Midfield_General

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.

Mistake 4 was spunking the transfer budget on kids Mistake 5 will be waiting too long before Jones’ inevitable sacking - by the time the time they are finally forced to own it, it will be too late (in fact if he doesn’t go tonight, I think it’s too late already)

Good point. We just need a ruthless, despotic state to buy into the Nathan Jones masterplan with a takeover and we're saved. Who shall we pitch it to, Kim Jong-un?

Come on Twar - this is a poor effort, even for you

That would explain why he's taken us to rock bottom, and started to dig

Agree with absolutely every word of this. Depressingly, horribly spot on.

Well as I always say, there is nothing in vain, even in old ladies. * Taps nose *

Swap Adams out for a decent new signing at CF, and that side has to be good enough on paper to stay up, surely?

Doesn’t exactly reek of a confident manager who feels he knows exactly how he’s getting us out of this mess, does it. Basically just begging the crowd not to turn on him if we don’t win tomorrow night. Rabbit in the headlights.

Fair point, Charlie. 13 points then.

Jones keeps going on about how his first priority is to stop leaking goals, so I predict he'll set up in a 5-4-1, grind out a grim 1-1 draw where our goal comes from a set piece, and he'll hail it as a fantastic result and a sign that we've turned a corner. Then we'll go on to get relegated with a whimper on 28 points. Happy new year!

Brentford have also been excellent to be fair

Forest having a real go at Chelsea now. Wednesday is going to be a tough game. EDIT: And they've just equalised.

Ings on the bench for Villa again. A suggestion of a six-month loan deal for a decent fee has to be worth at least a phone call

I mean that’s just an outright lie, isn’t it

Leno, with his 12 full caps for Germany, was available for £8m in the summer - roughly half what we paid for Bazunu who is nowhere near ready to be a starting keeper in the PL. But hey, who cares, one day he might be decent and he'd be just great in the Championship. Like Jos Hooiveld. 🤣

Plenty of effort. No quality. Ultimately beaten by an average side who didn't play well. Another of our 'easy run of games' (to quote our CEO) lost with zero points to show for it. Going down.

What the fuck is that 😂

You can add failure to sign a PL quality striker to that list. With that factored in I agree with you that so far SR have had four big tests and, unless Jones somehow manages to step up, they appear to have failed all four of them. Their approach is looking like a dangerous blend of inexperienced naivety and misplaced arrogance, and unless something drastic happens, it’s going to relegate us.

I get the clamour for a 'destroyer' type but the difference is that Romeu came through the La Masia youth academy at Barcelona. He was so much more than just an aggressive physical presence and tackler, he was also unbelievably good at receiving the ball, playing out of tight spaces and making a successful short pass. He knitted our midfield together in a way that none of our current midfielders, with the possible exception of Lavia, who appears to be permanently unavailable, can do. IMO that's a massive component of what we're missing with Romeu gone and Lavia out. I'm sure Lyanco would work hard and try and make tackles, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't add much in that additional respect. People tended to think Romeu was a thug because he looked like a 16th century gaoler, but he was a bloody good footballer.

That post was going so well until that point

Setting up to play a high line against Spurs, when anyone who had ever watched them play knew that Kane would drop off and keep trying to play in Son to run in behind, was a cause for massive concern. Not changing it while watching Son score basically the same goal four times as a result, was an almost unfathomable level of tactical incompetence from everyone involved - the manager, the coaches and the players. I'd stuck by Ralph up to that point, through the 9-0s and everything else, but that was the match where he lost me. It was just comically inept. An under-10s manager would have changed it after the first few.

There isn’t a single source or scrap of evidence in that story to back up the claim in the headline. FI is a joke of a site and that story is literally made up. By all means let’s criticise Jones for what we see on the pitch, but not for fictional bollocks written by a fantasist who pretends to be a journalist.