stevegrant

Suspect that's mostly because there's not a great deal to talk about at the moment, I guess we'll have to wait to see how the season pans out to assess the success or otherwise of the blog section. FWIW, I put together my first effort yesterday

There isn't, but that's probably not a bad idea...

Why would people be calling for Shearer? He proved in his short spell in charge of Newcastle that he can't hack it as a manager. It's very much the "English Disease" that we believe that only an Englishman can do a good job as England team manager. As has been demonstrated on this thread already, there are only two English managers in the top 10 of the Premier League, and with those two individuals' connections to brown envelopes, they won't be getting the job any time soon. Until more English coaches get the top UEFA licences and use them to coach young players, rather than senior pros (there are less than 150 people in this country with the UEFA "A" licence, and none of them coach at youth levels, compared with 640 out of 750 "A" licence holders in Spain coaching children), English managers are likely to be left behind at the highest level.

And that's a large part of the problem, the weight of expectation and pressure is mental. You've got papers who claim to be "getting behind the boys" on one hand and then on the other they're setting up some sort of sting operation to expose the then-captain four months before the world cup starts. That's going to help... Then there's the various parties who are only interested in looking after number one, they'll all grow Teflon shoulders and get away without much criticism if they can help one of the papers get a scoop on Capello. I'm fairly patient, so I've not lost faith yet, but he's got some work to do before the Bulgaria game in September, that's for sure. I've expanded a bit (ok, quite a lot ) on my thoughts about the root cause(s) in the blog section: http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/entry.php?17-The-Post-Mortem-that-never-ends

It can do... in the "Thread tools" menu at the top of the thread, select "Subscribe to thread" and then choose whichever notification type you want to receive.

You can subscribe to individual threads, but I don't think you can do so for individual posts.

:vuvu:

Ultimately a complete waste of time because even in the unlikely event of your forecast being correct, I'm not going to revert the changes I've made. This forum isn't run by a democracy.

Not even the guarantee of a seat, it would seem...

Haven't the foggiest, in all honesty. It baffled me, although looking back at the qualifiers, we flattered to deceive a bit, IMO. Only 4 clean sheets in 10 games, conceding goals to absolute ****e like Kazakhstan (particularly the manner of it, Cole basically handing it to their striker on a plate) should probably have had alarm bells ringing a little bit sooner. I think he got caught between fitting players into the best system and picking the best players and adapting the system to suit them. In the end, we ended up with a mixture of neither and both in equal measures. I've got no problem with him doing that, solely on the basis that he's the one player you would back to produce something out of nothing over anyone else in the squad. The Heskey thing is bizarre, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that he played in so many of the qualifiers that we won, ignoring the likelihood that we would still have won those games if either Crouch or even Darren Bent had played instead of him. International tournaments hold a set of challenges Capello won't have experienced as a club manager - being in the same location with the players all day, every day for the best part of a month for a start. I guess that familiarity is something Capello's famously never done, he's always maintained a distance from his players to emphasise his authority. Perhaps the closeness has clouded his judgement somewhat?

To be fair to Taylor, he had an abysmal set of players at his disposal. Sir Bob got the final swansong out of a lot of the 1990 squad, I'm actually impressed that Taylor managed to get that side into the 1992 Euros considering there were no playoffs, you had to win the group to qualify.

Well I would imagine it would be most beneficial to those overseas as they're obviously less likely to be able to get to a game, but it should be of benefit to everyone

Matchdays should be fine. In fact, we are hoping that things will actually be improved by a new feature we will be launching for the Plymouth game.

Depends which way you look at it. Foreign managers have done a hell of a lot for certain aspects of English football, particularly the dietary stuff the likes of Wenger introduced when he arrived at Arsenal, etc. They've also taken jobs that could have been filled by English managers, but then the argument there is that the clubs employ who they believe is the best man for the job whether he's English or otherwise. This simply points to the suggestion that English managers, like English players, aren't actually that good. You'd like to think that the English managers would be determined to improve themselves to ensure they have as much knowledge as they possibly can, but far too many of them just fall back into the age-old routine of buying players they've worked with before, buying players through agents they've worked with before, not broadening their horizons in terms of the "science" side of things, and in particular the coaching of technique into players' games rather than the usual English traits of blood and guts, "up and at 'em", etc.

I couldn't give a **** about the manager's nationality, as long as he's the best man for the job. The whole "he's got to be English because only an Englishman would have the passion required" is nothing more than jingoistic bull****. The FA won't sack Capello, they can't afford to do so, and he's not a quitter so he won't walk. Ultimately, we've employed two of the most successful European club managers in recent years, neither of whom have managed to get us beyond the quarter-finals. Perhaps that indicates that, actually, we're just not that good?

Do you reckon you might have made your point?

If you don't like it, don't renew your subscription. Nobody's holding a gun to your head. The number of people having a moan about the new look are by far a minority (about 20 out of 3500 who have logged in in the last month), and even some of those have come around to the new look and the initial negative reaction was a "eek, something's changed, I don't like change" reaction. Needless to say, I didn't spend the best part of 6 months of my (unpaid) spare time only to scrap it and go back to the old (and very much dated in design and functionality terms) format.

The Capello experiment has merely proven that no matter whether you've got one of the best managers in the world or not, a turd is still a turd.

What a hit, son.

He was still infinitely better than Gomez who replaced him, I genuinely can't remember him having a touch

Fabiano costing me points already

I suspect that's not the point being made. The lack of pre-match drinking time is a bit annoying, IMO.

Correct. In the Premier League, it's a contractual obligation, but it's entirely optional in the Football League. However, any club rejecting the "opportunity" to be shown live on Sky runs the risk of simply not being picked again.

As per the subject, really. Saints' first game of the season, at home to Plymouth Argyle, has been selected for live TV coverage by Sky Sports.

Now fixed. No idea how that happened, the payment shows up in PayPal, but it seems the transaction confirmation didn't then get sent back to the forum to automatically update your subscription. Slightly worried that could have been a recurring problem for others (given that we don't use the saintsweb.co.uk/forum/... directory for the forum anymore), but it seems others processed in the last week or so have all gone through fine!