs at least was sadly more in the Moyes mold than Martinez

the reason for c&p isn't just cuz i thought moyes would be out of his depth, many many people thought that, so much as the amount of people who were arguing with me after the fa cup final about the significance of martinez' victory and of moyes' crappy record vs the big teams during his time at everton

not so much that moyes himself is shit (there is a post up there about his virtues, none of which he displayed this season) save that as good as his everton side were relative to expenditure, he could very seldom devise a way to defeat good sides, let alone outplay them as martinez managed a few times with a team far below everton in terms of resources

and it really showed this season, he could mostly rely on rvp or twp win games vs crap sides but his record vs the top eight was atrocious, just a single win

so when someone like jonathan wilson, one of the vanishingly small number of intelligent british fitba hacks and someone who has probably watched twenty times more fitba than i ever will, comes out with shit like this today....

Fans will argue whether Moyes was ever cut out to be United manager, but that is to slightly miss the point. Managers and players rarely fit neatly into categories. There aren't A-grade manager and B-grade managers and so on down the line: there are merely managers who are right for a particular job in particular circumstances and those who are not.

then i think he is completely wrong, and it reflects poorly on him that he thought moyes was still worth persevering with even last month

moyes' tenure at manchester united and martinez' eclipsing of moyes' best ever points total with four games to go in his first season exactly shows that there are 'B-grade' managers who are fine up to a certain level, and in martinez' case someone who could potentially be a success at one of the best teams in europe in the future

god I love this thread

avb, mourinho FOUND OUT

Managing yr way out of a slump looks like a very specific skill separate from base competency. Moyes never had it, which should have been apparent from his time at Everton, but it has been interesting to see Klopp, Mourinho, AVB to some extent and Allegri all struggle with it too recently.

i'd say the absolute intolerance of slumps is to do with this - once it's a slump you've only got a few games before the sack, in the vast majority of cases.

True for ordinary managers but Klopp, Favre and AVB have been allowed to write their own exits and opted to quit / not extend contracts rather than get sacked.

The last couple of seasons have been full of managers who initially look good managing midtable teams and then bomb. They are fine when it comes to sorting out someone else's mistakes but absolutely clueless when it comes to addressing their own - Pardew, Bruce, Redknapp etc.

Obviously Mourinho etc are three or four cuts above that lot but I think that managing your way out of a slump requires an admission that you're making mistakes, and that your ideas don't work any more. There's a degree of humility required that a lot of managers just don't possess. Or if they do, they're too ineffectual to do much in the first place.

In terms of managing their way out of a slump, the two most consistently successful managers have been Wenger and Martinez, who have also benefited from unusually supportive Chairmen.

Not really sure how Wenger can be considered to have managed his way out of a slump tbh. Arsenal over the last decade have occasionally slipped to 6th or 7th (if that) at some point midway through the season to end up in the top 4 come May.

I don't really see all that much variance in form from Arsenal unless you're talking a month with say 2 draws and a loss followed by one of 3 wins and a draw? Have they ever been in a prolonged (8-12 games) slump?

I think it kind of makes sense - seeing the problems in an existing structure is a lot different from building something of your own - there are prob divides like this in many careers.

Moyes prob did manage his way out of slumps - as in the odd awful season followed by returning to 6th or whatever, IIRC?

Wenger's never had a slump of the level of Mourinho now, but neither have most CL-level teams. They have had several periods of looking lacklustre for a month or even two, slipping out of the CL running, and bringing things back with a long run of consistent wins shortly after things looked at their worst. Wenger has been good at preventing a small slump from turning into a tailspin.

that's one way of looking at it - another would be to say he's been in a small slump for a decade.

I mean everything we know about Mourinho suggests that a refusal to admit wrongdoing is at the very least a major contributory factor towards Chelsea's form this season, as is an apparent inability to build bridges with key players. Repeatedly criticising the mentality of your players is the sort of crap you expect from John Carver or Tim Sherwood or whoever.

Oh man I've just realised they've got Stoke next as well, that's the sort of fixture where managerial graves are dug.

Moyes prob did manage his way out of slumps - as in the odd awful season followed by returning to 6th or whatever, IIRC?

His early years at Everton were a series of slumps and revivals - kept them up in his first season then finished 7th then 17th then 4th then couldn't buy a win the next season but brought them up from bottom to 11th by the end of the season. After that it was a consistent run of finishing between 5th and 8th but even then they always seemed to start or finish the season badly.

youd have him ahead of ambrose alright

there are at least ten things I'd change at Celtic before Ambrose, who, and let's be clear, is a fucking disaster of a centre hoff

Been paying less attention to the fitba than ever in the last year or two and confess that I have no great confidence in the current Aston villa squad to wriggle their way out of present difficulties, but I find the appointment of remi garde quite intriguing and I'll be interested to see where it leads.

