the nascent appeal of managerial competency

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