CanadaSaint

I'm not trying to justify it, just understand it.

Of course it does - well, much of it. You can't take at least three key components out of a pressing side and expect it to perform - especially if Guly is one of the replacements. All of the intensity disappears just when you need it. I was sure he'd make the same two changes (Rodriguez and Schneiderlin on) at half time so they could set the pattern - not past 60 minutes. But taking Lallana off - who can change a game in a second - was madness.

Anyone who fancies a crack at the Europa Cup must be out of their minds if that's an insight into our squad depth. But perhaps that's why Pochettino didn't even want to risk qualifying for it via the FA Cup.

It's funny how other central defenders look poor whenever Hooiveld plays. Remember how bad Fonte looked last year? And he's a different player paired with Lovren. I rate Yoshida but not if he's playing alongside someone who needs perpetual covering.

I can't remember being quite this p*ssed off about a Saints result because the quarter-finals were there for the taking. Picking the languid, lazy Guly to play in a high-intensity side is insane, especially when you're leaving out the engine room in the middle of the park and you've got a problem pairing at the back. Even the commentators said there would be some explaining to do.

For someone who's supposedly not into football, she seemed very into football.

He looks and sounds like a manager very committed to this club: http://www1.skysports.com/watch/video/sports/football/9139088/pochettino-hails-sensational-performance

So much for the idea of selling him after he's boosted his value with sparkling World Cup performances: http://forzaitalianfootball.com/2014/01/osvaldo-to-be-left-out-of-italys-world-cup-squad/

New GM who wanted his own head coach and - in the opinion of many - dropped a very big clanger. A lot of fans have raised the possibility of getting Ralph back. But he's now involved with Canada's Olympic hockey team, and you don't get anywhere near that unless you're extremely highly regarded. Look, don't knock Ralph - he's a very talented guy with many attributes, and an extremely pleasant person. My only reservation is with his lack of football experience, but then we don't know what his role will be, do we?

It will be interesting to see how long that tweet lasts. If it's untrue, there is potential for legal action, and - had Cortese still been here - it would probably already be underway. On the other hand, it it stays up ...

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that a former school mate is (apparently) about to become CEO and a former head coach of my local NHL hockey team here in Canada is (apparently) about to become a board member. Bizarre. As soon as the very private Katharina Liebherr decided to become personally involved in Saints I was fairly sure that she had no intention of selling-up and was going to do all she could to honour her father's legacy, and I'm impressed with her performance and openness thus far. I really like the "team of various talents" approach she seems focused on, and she's shown more warmth in one open letter than the highly-talented but flawed Cortese has shown in all the years he's been here. My "however" is this. If people are expecting her to open the vaults to fund expensive new acquisitions I think they're going to be disappointed. My hunch is that one of the (probably several) breaking points in her relationship with Cortese was an unwillingness to do that for two reasons - because it can easily become inconsistent with Markus's original plan to use the academy as the springboard for a successful but viable club, and because two of our most expensive acquisitions have hardly set our world alight. Arguably, the inexpensive players we've signed have thus far been much more pivotal in our success. I'm not saying she won't spend, but that she won't throw money around. The team she's (apparently) assembling seems to support that view. John Williams has never managed a club with a mega-budget but one that has always had to be fiscally responsible. Ralph Kreuger is a very talented motivator who is at his best IMO with younger players. There are signals to be read IMO. I like what I'm seeing so far, but then I never wanted to become a Man City or a Chelsea, where the soul of the club has disappeared into a vortex of money, greed, high expectation and intolerance of any kind of failure.

Badger, the thread title took me by surprise because my instant reaction on seeing it was "Surely it's not the same guy", what with Ralph being such a hockey man. But then I started to see at least some logic because he's really much more than that. He's a thinker and a motivator and one of his attributes was finding new and enjoyable ways of getting players fit and keeping them there - minimizing the drudge aspect of fitness training. Krueger is an "out of the box" kind of guy, and a very pleasant man. Perhaps his strongest skill set is player communication, and I can see some value in having a top-notch communicator there because almost all of Pochettino's current team are native Spanish speakers. Krueger is (at least) bilingual - English and German, and is especially well regarded in Switzerland. I'm not saying it will work because, as you said, a lot depends on how willing Pochettino is to embrace it, but it does seem that Katharina is aiming for a team approach, with the team consisting of a variety of people with different talents. Krueger unquestionably has a lot to offer, and he's the sort of guy to quickly win people over with his personal warmth and thoughtful input; he's not the kind of guy to push himself in where he's not welcome. I'm still concerned that, for all his undoubted skills, he has no significant knowledge of football as far as I know.

That was my first thought, but my second was that there's an ocean of difference between Harry and Pochettino. Some of these signals coming out of the club suggest that the plan is to build the club around a team of different specialists, rather than a hierarchy with one guy very much at the top. I would be inclined to see Krueger's role, if there is to be one, as being a counsel and advisor for Pochettino - not inflicted on him but available to him. Both Tambellini (the GM, on the left) and Krueger were fired a year later. As far as Krueger is concerned, the new coach - even though he has a better squad to work with - is getting much less out of the players than Krueger did.

