Holmes_and_Watson

It took me years to rejoin after logging in only to see the forum lion beat off a circle of other posters. 🙂

Shopping

That crooked *!#! Infantino defending everything going on for an hour removed any chance of me becoming interested. Well done to Williamson, Mead and Christiansen for speaking up. The latter declined to take part in commentary. Lower league football to look forward to.

United

Winner - Bribery Runner Up - Fraud England - Out in the first round of voting, included sickening chats with crooked Jack Warner. Dark Horse - None. Dark horses will be detained indefinitely by police, allowing the unopposed nut job of a corrupt organisation to host it's tournament in an undemocratic country. 🙂

Jet

Ex-Saint ruled out of World Cup. No Mane to watch. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/63670760

Repent

Sorry to hear that Soggy. I hope you're back to 100%,or as close as any of us get to that, soon.

The long coat is because it's cold!

All the kids where I am still hang around street corners, going on about Brexit, after all this time. I've tried buying them booze and cigs from the off license, but nothing distracts them from their Keynesian economics in a post Brexit world chat. Really distracts me from my graffiti. 🙂

Saint

Something

Beeb saying that Trump "has invited the world's media" to his home. Expected to announce he's running. Each visitor will get a gift box of secret documents he took from office last time. 🙂

Vampire

Although data analytics is growing, I'd say that underpinning the operational structure of the club with them, would be seen as hipsterish. Moneyball/ soccernomics has been around for a while, but again would still be seen as being left field enough to be hipsterish. That oversupport of new things, in the face of conflicting evidence is both culty and hipsterish. Bielsa is a big inspiration to a lot of coaches, and was loved by lots of Leeds fans. But a lot of those inspired coaches built on his principles. He gave the foundations, but couldn't adapt them successfully enough to stay in post. RalphBall was super when it worked. Had we better quality players, maybe it would have worked more. But in needing automatons to implement it, that quality might have been hard to keep. Either way, Ralph had an underlying tactical principle that he couldn't adapt successfully enough to stay in post. Data analytics cover an increasingly massive data set. But it's still developing the ton of other variables that can impact a game, let alone a club. Not the only band wagon you'd want to jump on. If everyone adopted a data led approach, with the same data sets, there would be a push for the next development beyond it. Jones maybe isn't the coolest of hipster choices. But the amount of scrutiny he's been under to get the post is considerable, and very solidly based in hipster areas. He's not here because of his big name playing career, his stellar contacts, or previous high level success. He's here because the data underpinning his approach, and the ethos he's built at his club, match SRs. I hope he's the bestest manager we've ever had.

Not seen it, but will having read a couple of books on it ages back. Like Alex, you know they are greedy and corrupt. But seeing that no level of greed is ever enough for them and no corruption would ever deter that greed is an eye opener. All with the tacit approval/ active collusion of governments, banks, sponsors etc.

I hope there are some revelations in his chapter and it doesn't lead to an exodus. 🙂

As I read that, I thought it was going to go... You wankers should be grateful you don't live in Somalia. My kids never... forgave me for making them live there. 🙂

Tomorrow's news... today! Dateline January 4th 2023 Tarzan joins Saints, in early window swoop. Jane now optimistic of league survival, and a Netflix series...

