Ex Lion Tamer

I assume he means we maintain a shortlist of five players for each position all year round. They are watched closely and are considered our top targets, but this list can change on an ongoing basis if other players are identified as better

Chop off their hands i reckon

Watching that, I'd be surprised if a bigger team than us didn't come in for him. Unless there are serious doubts about his defensive contribution

Part of the reason why his squad seems really good is that he gets players playing at the best of their ability. Look at how the likes of Lovren, Lallana, Shaw, Schneiderlin have struggled since leaving the club

To be fair, he did look quite good in the 2014 world cup

Two of those have yet to be confirmed just like ours

I'd definitely keep but we need more options so that he can fall out of the side when he is in one of his out of form spells

It does seem to me that the ITK's in this thread were all correct in their own way: Arfurdent - Les saying that the club is considering other options, because that's what Les wanted. This then overinterpreted by the OP as Hughes out of the running. Telegraph - leak from Ralph or someone else on the board designed to be supportive to Hughes. EkonOkereke - dubious Kenyan back story but basically on the money that Les wanted to try to for another option. Les again talking up the possibility of other options, because that's what he wanted. Landford.Saints - basically confirms that Les tried to propose an alternative but it was rejected by the board. But this time the tone is a little different because its Ralph or other board member shutting down any possibility that someone else would have been chosen. Huffton - confirms there has been a power struggle behind the scenes

I think one of our biggest problems has been that while embedding a football philosophy through the club is a good thing, ours got outdated. Possession football and 4-2-3-1 has been overtaken a bit by counter attacking football and 5 at the back, and sometimes the manager needs to power to be able to change that if things aren't working on the pitch. So more autonomy for the manager in terms of the style of play and formation is all good. Power over transfers less so. But surely the board will have seen our track record of manager-led signings and not given carte blanche on that front - one can only hope

Best of both please

Cortese did a good job of creating a positive vision for the club, where everyone believed we were going to keep progressing up and up, players were willing to stay with us for the ride and we had the funds to outspend those around us in the table. But there came a point where Kat said she wasn't going to provide the funds to take us to the next level (above about 6th really) and so that vision became unsustainable. The vision for the club had to change and the best way to get players in that were above our natural level was the stepping stone strategy

Shebby Singh is available

The black box is the biggest myth going, that you can use stats and computer algorithms to make the perfect transfer policy. Yes its good to have detailed data on players, psychological profiling and the like, and some clubs are obviously weak in that respect (West Ham spring to mind). But ultimately scouting is an art not a science, otherwise the biggest clubs would sign the best players from day one and that would be that. You have to decide what to do with the data once you have it. Who knew that Rickie Lambert and Jamie Vardy would go on to become top Premier League players when they were plugging away in the lower leagues? Mo Salah had a good season for Roma last year, but who predicted he would have the season he had this year? Or on the flipside, who knew that Fernando Torres would go from being one of the best strikers in the world to not barely being able to score at all for Chelsea.

And 8 of them were in the last nine games, so seems like he won his place, unless someone got injured, which is possible

Seems to be a first team choice though regularly coming off around the hour https://www.transfermarkt.com/jordy-clasie/leistungsdaten/spieler/104223

Its not impossible that Hughes will want changes to the way the club is run which he has kept to himself during the relegation battle and which could be a sticking point. But i expect him to join - what other jobs will he get that are better than this one realistically?

Is this true? It seems speculative to me. Surely the system will always be imperfect. There have always been bargains that come out of nowhere and there always will be. It wasn't really even that difficult to find out about Mane. He scored 31 goals in 63 games for Salzburg. Anyone could get hold of those stats at the touch of a button, and surely most clubs did. What we identified is that he had the potential to step up to the Premier League, which is the hard part. Its about judgement rather than knowing a player exists, which is why Paul Mitchell is so sought after. And we were willing to take a punt which a bigger club wouldn't. How many of the top four clubs would have put up with his poor form which had everyone on here up in arms? But it was necessary for his development.

Depends how you define success. They thought they could go even bigger than 6th if we kept some of the great players we kept selling. Perhaps they were egged on by fans complaining about players being sold, and saying Les was in the pocket of Liverpool etc. With hindsight it didn't work but that is why they did it

Fulham seem to have some good players but this Kamara bloke will/would get found out pretty quickly in the Premier League

The good news is that Hughes has never had good starts at the clubs he's managed, but gone on to do quite well. So hopefully we will kick on next season

Long is better than Brett Ormerod so that is something

Pellegrino had one good season with Alaves having being sacked at his two previous clubs. Pochettino had 3.5 seasons at Espanyol where until his last season he achieved creditable mid-table results despite having to sell his best players every summer. So not that similar. If the new Pochettino is out there, then yes I'd go for it

Sorry wrong thread

Let's re-establish in middle table with Hughes for at least next season. Then we can be ruthless like we were with Adkins if we feel he is not getting the most out of the players available

We should work out what makes him tick and build the team around him