Use of all the French players to hand during the recent man city match (even Charles n'zogbia ffs) has piqued my interest and got me to wondering if there are other examples out there of managers seemingly being appointed explicitly because of their ability to work with the particular resources available - villa invest large sums in young French players and then appoint a manager whose reputation is founded p. much entirely on his ability to work with and bring along young French players.

Are there other high profile examples of this kind of targeted appointment and if so, how successful has this strategy proven in the past?

Just re-read this thread top-to-bottom for the 10th time btw, so great

Valencia head coach Gary Neville has revealed in an exclusive interview with Sky Sports that the current focus is Valencia, but his long-term future does not lie in management.

The former Manchester United defender is in charge of the La Liga club until the end of the season, but is yet to win a game in the league.

His side face Real Madrid - live on Sky Sports 3 HD at 7pm on Sunday - following the 1-0 defeat by Villarreal on New Year's Eve. Valencia currently sit 11 points off the Champions League spots.

But the Englishman's long-term future is clear in his head, and speaking with Sky Sports' Geoff Shreeves, Neville said: "I'm not going to say where I want to end up, and it isn't in management or head coaching, so I want to be clear about that.

Gerrard thinks deeply about the game that has enabled him to fulfil his dreams and it is when the conversation moves on to management that his opinions strike a chord; he, after all, is one of a generation that includes Jamie Carragher, Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand with so much to offer.

'Would the likes of Carra and ex-players like Robbie (Fowler)? Keep them about. Find roles for them. They have too much to offer to just be let go. I have regrets now that I didn't start my badges at 21-22. All that time I wasted in hotels being when I was watching The Office and The Sopranos.

'I wish I could be doing my 'Pro' licence now. I know many players who get to the end of their careers and get handed a C licence pack, which is about four inches thick, and say "Nah, I'm not doing that". He could have 70/80 caps and 600 career appearances. They have so much to offer.'

the neville stuff is p ridiculous, like he had to distance himself from england and man u this week, when the valencia job, which he basically got due to being friends with a millionaire, is almost certainly a doomed project.

'I wish I could be doing my 'Pro' licence now. I know many 70/80 caps and 600 career appearances players who get to the end of their careers and get handed an elite club level job, which is about having to do work, and say "Nah, I'm not doing that". They have so much to offer.'

zidane at real madrid is going to be a disaster

afaik he is not very clever

charismatic megafauna

it's the opposite of a nascent appeal of managerial competence appointment

combining galactico signing policy with "good madrid man" appease-the-plebs-populism

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/01/04/19/2FCBEDBD00000578-3384157-image-a-61_1451936033479.jpg

It's like an elite version of replacing Villas Boas with Tim Sherwood.

lol right

down to the ballyhooed not-sign-zidane-already-got-sherwood.html tales of yore

like the idea of tuchel getting his defenders to play practice games while holding tennis balls in their hands to discourage shirt pulling.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/may/14/quique-sanchez-flores-watford-departure-explained

vg

Conte, Pochettino, Guardiola, Klopp, Mourinho, Wenger, Koeman, Pellegrino, Howe, Bilic, De Boer, Clement, Silva, Benitez.

Not all perfect by any means, especially at the back end of that list, but this probably represents the single best crop of managers to have all been working in the Premiership at once?

ffs you missed Wagner, who is as the chant goes "better than Klopp"!

Hard times for the Huddersfield fan: chased out of the EFL thread by angry Charlton hard-lads, unconsidered by the Prem lot.

Lol! It is hard out there when yr upstart club has just won the Euromillions jackpot.

xp
We might be getting Ince jr from Derby, so it will probably be our fault if they bid for Ollie Watkins. But at least they aren't shy of paying big transfer fees.

zidane at real madrid is going to be a disaster

― Cuombas (jim in glasgow), Monday, January 4, 2016 1:20 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

um

Draw against a 3rd tier club yesterday in the Copa tbf

lost to girona in the league a month ago too and currently 4th in the league.

but still won the champs league twice and la liga once so perhaps not the worst disaster

Champs league don't mean shit nowadays. Just look at Spurs.

(he's not that bad though, I agree)

Fp ya cuntcha

I'll take it on the chin.

hadn't heard of this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxGz1nWwCaw

speedrunning managerial competency like never before

i listened to wengers desert island discs the last night and hes a good charming speaker so he is

Unfortunately no Magma or Heldon among his picks.

alas Lorraine