Midfield_General

Moi is a textbook ‘manager’s player’. Does what he’s told, will play anywhere, doesn’t moan, works hard, never causes any trouble. They all have one who then probably gets more game time than they should as the result of being a ‘model pro’, which blinds the manager to their limitations. Paul Telfer and Jermaine Wright spring to mind.

Keep it exactly the same. Same XI, same formation, same aggressive, high-energy press. That was the best we’ve played in about two years. That side just played one of the best teams in the world off the park. Unless someone’s injured or so fatigued they can’t play, why would you change it? Let them worry about us for a change (which, going by their forum, they now very much are, which is remarkable really when you think where we were a week ago).

Bale too, before that. It’s sometimes a shame that we can’t hang onto these players a bit longer, but it’s also a privilege to see them in a Saints shirt, even if just for a season or two.

Why does Redknapp keep calling Mara "Maré"?

Pep Guardiola: "The best team won". That was not a statement I was expecting to hear tonight. Dreamland.

5 minutes time

I've been as critical of Jones as anyone but fair fucking play. Absolutely magnificent from every player, and the management. That was epic - we played them off the park. Incredible.

Credit where it's due - that was absolutely superb

Confidence-wise it matters though. Going into an important 6-pointer on Saturday off the back of a 6-0 spanking is very different to going in off the back of a tight 1-0.

Sounds from Pep's presser that Phillips will start for them ahead of Rodri and that Haaland and De Bruyne will be rested tonight - wants to keep them fresh for the Manchester derby at the weekend. So that's something at least

It wasn’t a shot

Defender gets done, goes straight through Bazunu Well I for one am shocked

If that's a 5 at the back with Joe 'The Workhorse' Aribo at centre mid with JWP, then I actually want to see that, just for the comedy value 🤣

Wrote a note on the way down here. Simply says… ‘bugger’.

Hi Nathan! 👋

If they're really serious they'll realise they need a keeper too

For £3m+ a year, on a four year contract? Er, me? And most out of work football managers outside the elite, I'd imagine?

Lord D's Wet Dream Team

I think the most generous thing to say, going from the thread Everton fans have on him, is that he divides opinion. Take your pick on a spectrum of comments from ‘can be decent when he’s got someone good alongside him’ to ‘get out of my club you absolute disaster’. Would definitely be more in the Lyanco/ Bednarek/ Stephens level of risk, rather than an exciting ABK or Salisu type signing. Do we really need another average, error-prone centre half? And one thing that he definitely isn’t is a leader, which is what we need more than anything at the back. https://www.grandoldteam.com/forum/threads/michael-keane.115778/ Edit: Apparently also can’t play as part of a three at the back, which would make it an odd link if we’re planning to persevere with that.

God that’s shit 🤣

Probably deserves his own thread now he's reportedly having a medical?

Good post. I don't agree with all of it, but you make some interesting points.

It's very obvious that Ankersen sees himself as a 'disruptor'. His world, or the one he aspires to, is the one of Musk, Bezos, the 'disruption visionaries'. Look at how Amazon came and changed the way people shopped! Look at how Spotify changed how we consume music! Look at how Uber changed how we get around! Then look at an industry like football where, apart from lots more money sloshing around, it's pretty old-fashioned really. We can disrupt football! People like him have been around for years, in different ways. Thinking it can all be torn up and done differently and everyone will think they're a genius and wondering why no-one had done it that way before. Sometimes it works - the Premier League is an example of a disruption strategy that was an unbelievable success (commercially, anyway, which is all they really care about). But with any disruption approach, for every success there are a multitude of failures, and football has seen more than most. It used to be things like Americans wanting to make the goals bigger or have pop concerts at half time to 'make it more entertaining'. God knows, we've had our own fair share of disasters like Woodward, Clifford and Lowe and his 'revolutionary new coaching set-up'. Then everyone got carried away when Moneyball came out. Most of it crashes and burns. That's the nature of trying new things - without a precedent to work from, they are learning experiences and much of the time they fail. The thing is, trying new and different things in itself isn't wrong. As said above, clubs like ours do need to try to find clever ways to stay in touch with the competition when half of them are bankrolled by billionaires and nation states. Ambition, vision, innovation and change are, fundamentally, good things and should be embraced. Where it goes to shit however, is when rather than doing tests here and there first to see what works (and more importantly, what doesn't), you just go balls to the wall and throw out all the conventional wisdom and change everything at once in the blind belief that you've cracked it and you're just cleverer than everyone else. Which is what it feels like is happening here. And with us, there's no safety net, so whether it ultimately works or not* , it's still an astonishing risk. (*it won't)

So the summary of that 10-minute video is: ‘Sometimes you can identify a raw talent who given the right support or conditions can excel and surprise people’. Well, yeah. Sometimes. Duh. What it doesn’t touch on is the bit that matters. Namely, how you identify those people, consistently, in a way that isn’t just taking a punt on a long shot who you think might have something, and hoping for the best. It also doesn’t deal with the law of averages - that for every long shot who overcomes the odds and turns out to be brilliant, there are 99 that don’t, and who turn out to be just as average as their previous performance said they were. If that schoolboy level of thinking is genuinely what’s driving his decision-making then it really goes a long way to explaining why we’re in the shit. It explains the transfer policy and it explains the appointment of Jones. He’s using us as an experiment with the aim of showing how he’s the smartest person in the room, but his theorising is built on sand and has no bearing in the real world of the premier league where - surprise! - a manager and players with a track record of success are consistently proven much more likely to succeed than ones with none. Maybe he’d point to Brentford as his example of how it can work successfully. My counter-argument to that would be that as any football fan knows, for every Thomas Frank who can pull it out of the bag, there are a hundred Nathan Joneses who can’t. And if you’re going all in, stacking it all on red, betting the farm on doing the impossible, beating the odds and always identifying that one out of a hundred, then unless you can somehow magically do it every single time, then as any bankrupt gambler knows, eventually it’s going to do for you. He clearly has the arrogance to think he can. But he can’t. And here we are.