Dusic

Promotion winner so fair shout amd especially compared to the replacement!

Personally would be high pressure, aggressively positioned full backs, wide players who run towards the penalty area, with a deep lying defensive midfielder similar to during the Pochettino era. Proactive, high energy out of possession - the best template IMO to catch cold teams who have better individual players. Formation not important, but always a back four.

Understood and agree to an extent - just feel that largely the managers that have done well at Saints - e.g Strachan, Adkins, Koeman, Hasenhuttl - have been strong personalities able to build a rapport with fans quickly to bring a bit of calm authority in their various ways and a personal opinion is that given the magnitude of the fuck up this season and type of character required to reunite the club (again) I'm not convinced that Cooper is that guy. Can't think of any of our "dull and uninspiring" managers who have done a good job tbh.

Not with fans by and large though. And certainly handled the summer period very well. With players also.

I'm certainly not disputing Cooper's achievement with Forest but personally find him so dull and uninspiring. One thing Russell Martin did well was galvanise a club that had just been relegated and in part that was due to personality, media handling etc. We will definitely need that from whoever takes over (and its one thing Juric has massively failed on). Personally don't see Cooper as that type.

Not sure that is fair. Shields and Wilcox both did enough in a short time to be poached by the big boys and Goldie seems to be doing ok with the Academy after a poor period previously. Their off field appointments have generally been fairly decent I would say and not their fault that those guys were approached by Chelsea and Man Utd!

He showed enough last night that one vs one he is still the best we have. Cleaely at times he has been disruptive but in the absence of being able to sell him it does seem a bit odd that he wasnt tried before now in a team that has conceded lots of goals for ages. Hopefully he plays til end of the season and we might be able to get some cash for him.

We seem to be so bad at selecting L1/2 loans for our better academy players. Both of Ballard's loans this season have seen the manager fired just a few weeks after he joined and he looks set for a 2nd season in a row of barely playing unfortunately. Shame for him as he definitely has something but in danger of just being good in age group football...

No issue with flexibility but you certainly need some overarching principles. Both Iraola and Frank play slightly different shapes but regardless the type of players they need are the same despite that. Same with Pep who often switches between 3 and 4 CBs but the overall style remains. We have shifted from pressing to long ball to men behind the ball to extreme possession to man-to man...no wonder the squad is a bit of a mess. We need to stick with something for longer than 6 months and back it up with 3 or 4 windows in a row of decent recruitment, get better at managing contracts, selling assets rather than losing them for free and somehow get fans engaged again (I like many are as unbothered as I have ever been about games now). Over to Spors. Massive job on his hands.

Its actually more of an issue that a.) Our recruitment track record the last 6 or 7 years is poor, and b.) we keep changing the "systems" and therefore have players who are not suited to what the current manager wants, e.g having no left footed CB for a manager who exclusively plays with 3 CBs. Recruitment is at the core of the reason we have been so poor the last two PL seasons and the 5 permanent managers we have had in that time have all wanted different things. Recipe for disaster.

Its obvious we didn't have a good enough squad to stay up in August - not enough goals and likely to concede quite a few. But managers both should have got a little more from them to make for less embarassing season. Martin had us playing 'nice' football that with a few tweaks he was unwilling to make could have got us level with Ipswich, Leicester. Juric has just been a disaster and seems to have fragmented a squad that was already low on confidence.

Notice they have all gone quiet too. Rudderless. All we can do is trust in Spors that he makes a good decision in the summer.

We have definitely become worse under Juric than we were under Martin (except for perhaps the last game). He is even more inflexible and clearly doesnt have the players needed to play his way, hence ending today with a back of a RB who couldnt get in our team in the Champipnship, an attacking midfielder and a player who hasnt played for 2 years. Madness.

Aside from perhaps the very end of RM's tenure it definitely is worse. There is no sense of playing to any kind of plan (whether a popular or unpopular one) and nothing positive ever happens under managers to whom this applies. It was always going to be very tough for any manager who came in at that point to be a viable option for next season, but with every passing game the chance of Juric still being here gets ever smaller.

Juric plays a different style so would of course have signed some players of a different profile. But as pointed out further up, pretty much every fan wanted us to sign THB and Downes. Wood was a low risk £3m signing so will likely be very useful next season and clearly wasn't signed to be a key player. Fraser was a poor signing but also cheap, its not like we signed him instead of getting someone for £20m. BBD and Archer on the other hand were obviously signings seen as starting XI options. Just because we signed them it doesnt mean they were #1 on RM's list (they weren't). It means they were the deals the club was able to get done. Swap Delap for Archer and we definitely have more physicality and more points. My question would be why did Delap prefer to go to Ipswich over Saints? Why did they find £25m for a goalkeeper when we could have signed one on loan and spent that cash on a proper attacker? Why didn't they stump up 500k to bring Welington here in the summer? Why didnt they replace Wilcox properly when he left? These are SR questions not RM ones.

Usually you are fairly balanced and reasonable but this is an odd one. RM was the manager but he wasn't the person negotiating signing players and wasn't the Head of Recruitment. I doubt any of our genuine first team signings were first choices, we already know most of them weren't because we were clearly in for players like Delap, Carvalho, Clarke (just off the top of my head). Its fairly likely many were quite far down the list. The blame for recruitment clearly lies at the door of Sport Republic. They failed RM in the summer, as much as he messed things up himself. Re Juric...seems odd in our situation to get a manager who is very fixed in terms of formation when we knew we didnt have some profiles for his setup.

Why would anyone want to get rid of Smallbone FFS? He was very good last season, a key player in a promotion season. Has been injured most of this so hardly to blame for anything. Players like him who actually care a bit about the are exactly the ones who we do need for next season.

Why on earth he would think we would sell him to Ipswich a few months after he turned them down to come here is bizarre. Really poor from him.

Feel like he has a long way to go to build any kind of rapport with fans to the point where many will feel he is the right man for next year. He just comes across as being a bit cold and uninspiring.

Yeah very good news he will be based at Staplewood! Lets hope he stays for more than a season.

The Göz are nailing it on and off the pitch - and have done since Ankersen took over as Chairman.

If he can't actually be physically present at Staplewood to lead the football side of the club is he actually the right person?

Would probably go with Summer 2024 tbh, largely based on the fact that if Kamaldeen keeps showing a bit we might actually get some cash for him in the summer. Onuachu we massively overpaid for but we got our cash back for Alacaraz, Bree still features and Orsic was at least a cheap flop. Summer 2024, aside from Fernandes was woeful and just seemed so badly organised. Signed a RB to start (Sugawara) and LB cover (Taylor) when we needed the opposite. Went after Delap who was the profile we needed then signed a totally different type of forward in Archer. BBD, Fraser, Cornet all a waste of space. Wood, Edwards not able to help the team now. Lallana I don't mind, the issue is he ended up (under RM at least) being more important on the pitch due to the lack of quality in the squad. Even Ramsdale. Good signing but a.) Why did it take all of pre season and the first few games to see AMC wasnt up to it? and b.) If we had a spare £25 why didnt we use it on an attacking player instead and find a loan keeper better than McCarthy? All round shambles and still IMO the biggest cause of relegation? Have we had a worse window than this?

Biggest thing by far is to get the DoF position sorted and have some essence of a plan going into the summer. Really no excuse given they have been able to plan virtually a year ahead for next season!

Aside from half the summer signings having left or been frozen out, another indicator of how shambolic we are is the likely scenario we only use one of the PL loan spots - these are key for newly promoted sides and we have known Cornet was leaving since December.