S-Clarke

Protest ffs? get over yourselves.

I'd say unsure. It's impossible to form a really strong opinion either way as I don't know him, I've never really watched Luton and I didn't really pay any attention to his time at Stoke. If I was a neutral fan and Wolves were looking to appoint him I'd go ''WTF?'' though, so I can understand the concern fans have. You look from the outside and say that he's overachieved at Luton, but sometimes managers are in a comfort zone at a club which just works for them. That feels as if it could be the case here. But he's clearly not stupid though, he's pulled a Luton team from nowhere to the Championship playoffs so he must have something about him. So I'm unsure, it's impossible to say. A 'name' manager would have certainly got the fans on side and created a bit of a bounce, so in that sense this feels like a bit of a missed opportunity by the club to create a much needed feel good factor. The main concern I have is that we have an incredibly inexperienced team at PL level, certainly in age - adding an inexperienced manager and coaching staff to that mix doesn't feel like the most sensible thing to do at this moment in time.

That's what these guys need, a bit of home truth. They have been utterly shit for months, it's not always the manager (they are the easy fall guy), but at the end of the day it's the 11 players who have to go out on the pitch and perform.

Possibly, you could even look at maybe some aggrieved former staff members who were let go in the summer. As these links only really started surfacing in the summer. But if it is someone still employed then they need to be weeded out and moved on.

I'm really not liking the leaks that are coming out about Ralph. Some really nasty, vindictive stuff being thrown out in the media with very little substance to back them up. The Atheltic seem to be lapping it up. If someone still employed by the club is doing this then they need frogmarched out never to be seen again. It's in really bad taste.

That's such a valid point and one which really explains why we fell away so much. He needed to be backed at the start so he had the players to employ the football he wanted, but he had to make do with a mishmash and that has slowly over time diluted his approach due to the fear of losing goals. From being a front-foot ‘heavy metal’ manager, he became a risk averse and passive manager, which isn’t him and isn’t who we recruited back in 2018. One of the criticisms you can rightly label at Ralph is that it’s always been one way or no way, he came with a clear philosophy and if the club had researched it well enough they’d have known the squad would have needed a radical overhaul to fit with that, but they never had the backing to do it until now - and now it's too late. I'm frustrated for him, but that's where we are.

I thought this was a good write up on Luton, it's from a few years ago but it does line-up with our strategy to a degree - so we're looking for potential managers who have worked within similar setups. I'm not sure if it was under Jones tenure or not, but a couple of young players who have made somewhat of the step up are Aarons, Lewis and Justin in recent years (Justin playing for England too) Training Ground Guru | Luton Town's Premier League production line

I don't understand the view that they've just plucked Jones out of thin air as a last min idea. If anything this potential appointment has shown that they've been looking at someone for a signfificant period of time in the event we need to make a change. The one thing you cannot label this potential appointment as being is 'unplanned' or 'last min'. We may not agree with the 'name' and let's be honest we don't really know much about him at all to come to any strong opinions, but it's fair to say that those at the club know him far better than we think we do.

Who had ''before he's even joined'' on the ''When will fans want him out?'' sweepstake. Good effort if so.

Then we're relegated. He'll have nothing to work with. Goals are needed and they will need to invest or lose a hell of a lot more money.

As I said on another post, I will always appreciate anyone who dedicates so much time to my club. He didn't come here with the sole reason of destroying anything, he tried his absolute hardest to make this a success and went through a severe amount of personal turmoil throughout the process I'm sure. The entire reign of Ralph is an odd one though. At the time, back in 2018 (feels like a lifetime ago) - he was seen as a coup. A former RB manager, backed with a very modern philosophy that we'd started to see take over the PL (Liverpool for e.g). I firmly believe that our massive defeats changed him, he lost belief in his actual philosophy and tried to change the only thing he knew. What really should have happened was that he was backed right at the beginning and I think we'd see a different story. The biggest positive to our time under Ralph is that we have never been in any relegation trouble, this season is the first season it looks a bit ropey, but in all his other seasons we have been well clear most of the time. In the main he has had to work with an absolute rabble of misfits. He's tried to make the best team he could with this group and I genuinely believe he's made players better, KWP being one. The problem he had was a lack of backing at the beginning, so he ended up having to invest his time and energy on a group which weren't really suited to his style of football. This is the first summer he's been truly backed, and it's sadly gone sour more than anyone could have thought, but I still wonder 'what if' he'd have been backed like this at the beginning. At the end of the day everything comes to an end, but I'll stand by my view that anyone would struggle managing this lot without a striker and sometimes the grass really isn't any greener. We'll have to wait and see.

It's ok, we're experimenting with a championship level manager to help us. I jest...maybe.

Call me cynical, but I still believe Sellles is who the club have in line as our long-term manager and an appointment like Jones isn't going to push Selles below loads of high-profile backroom staff, far from it - he's probably been asked to work with what is here, for the reason I stated.

