SWLondon Saint

Everytime they cut away to him he looked somewhere between thoughtful and pissed off I thought. Quite a few exasperated hand waves which looked like they were accompanying a 'FFS' followed by talking to his assistant. 👍🏼

Watched from about 20 mins in and thought we did fine - we were competitive, it was ugly at times but that's absolutely fine for a promoted team and you'd take the away point any time. Look how Ipswich celebrated getting a draw at ours. - Definitely think Juric has already been giving instructions, we have never pressed that far up with wing backs before and clearly our CBs had more license to go after the ball into the opposition half on the press. - Why was AA even on the pitch? He won it once that I saw and offers so, so little on the ball it's shocking. He doesn't even try to use his strength against CBs, he doesn't shape to take it on the turn and run the defender, and nearly always plays backwards, often into pressing traps. Just... - For a supposed 6, Downes plays some real hospital passes at times. Twice at least he played a pass to the most under pressure player when if he'd held it even a second he'd have seen it wasn't on. If Juric as a former CM can put some tactical sense into him that would make a huge difference. - Think Dibling needs a break, too much has been asked of him - he's a marked man these days and that's made the game a lot harder for him. His end product also needs work, but that's understandable. - Big Les overplayed a few times, but he looks much better suited to the double pivot when he can just go for it rather than play possession. - We still really lack attacking structure. I saw a couple of good cross field balls in the first half but we need to overload quickly and then cross if we're doing that, and it looks like our players are still waking up out of Russball as they go back after the switch which I am pretty sure Juric will want to cut out.

Come on, 5 points at Christmas is the joint 2nd lowest total in Premier League history. And those Sunderland teams were in chaos on and off the pitch. Our squad, while weak, is not one of the 3 worst squads in Premier League history. You could certainly argue it's better than Ipswich's this season at the very least. Not being surprised at 5 points is definitely letting RM off easy. He's now statistically the worst ever non-caretaker manager in history I think, and you can't just blame that on recruitment. Look at Luton's squad last season for example, they were true no-hopers and even they had more points than us.

'...what is important in football is to play the games for win, that's my idea of football.' Our squad: 🤯 It'll never catch on mate.

Found a couple of articles about his style of play: https://breakingthelines.com/tactical-analysis/ivan-jurics-torino-the-fun-side-of-serie-a/ https://totalfootballanalysis.com/article/head-coach-analysis-ivan-juric-201920-tactical-analysis-tactics He's a Gasperini 'disciple' which judging by how Atalanta play could be great. Looking at when he was at Verona and Torino he's never really gotten decent backing in terms of getting players in, so I guess the hope is we put up a good fight, and he feels happy enough with the club setup that he doesn't mind a season in the Championship building stuff his way, as he's definitely a 'top 5 European leagues' manager going off his Serie A record.

We also look a ton better when crosses are actually getting thrown into the box. Sugawara can really cross it, it beggars belief we weren't trying to get him to fire some in before. Though on defence he still stands off far too far, thought Bree did a reasonable job on Gakpo till he went off. Someone needs to coach Suga to copy Bree's defensive positioning which is mostly solid.

Harsh but pretty fair. Nice compilation of his greatest hits there: He picked midfielder Flynn Downes as a centre-back against Liverpool and he passed the ball to Dominik Szoboszlai for the opener. His penalty taker against Manchester United was Cameron Archer, who had never scored a spot kick in his career, and not Ben Brereton Diaz, who had never missed one. Archer duly failed from the spot at 0-0 and Saints lost 3-0. Martin’s chosen captain was Jack Stephens, who was sent off for an awful lunge at Alejandro Garnacho, collected a further two-match suspension for calling the fourth official a “c***”, returned and was red-carded in the 5-1 hammering by Chelsea for pulling Marc Cucurella’s hair. A Championship-standard defender, Stephens will be banned for nine games by Christmas.

He was miles offside...

Also, why is BBD coming on at all when you could bring on Sam AA who can actually control the ball?

We should have gone to 4 at the back soon after the Archer goal, I honestly don't know what the management 'team' are thinking there, we lost so much momentum after the goal. Archer looked like he still had plenty left in the tank, they should have taken off Dibling who looked knackered frankly. But so much better after the goal.

We can't press because we have 3 CBs marking one striker and our full backs are pinned back as we're not willing to cover them with our back 3.

I just don't understand why we have 3 CBs on, there's literally no point when everything critical is happening in front of them and they can't stop the ball over the top.

Clearly didn't bother watching the press conference at which Rusk said they had 2 days off, good thorough journalism there 😂

It's absolutely unbelievable that they had 2 scheduled days off before what you could have considered one of the most important games of the season. That speaks absolute volumes about Martin's quality as a manager. You'd think with a game that important they should be right back in the next day - sure, the players that played 90 mins should be in recovery mode, but the others should be training, then everyone should be doing film sessions or planning. The situation in the club right now sounds absolutely shambolic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect "People with limited knowledge or skills may not have the metacognitive ability to recognize their deficiencies. They may also assume they are not deficient because they tend to choose what they think is the most reasonable option. " TLDR: He didn't know that he didn't know...

Think you may have missed some irony there...

As I said a few games back I actually feel nothing watching us get smashed now. When your manager is this bad, you can't expect to win any game at this level - all week to plan and a panic sub after 15 mins which makes F all difference? Give me a break, why did you send them out like that in the first place?! 🤡

Think I understated that a bit.

Too easy.

You say interesting, I say completely stupid. Our 1 player who is good running at people and RM puts him in a position where he has to have his back to goal the whole time, especially with our style of play. Also AA offers literally nothing on the wing, I've no idea how he never even threatens to run defenders on the outside. Also, great start 🤡

What I don't get is he sticks a bunch of midgets up front and then refuses to play in any way to give them a chance, which would be them playing on the shoulder of the last defender and quick balls into the channels. Instead we have this super ponderous buildup most of the time. And I have no idea what AA needs to do to get dropped as he offered absolutely sweet FA against Villa, even less than Archer which is saying something.

If we'd signed Delap as we tried to, it wouldn't have made an ounce of difference as he wouldn't see the ball ever in the positions he gets it at Ipswich.

Look at all these idiot other teams getting last minute set pieces and putting it in the mixer, haven't they seen our amazing 1-0 loss at City and figured out the way to get praise from the other manager is to pass it back to the keeper instead of trying to land it on your tallest player's head? 🤯

Well, couldn't have summed up better why he fails again and again. Football is ALSO about the 11 players on the pitch on the OTHER TEAM you absolute delusional muppet. Focusing on your own team is fine when you're a development or age group coach but the fact is he makes all his players perform worse even if they feel good so he fails at that too. But the whole point of top flight management is figuring how to counter the other 11 twats out there while figuring out how to stop them countering you. Guess he missed that memo.

Surely this can't be the case - I mean even the stats show we've been complete crap this season! Someone said Phil Parsons once played for Woking? That's a level at which he should have a pretty solid knowledge of the game at least from a playing perspective....