the nascent appeal of managerial competency

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.