He coached the Edmonton Oilers of the National Hockey League (before being fired - many think unwisely - at the start of this season), and he was particularly successful coaching the Swiss national hockey team. He's a smart and thoughtful cookie, a very strong communicator, a hockey theoretician and a good motivational speaker, and he's well thought of in hockey as a new age kind of thinker. Really nice guy. He's especially good with young players and I can see some of his skills being valuable at academy level but AFAIK he has no football in his pedigree.

That's why I mentioned him - because he doesn't fit the cost/depreciated value method but is a player who can only be valued using a current market value approach. You can't just not recognize an asset of his value.

I think that suggests that they do indeed hold value and are therefore assets - albeit depreciating assets based on the declining balance of their contract. In the case of a Luke Shaw, for example, he has a contract and a (debatable) market value and is therefore an asset. Part of the complexity of negotiating the purchase of a football club revolves around the challenge of agreeing what such an asset value is.

I think the player contracts count as assets because they have a realizable value.

Indeed. I went to school with him and he was pretty good at Subbuteo. Not sure what that means.

Perhaps the present (or new) owner will ban him from the ground.

I can't disagree with much that you've said because none of us knows what's really going on back there. However, perhaps I didn't articulate my point about Katharina well enough. When I say that Katharina opted "to inject herself into the situation", I meant it in the personal context. Certainly I can understand why she felt that she needed to act and - yes - I can appreciate that her hand may well have been forced. What I can't understand is why she would choose to become involved personally and publicly when she has always shied away from any kind of public involvement, and when she can afford to hire the world's very best to do all of that high profile (and often unpleasant) stuff for her. The only explanation I can come up with - when so many signals are pointing towards a sale - is that she doesn't intend to sell and is anxious to see her father's wishes honoured. Time will tell, and we'll be able to read things a little better when we see what kind of person is hired to replace Cortese.

You could be right but I don't think the two potential explanations are mutually exclusive. The choices for the Liebherrs back in the Summer could have been 1) maintaining the status quo (carrying on owning the club with an unfettered Cortese in control), 2) selling the club - with an unfettered Cortese at the helm of it, and 3) confronting the Cortese situation and retaining the club. Back then they might have opted for 2) because grasping the Cortese nettle (amidst an inevitable public furor) didn't appeal to them. For whatever reason (perhaps a concern that her father's wishes would be lost in a sale), they switched to option 3). Yes - it's possible that they felt that Cortese had to either go or be "reined in" in order to make the club more salable, but I don't think so, because the key question for me is why the intensely private Katharina would now opt to inject herself into the situation when she could have paid people to do that if she just wanted to sell the club.

No, I don't think so. It's just that we lost his oversight/restraining influence over Cortese when he died and it was never replaced. The scene was then set for "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely" - not in a dishonesty context but a personality context.

The current situation is fascinating from a number of perspectives, notwithstanding Duncan's particular angles and Hypo's "amateur psychologist" input - and yet, in some ways, adding a little credence to both of them. And I've been (and still am) a big Cortese supporter, while always recognizing that he seems to have some troubling flaws. This leaves me with three interesting questions. 1) If the relationship between Katharina and Cortese had (supposedly) broken down "irretrievably", why did she (on her side's own admission) make him "very generous" offers to stay? My hunch FWIW is that she has a very high regard for his strengths but was no longer willing to tolerate his weaknesses; she made those very generous offers to "sweeten the pill" of reduced total control. The fact that Cortese chose to walk suggests that he finds anything less than 100% control unacceptable, which - in and of itself - both confirms the widely-held perception that Cortese is a rather arrogant "control freak" and justifies the Liebherr decision to bring this to a head. 2) Why would Cortese turn down those offers? I'd suggest that he either cannot accept the diminished control or thinks he can engineer his "perfect world" under another owner. No other owner - in their right business mind - would allow him unfettered control with a very big chunk of their money, so I'm inclined to think that he chose to reject the offer and walk away because his ego got the better of him. I can't imagine that he could fund the purchase himself. 3) If Katharine really wants to sell the Club, why would a very private woman with little knowledge of football decide to become personally involved in its operation - even if just from a high-level oversight position? After all, she can afford to hire the best talent in the world to oversee a sale which would respect her father's wishes for the club to have a bright future, and yet still be very distant from all the prying, media interest that would inevitably entail. My hunch, again FWIW, is that she has a lot of respect for her father's wishes and plans to keep the club for the foreseeable future and continue building towards his dream. I can't think of any other reason why this private woman would throw herself into the teeth of a very public issue when she could have hired people to do that - and all the associated "dirty work". So far, Katharina has IMO conducted herself extremely well.

Yep. Pitiful, isn't it?

Agree with St Marco above. Regardless of where this supposed "meltdown" is taking us, I do know one thing. We are now a far, far more attractive proposition for prospective owners, top executives, managers and playing staff than we were even a year ago. Sure, I'm concerned about the imminent period of instability, but I'm also optimistic that we'll still end up on an exciting upward trajectory in the longer term.