Mystic Force

Salisu came in looking like a player with the right ingredients who had the ability to improve and become a more complete CB. However our coaching team seem to have the knack of making players look worse over time, I think that is where things went wrong. Please remember that those players that he was compared against VvD, Loveren and Alderweirald all came in a little older and having played at decent level prior to joining us and clearly having already some credentials. Those kind of players are now cut off from available so we have to go a little younger to get a chance that means 19 y/o attackers and midfielders and 21-22 y/o defenders. I think Salisu had his career hampered by us. Maybe it was better for his future not to be seen playing in a relegation side.

Salisu who looks like he would add to our team frozen out because he won't sign a contract. Moi the one who looks frozen in place also won't sign a new contract. Yeah, the people running this club are football geniuses.

The fact your taking the piss but looks credible, really summarizes how bad this year has been when we all know we suck at defending yet try to play it as a strength.

I think the opportunity to play the transfer market like we did is gone. We were buying 21-22 year Olds who had already demonstrated some ability at a lower level and we would get them to showcase their ability before leaving at their prime of 24. Those opportunities are gone those players are going straight to the big boys now so we are fishing in the 18 and 19 year old level where they have not yet been challenged properly and its not surprising that more of them are not ready for the rigors of the premier league. You can carry a player who needs time to develop, you sacrifice a little now for the longer term gain, but you can't carry a team of developing players. You will not develop them and your performance will suffer.

Salisu looked like a decent player who made mistakes based on inexperience. However after some time here and our coaches who seem to manage to make players worse and getting the opportunity to 'learn' from more experienced CB like Bednarek he really hasn't pushed on in the way he looked like he would, and become the finished article. I am assuming for his own future prospects he wants out rather than looking like a worse player over time due to our weird ability to degrade talent. And I don't blame him.

Football is replete with individuals who came from outside thinking they know better. The problem is that in a highly competitive situation with the amount of time it has been around, and ubiquitous nature of the game, there is very little that someone can find that hasn't already been looked at. Tactics have been played with for a hundred years and every advantage and disadvantage of each system is known and be countered. The only area which has really had movement is in sports science and human physiology where the knowledge has been improving, but any early mover advantage has probably been erased. Data science is now mostly mature too. With off the shelf systems and data brokers supplying the same inputs. People will pull out stats but you can just see some players can do it and others not. I think we bought in to our hype a few years back when really what it was down to was assembling a decent core of a squad at a lower level by out spending our opponents and being able to bring through a succession of good youth who had time to gel outside of the pressure of the premier league. Our problems started when that advantage dissipated and each time we sold off players for big money we had to replace them in the next window at a new inflated price where the finished products of one season were now the cost of an unproven prospect. And then these jokers thought, you know what I can do what we thought we use to do, when it turned out we were probably just fortunate. We use to be the intermediate stop of on the way to a Liverpool or Man U, except now these clubs just took on the risk themselves, this started with the likes of Courtinio, he went straight their skipping that intermediate step. So now if we want prospects we are gambling on 18 year Olds who couldn't force themselves in at a big team and have no competitive play track record to look at, instead of picking up 21 year Olds who have shown moderate success at a lower quality team/league for a couple years. Then we can't play these teenagers because the stakes are too high. We had the perfect chance to reset our season with the world cup break. And we wasted it. It was clear after a couple games things had regressed instead. I thought that in January we would have been better off cutting our losses and selling what we could and preparing for the inevitable. Instead we doubled down and for a brief moment it looked hopeful, but I don't think we spent wisely, and even if we do escape I can't see next year being much different until we eventually succumb to the inevitable, except loaded with the expense of a bunch of useless players.

It's just a temporary tactical retreat.

