He still had more than enough quality in his side to do better than he did. He chose to leave Greenwood out for the first half of the season, and despite having Lingard and Pereira around he still had first XIs that were better in quality than a lot of the sides faced.
What the feck are you on about
Once Pogba got injured I genuinely think our midfield was mid-table at best. You don't get top 4 with zero creators. Not unless you have a brilliant attackers that can pull goals out of their ass(which we don't have).
So, hypothetically, how long must Ole keep the current good results up before you are willing to look past the first 13 months(10 in actuality, since you must also praise his excellent start then)?
Except it wasn't. We just looked that bad under Ole. There are various games last season + season prior where we had a host of our big names available and were still shit.
The underlying point just shows the problem with your logic. What current good results? He's won against Everton + West Brom and a Turkish outfit making their debut in the league. It's odd to thin that 3 wins suddenly means we're back on especially after we've seen it can go to shit so quickly. Yeah I think I'll take a bit more than that after his torrid form prior to that.
We go on a 37(!) game run of good results and then suddenly results don't matter
Follow my posts mate. I started to believe in him until he crashed again. A manager 2 years into his time with the club can't afford to be up and down this much.We go on a 37(!) game run of good results and then suddenly results don't matter
I give up.
You're never going to get through to him his user name is Ole boi. Good post by the way.
Thanks. Yes I thought this too. I struggle to imagine how someone can overlook 61 points, then cherry pick a random point in time because the form looks better that way.
Manager | Games (All Comps) | W | D | L | CS | Win % | GF | GA | GD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Pep | 104 | 72 | 18 | 14 | 41 | 69% | 246 | 95 | +151 |
Ole | 104 | 59 | 20 | 25 | 39 | 57% | 190 | 104 | +86 |
Klopp | 104 | 55 | 28 | 21 | 37 | 53% | 193 | 111 | +82 |
Poch | 104 | 53 | 26 | 25 | 29 | 51% | 174 | 114 | +60 |
Im confused. Such a good record but Klopp won the league. Ole finished behind Pep in everything and Poch hasn’t managed a game in months.
Quite certain that he's talking about the first 104 games of the 4 managers
Correct.
I dont think its that unfair to choose the point at which Bruno was signed as a fresh start of sorts. Granted it makes the numbers look a lot better, but its also the point where this new team we have really started to take shape. We desperately lacked that creative link man.
Its not because its just a certain period when we started playing well. Its when we signed the player that's become the most important player in the team. Im sure opposition fans would have done similar.
No it isn't, because we are judging a mangers results with the team. You don't just take the period where he happened to look good.
Yes that was very clever, and absolutely nothing like what's happening here.
Follow the posts - I have no problems with the statistic to praise Bruno. I have a problem with someone quoting a complaint against the manager where we ended on 66 points, to suggest form since Bruno discounts that for the manager. It's a nice statistic, it shows Bruno made a big impact on the team. It does not mitigate Ole finishing on 66 points because as I said, we had an atrocious first half of the season where not having Bruno + a couple of injuries is not sufficient context to argue his case. We shouldn't just cherry pick and ignore the entire first half of last season because it suits an argument.
There's an answer to everything though isn't there. Its why this thread is such a train wreck.
From where? We've been consistent for 37 games now. 24W, 7D, 6L. Is that not consistent to you? Or does the clock restart every time we lose a game?
Oh great. So a Premier league and Champions league soon then. Pep took 24 months. He should be close behind based on that table.
What the feck is wrong with you, you want to talk about consistency - he's only won half of his Premier League games in the season so far. It's not even a small sample - there's 8 league games there and he's managed to win in just 4 of them, and if we didn't have 100 lives against Brighton it would probably have been 3.
Yes or you can go deeper, away the numbers and instead look at how we play. Do we have a set system that we know he can depend on? No. Does he look like he knows his first XI? No. He wanted us to be the most hard working side in the league, are we even close to that after 2 years? No. He wanted us to press well as a unit, do we do this? No And is the quality of our performances showing like there is a direction, independent of the end result? No.
Do you think the Covid schedule has impacted our and all other clubs consistency or do you consider that an excuse? Generally curious as it seems if you look at the data that all clubs have struggled for genuine consistency.
No the whole season is indeed topsy turvy. But the likes of Southampton, Leicester, Liverpool, Tottenham, Chelsea for example have adapted well. We had a later start to the season so there is a grace period there, but thats why I said, it's crunch time now for Ole. He's had yet another crash after great form post lockdown, but this crash can't last as long as the first half of his 2019 campaign, because something close to that will certainly get him the sack.
Dips in form happen to every team, and will continue to happen to us. This is a hard league and a short season with a ton of football. Its unrealistic to expect us to play consistently well, because nobody will do that.
I'll be surprised if we continue with 2019 form tbh and if it does then his job should be under threat. As that was mainly down to injuries and our defensive reorganisation taking time to adapt. He doesn't have those excuses this season so from my perspective we need to be hitting form and now. But I will say that all the clubs have struggled with form post lockdown, the difference is that some clubs struggled last season while others are struggling this season. It's interesting looking at the results as one batch of data and then comparing as if you do that, then the win rates for all the top clubs are almost identical, but more importantly way, way below what would normally be the requirement to win the league. That tells me that this season in particular will be a carbon copy of the Leicester win, the final points total will be in the 80s bracket. That means as a club, it's not impossible for us to be title challengers this year, we just need to sustain our 2020 form going into 2021 and if we do that, then we'll be there or thereabouts.