Oh heck, Don't work with the last paragraph! I was seriously out of puff by that point. 🙂 You could see, at least as early as the Norwich game in Feb, that Ralph's tactic had been found out. The following shocker against Villa left no doubt. It was disappointing that, for all the automatisms and playbooks, there was no effective transition planned. No way of changing in a match, and no slightly successful back up plan. Anything after the West Ham game on was dire. I could understand that brand new owners might not want to sack the manager with no succession plan in place. Perhaps they didn't know how bad it was, and based on the good spells mixed with bad under him before, thought it would turn round. The data trends must have looked decent for a while. But they could have made a change that early. I'd have been disappointed, but I would have understood. By Chelsea, if the club had decided to part with Ralph, it would have been understandable, with a lot less disappointment. Perhaps the same reason for sticking with him, is the reason we went for Jones. They'd analysed the data on what Ralph could do with little resources. We played some cracking stuff. Imagine what we'd do with investment in both the squad and in youth. In the summer it looked as though they cracked the numbers and developed a strategy to keep us tight at the back. They could easily have moved to a new manager. They chose to make improvements to what they had, which I can understand. Had they brought Jones in then, I'd have been pointing out that Ralph could finally be given a go with some proper backing though. If the new signings could be used to overcome the tactical mess of the last dozen plus matches. They let Ralph down badly over a striker. We did look tougher to break down, and the data (and anyone with a brain) have shown up front as a massive weakness. Just like Potter at Brighton, they would have thought it could be fixed, while keeping the manager. They hoped to limp into the next window, so they could give him the chance to do it properly. But it's become untenable now, possibly for all parties. The untested at this level manager is absolutely riskier now than it was in the summer. But it does seem Jones was next in line at whatever point. By doing it now, he gets to coach them ahead of a tough opponent and then gets a break with most of them. Better now than... any point after now, I guess. They could have pulled the plug at any point in the last month or so. And that's giving Ralph the benefit of losing Lavia, with the club selling Romeu and KWP injury. It's turned out that doing it in the summer might have been best. But we don't know what would have happened if we'd got those/that last attacking signing. A signing we smugly left to the last, which was nothing to do with Ralph. So I get why we stuck with him. As for Semmens saying we're poor little waifs, lucky to be allowed scraps from the big table: Incredibly thin skinned about fans reaction to watching dire football. Deflecting that it was his screw up that helped a good way towards those results. The latest data now has enough rubbish results, that they can now see what we've been watching, and it's predicting the drop, hence the manager change. SR thought they were buying successful RalphBall v1, and now realise it's more than they can handle/ invest in. In the end, if 20 state funds buy into this league, then there's no real hope for us to stay in it, short of mismanagement on their part and getting a season up from the Championship. But that's not where things are, so agree it's counterproductive for everyone, to be making such ambition lowering statements. Whew. Out of typing puff again. 🙂

Cars

That's exactly what I was trying to say. Can I just copy and paste your post into mine? 🙂

Lots of points to think about there in your post. As young as they are, ABK has been a significant upgrade. Lavia has also made a real difference. The club were wrong in getting shot of Romeu, just when we finally had a chance of having quality and depth in that position. I rated Forster, but Bazunu hasn't been terrible. Not as good, but not a disaster. So some definite improvements. The likes of Edozie, Larios, Mara and I'd add Small there have improvements to make. But there's talent in all of them. I see them as being bought in to replace that absence of academy graduates pushing the first team. We've Doyle, Dibling, Edwards and Ballard coming up behind. Hopefully that's going to close that issue of not producing first team players. Elsewhere DCC, Aribo and AMN are decent squad additions. Their age means we're not only focussing on kids. It's the missing attacking midfielder and striker that turned a very good transfer window sour. From posts here, that was more Semmens than SR. Brighton, Brentford etc improved over seasons by employing a number of transfer strategies, keeping costs low. We've had a few years of stagnation before this one. We've clearly been addressing a number of areas, but had a howler at the one we all,including the manager and club, knew we needed to fix most. I agree that the standard of teams has gone up. While we were paying for Man City kids, decent experienced players were being bought elsewhere. A number of players I liked moved for decent money. But nothing wrong with picking ABK or Lavia over them. We are going to need quality attacking signings. They are going to have to hit the ground running. Hopefully the new manager will be working during the break to get ones fitting his tactics in as early as possible. I imagine there will be a lot more oversight on Semmens this time round, if the posts were accurate. Without mega bucks, we're going to be in that bottom pack, trying to outsmart our competitors to get some success. Further up the chain, even Liverpool are looking for new owners to sustain their aspirations. Brighton, Brentford are already well down their paths so it is a challenge. The new manager is more of a Potter signing than a Emery one. Could we have got a higher profile manager in, who could show the players what to aspire towards, with the risk they can't get there? Or is it better to have someone develop a long term ethos of the club (and across others), building from where they are, but at the risk of setting the sights too low, or on short term sell ons? We've sent with the second option, in keeping with Ankersen's views. We know Jones has been on the radar for some time, so can only hope it works.

Or stale manager out, and new guy in with a tactic that could push JWP forward up the pitch, and to a cracking second half of the season after a nice break. 🙂