The thing with a systems approach is that a counter approach can always be found. So is cannot Trump everything else. Creativity within a system can come from a few options. 1 give someone a free role, they are not given a fixed position or only sometimes adopt that position MLT did this for us before, it can be strikers who sometimes drop deep or appear at different points, skilled dribblers from midfield who can beat a defence on skill or creative passers who bring the ball up to create the killer pass or pop up in hard to expect locations to do the same. I think that we expect JWP to do that but is rarely given that freedom, especially without the covering of Romeu to back him up. Another creative option is to vary your system throughout a game, not in some unorganized reactive scheme but in a fluid, and dynamic way so that the opposition can't just set up to stop your one weird trick. But you have players interchanging positions or focusing your attack differently. Right now we chop and change looking for something to work, or only change when the personnel change telegraphing what we are going to do. Those rotating positions were very much in evidence when we had players like Tadic, Lambert and Steve Davis who could all comfortably play through the middle or out wide, dragging the opposition out of position and creating opportunities the key was they were capable players with the skills to do multiple roles. If Moi say came in from a wide position to the center, now all the defenders will think is that their job got easier, not be worried about who is picking up whom. I think the key to how a system works is that it provides a base from which the other attributes come from. The system is key to defending, but the ponderous slow staged attack we have favoured over the last few years just let the opposition regroup, and channel us in to less dangerous locations. Even when we do a play switch it's so obviously going to happen they reset quickly.

I think the problem here is that Ankersen or whatever he is called believed in his fishing for talent theory. The examples sited though in the video were all individual fishing for talent against no competition. No one else was looking for Asafa Powell in Jamaica and if they were then he could still have succeeded, No one was competitively hunting for Paul McCartney at school but if they were and didn't damage his musical development in the process of teaching him then no harm would have come to the body that did not search. However we are not fishing alone in a pool trying to find the best fish we are up against a whole bunch of sports fishermen with radar scans of the seafloor and million pound trawlers hovering up everything in their path. to think that if we just dangle our rod in the right place we will suddenly be world beaters against everyone else doing the same seems naïve.

Not sure the Premier League has the balls to follow their own rules. As for the big six instead of turning on them I expect them to emulate it, I wouldn't be surprised if in fact they were already doing the same thing. It will intresting to see how they react if they stay quiet you know they were doing it too.

My main contention is not what stats to use to identifysuccess, but more that with a lot of competition and everyone and their uncle doing it. Thinking you are smarter at doing it than everyone else is what will get you in trouble. What turns out to work most often seems to be a have a lot of money for a longtime and being willing to spend it.

I think flogging anyone with some value now and getting our finances on a sounder footing for life back in the championship, because I don't see anyway of coming back from here. We wasted our chance to fix it over the world cup break.

Finding hidden talent great plan, so where is it hiding? Lower league club? Scouted for a century at this point. South America? Spain and Italy were doing it before us. Lesser European leagues, Scandinavia in the 90s Eastern Europe 90s, Nations with a few good teams, less money (Portugal, Netherlands, France) 90s. Smaller teams in top leagues (Spain, Italy, Germany) 00s Developing African nations 10s where. Where exactly do they think these gems are going to come from that haven't already been exhaustively searched? I know we need to get a bunch of skilled Indonesians and Nepalese who have been cruelly overlooked. Sport like war tends to test people's theories and find the ideas wanting often. I am all for improvement, it is my professional occupation. However in most fields there are experts slowly chipping away learning rather than radical change. Radical change only generally comes about when incremental change elsewhere make something new possible when a threshold is met. Not much can really radically change a bunch of blokes chasing a round object around trying to get it in the square netty thing, at least not that hasn't been learnt over 150 years.

Wow this was a disaster. I expect relegation at the end of the season. Perraud is too slow for a FB in the premier league and the way the game is played these days. 3 at the back might as well be two with Lycano gifting opportunities to the other team. Elyanousi just runs around not doing much. And we need to replace Romeu, and while it would be nice to have someone of his caliber from a few seasons back, right now I would take someone just occupying the same space he use to, just to protect the back line and be an anchor for attacks. I would be patient for a manager who just got the job, but they have had a break, and several games. And if you can't see that it is a bad idea to play Lyanco, and the team looks more threatening with Stuart Armstrong than Elyanousi then there is probably no hope.

I think the biggest problem with getting traction in USA is the time of year. This is Egghand ("Football") season and that sucks up any attention. Fox are carrying the world cup this time instead of ABC/ESPN and when one network has something the others will behave as if that thing is not even occurring. With ESPN being the biggest window for sports fans not covering it, whilst being at an unusual time of the year which is packed with Thanksgiving, school Christmas concerts, Christmas shopping and Football both college and NFL (you probably have no idea how big college football is over here each state probably has one or 2 teams with an 70k+ stadium and consumes pretty much the whole of every Saturday on 10+ TV channels, the EPL only gets a look in because it is played too early in the morning to be a problem) with all that going on it is just not really breaking through. The reason that the USA makes a reasonable venue for a world cup is that is has a large number of massive stadiums already in place and local infrastructure to handle it. With enough expats from any country that qualifies to fill the stadiums before anyone else even flies feom abroad. At 2hrs from Atlanta I will be at the next one for sure chearing on Bolivia Vs The Central African Republic or whatever else turns up near to my door. Although going back to England would be very reasonable too. I think it's time and likewise England plus other bits of UK has plenty of venues that could handle it.