I don't think that's fair. I think we're trying to talk up Adams up into someone he has never been. You will never get many goals from Adams, but you do get physicality and some really good old up play for this level. Partnered with a better player he is a very useful PL forward without question. We've just hung him out to dry a little bit by expecting him to be our source of goals when he never was and never will be.

You know it's bad when you get a late night rant from Kaiser Soze.

Football pales into insignificance during times like that - hope everything is ok.

This guy feels like exactly the sort we'd go for. Totally leftfield and someone who'd use us as a steppingstone as an oppertunity to show up in Europe and get on the radar of big clubs, if he's as good as the reports suggest he is (I'd never heard of him until last week tbf)

You often get people thinking we’re a bad choice as we’re 18th etc, but we’re still in the PL, they’d be offered decent $$$$ and I’d imagine an attractive enough break clause 'if' the worse happens. I’d expect us to have a chance with anyone on that list.

He's a really young kid who doesn't seem capable of saving anything at the moment. He's got potential and I like his demeanour on the pitch, but as I said in the summer this is the one position we had to get right in the summer and signing a kid wasn't getting it right. The club are too obsessed with the mantra of buying young players, creating a platform and making a profit in a season/18 month, as borne out by Semmens comments about it not being about how many points or where we finish - it's who we develop. That's not a football team, that's just a soulless conveyor belt business that no one is ever going to be able to get behind as they're not around long enough. I have no issue with signing talented young players, but it has to be balanced and you have to create a platform for those young kids (i.e a team). And you certainly can't rely on kids in the absolute key positions of goal and ST.

Sheldon clearly still has links to the club, he broke the takeover story as well. I know Ralph seems to be despised by many, but as a fan of this club I appreciate anyone who puts their time and effort into 'trying' to make things better and I'll always appreciate Ralph for that. We had some decent times where he was able to assemble a team from this rabble, but ultimately it has been fraught with frustration and many what ifs. I've always felt we got Ralph at the wrong time when we had zero backing, he tried to implement his ways with players nowhere near good enough for it. And slowly his way has just evaporated, and I think we've changed him. He was always known and proven as an attacking coach, gegenpressing the fancy term for it, and he did it very well at RB - but with better players. He has now morphed into a cautious coach, which has actually made us a really confused outfit. We don't seem to know what to do in possession anymore due to the complete and utter fear of making a mistake. I can see him doing a good job as a Technical Director or such, but I think as a manager his experience with us has probably finished him off sadly.

If we're not willing to operate in that sort of market, then we will be relegated. What we're 'up against' are PL teams, if we cannot compete with other PL teams then we should pack up and travel to Millwall. Football has moved on from the days you could pick up a Wanyama or VVD for £10m and as a club we've never quite moved with the times. Expecting to find another Mane for £10m and ending up with Remond is an example of that.

Perraud's defending for Willocks goal left a lot to be desired. PL full backs should never be beaten as easily as that. He has a bit of fire in his belly which I like, but some of his positioning today was reminiscent of Oliver Bernard. I would agree that it wasn't a 1-4 game at all, but the way the team structure and shape fall apart after the 2nd goal went in shouldn't be allowed to happen.

Weird game all said, if you take the emotion out of it for a second we really weren't 1-4 bad. The chances Adams and Elyounoussi had were as good as, if not better, than any of Newcastle's 4 shots. Adams chance at 0-1 was huge, that moment on the belief just evaporated and it was 0-2 shortly after. Defensibly for all goals it was a shambles, we lost our discipline and pushed up higher which left gaps and runners all over the place. A really half arsed defensive effort to close down and get tight as well, which is totally at odds with everything we are supposedly known for. Two major problems in this team - A goalkeeper who can't seem to save any shots, and an attack who can't score goals. When your left back is the leading player for shots on target then you have a major, major problem. The whole place certainly feels stale, so a change of manager is about to happen of that there is no doubt. But I really don't think anyone else is going to get goals from that horrific bunch of 'strikers' we have.

I agree that we'll lose games, but I don't think the club/manager should be shouting from the rooftops about the fact. There's being honest and then there's being a bit self defeatist, which is how the club feels to me at the mo. It definitely does filter from the top, maybe not as far as Sports Republic, but the comments from Semmens at that level seem to follow a worrying theme of us being lucky to even exist.

Has anyone seen Ralph's comments in the media today? ''We should expect 10-15 defeats a season'' - come on FFS. No club, no matter how big, how small, should go into a season openly preparing to lose a quarter of their games. How is that galvanizing the fanbase and the players? Sure, we will lose games but don't pre-announce it ffs. The whole narrative fed from all levels about this league being ''so so hard'' and ''we're lucky to be here'' is pissing me off now.