And yet it sometimes happened to SAF. In fact there were quite a few shite spells over the years (ignoring the massive 4-year shite spell after he first came here). Good managers have shite spells. You have to look over a season. We can still challenge for the title. Heck, we’ve only played 8 games.
This is a tough league. People are looking at our December schedule and commenting on how tough it is, but fairly recently we'd have looked at Southampton, Leeds, West Ham & Sheff Utd and be licking our lips at the prospect. Teams are improving and there are so many strong managers in this league now.
This is why those depth signings are bigger than people realise. It would have been so unwise to spend it all on one player with a heavily condensed season about to start
I feel like your defence of Ole is just based on those 24w, 7d, 6l.
Not sure what this post achieves. No one here regards Ole to be as good as Klopp or Pep. The post was just to provide context to the fact that no manager became a champion this early.
I think you have a point regarding the covid situation, but I think even with injuries the system could have been more apparent, our work ethic and press could have been more visible etc. And it's not just that, it's Ole's approach to management which I fundamentally don't think works in the modern game in the long term. He talks of moments changing games too much, he talks about not believing in tactics as much as he does in mentality. The aren't wrong per say but it's clear he's watering down the importance of a functional system and technical application toward management. That is actually seen on the pitch and explains why we go on longer stretches of both good form and a prolonged stretch of bad form, because we appear to be a confidence team - and if that indication is genuine, it isn't sustainable.
Yeah. I mean most the pens we get are genuine pens so I don't have too much of an issue with that. @Pogue Mahone raised a good thread about Martial/Rashford being both very talented but still inconsistent. So when you have 2 very talented yet inconsistent players and no established right winger there can be an issue. I still think the attacking players are capable of big things in their careers especially with Cavan in the mix - so lets see if Ole can unlock that this season. For me, he would have to move Martial left and start Cavani if he can stay fit, that ruthlessness is required from the manager to get his team more consistent.
I do get the comparison to Ferguson but I'd be wary of drawing parallels. If Ole was struggling today but had managerial pedigree on his CV like SAF did, then fair enough. But Ole actually has the opposite, his last job in the Premier League bombed massively and he has nothing on his CV to suggest turning fortune around. Moreover sadly, the modern game has changed and the freedom SAF had to re-stablizie a dressing room and stamp his authority won't be the same for Ole (rightly or wrongly). SAF had the authority and credibility to do this, and Ole has a lot of respect of the dressing room but it's been reported by well reputable sources such as Athletic, that several players doubt Ole's credentials as a top coach. That was never the case with SAF because he actually joined with pedigree on his CV.
He has last season. At this club, in this league, when things looked a lot worse than they do right now. That means more than anything else that would be on his CV.
I get why we talk about all these things but the thing is it's the same with every club. No fan watches other clubs the same way as they watch their own club and hence these points pop up. I don't think anyone watches City vs Burnley games as closely as we would watch Utd vs Macclesfield. And all this does is to reinforce our biases. If you're comparing "Oof" moments in a Chelsea's game to the 90 mins of a Utd game, obviously Chelsea would come out to be better. And vice versa.
Yep. He wont ever get the credit he deserves for last season from the people who want him out so that's a losing battle. They'd rather talk about Cardiff because it fits the argument.
It's what I've said a couple of times. I don't think Ole inners realise how much of an impact Ole's underqualfied CV has on people trusting in him. Ole's been compared time and time again to Klopp and Fergie when he should be compared more with Pep Zidane Arteta and Lampard. All of who were underqualfied at the time they took over big clubs. These type of managers have to do remarkable things for people to actually rate them
So you have to ask yourself, should Ole be in a position where it's 90 minutes between success and failure against a side that had equally terrible injuries, with a manager with less time in the job and far far less money spent? Is that what it has come down to? That if he wins that game he's brilliant and if he loses he's sacked?
Please can you expand on this? In our big wins vs City, Tottenham, Arsenal, Chelsea + and our draws vs Liverpool we weren't missing that many key players relative to the other team. For example we missed Rashford when we beat Chelsea 2-0 and they missed Pulisic. We had Rashford + Martial both available for City, we had a full side available when we beat Chelsea on the opening day of the season. When we drew to Spurs 1-1 we had a virtually a full side available and when we lost to Arsenal we virtually had a full side available.
I'm more than happy to talk about last season. This concept that he has had a makeshift team for most the season is overcooked. He certainly had injuries but there are various matches where he had a stronger team than the opposition team and performed badly. I dont even look at the results at that stage as long as we play good football and it shows a direction, but there was too big a stretch of us looking lost along with the bad results together.
Comparisons to Klopp and Ferguson are stupid. I don't think anyone really does that intentionally. Those two names appear frequently in this thread because its 35000 posts of back and forth where everything possible has been argued. You won't find a single fan anywhere who would seriously contest that Ole deserves to be rated on that level. That's bonkers. He has to win things first.