Back in the day Jack Welch was famous for running GE with a policy of firing the lowest performing 10% each year. The net effect of this was that the most talented engineers avoided applying to the company as they did not want to deal with this hassle, where as it tended to attract the self important blow hards. GE is now a shadow of the company it was having divested of most of it units. Engineering and scientificly minded individuals are not necessarily the most gregarious individuals and being thrown into a dog eat dog environment won't bring out the best and will probably drive them to go elsewhere, leaving you with a B team.

I am being entertained by the fact that a new form of money that is not meant to be encumbered by all those pesky regulations is being destroyed by an old fashioned bank run.

The main reason I thought his time should be up is that something about the set up seems to make the players deteriorate in quality over time. I don't mean like OR aging out of premier league pace, but the younger players who come on with promise just to stagnate and players that should be in their prime just slowly getting worse. At the beginning of this season we looked like we had a fine crop of recruits who would give us a good season, but as the season has gone on that early promise seems to have been coached out of them. I think it's time for a new approach, because as a team we rely on finding quality players who will eventually leave. That doesn't work if we make them look like worse players over time. And as head of the coaching staff that is where the buck stops.

I appreciate that he is likely to give me $10,000 off my student loans I took out whilst a graduate student.

I miss having a player like OR was from about 2 seasons and before. We are clearly missing this piece now, but current OR is not able to do this anymore so the guy choose to go home and carry on at a level he does think he can continue at. I say fair play to the bloke. It's our problem we haven't been able to cope with the gap.

As a non practising cultural pagan I will be celebrating the winter solstice a few days late because that is when I get given the day off work. By erecting a fake coniferous tree, and sharing gifts with my family to indicate my surplus bounty. I will then pass out after eating to many mince pies, as they hark back to a time when only dried fruits were available this time of year before modern preservation and shipping methods were available, if you wanted consume some form of fruit. However at no time will I or my family care that a made up story about a real person is said to have happened on this day. Oh and I might tune in to see if Charles will complain that everyone gifted him a pen this year because they thought it would be funny.

Romeu was crucial to the way we played over the last few years, but it was obvious towards the end of last season that he couldn't play at the same intensity as he used to. I was worried at the time about his dropping level, although surprised he left, rather than be a bridge to a permanent successor, ot maybe that was what last year was meant to be and they failed to deliver. Anyway I think JWP has been largely anonymous this season. Clearly without Romeu as a partner he is not playing the same game. He is not looking like a player who would step up to a bigger club for big money with his current performances. It weird the beginning of the season it looked so good. Like the recruitment team having made good signings this summer but now mid October the wheels have fallen off. Which means either the coaching staff have coached out their ability, which I think is a little fast even for the goal keeping trainers, or the general way to play and specific tactics have let us down. In which case there is only person responsible.

Mayne the thread title is incorrect maybe Braveman can get another crack at it after this disaster! If you need to fight inflation by reducing the amount of money in the system, the alternative method to raising intrest rates is the opposite of a tax cut.

Not sure the Ukrainians particular care of the intricacies of the means by which they are being murdered, property destroyed and freedoms curtailed. Being irradiated or blown up still equals dead. The whole we can't upset a mad man in case he gets angrier is stupid. And it reflects poorly on those saying it. He is rational he is just working from a different set of assumptions than us. There is only one person. Who can stop this war and that is Putin. Are we going to condemn a group of people for "fighting too hard" to protect themselves from another group who seem intent on exterminating, torturing and raping them or forcing them to fight for them against their will. Wow I think a lot less of some people on here.

I remember growing up during the 80s with this constant background of the evil soviets and their massive army threatening to annihilate us. When the soviets regime fell, it turn out this bogeyman was but a shadow who struggled to have enough refrigerated trucks to move food about and armies equipment was mostly rust. In seems over the last few year we have been fooled again that this country was a tiger to be feared and respected. Turns out not so much. Instead it is just a corrupt inefficient back water, just that the people skimming off the top were not necessarily the same as the previous lot, although a lot of them seem to have got their start under the old system.