Discussion: Manuel Pellegrini 2015/16

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We've just bought a sought after, 20 something defender, one of the best in the world, and the bluemoon massive are slaughtering him and pining for mangala. The same people no doubt who were slaughtering mangala last season.

We won last night. Against a German side in Germany. A side that had never lost at home to an English team.

Our manager changed things around at half time and we were easily the better team in the second half.

We won. We won . We won.

Pelligrini is going nowhere this season. Get used to it.

Second in the league, good chance in the ecl, next round of the league cup, best squad in the entire history of our club. Cheapest season tickets in the league, playing the most exciting football in the league.

And a manager who is calmness personified.

We've never had it so good. Why are so many not happy?

Agree with a lot of that although just not sure Otamendi was what we needed at this point. Also don't think Pellegrini is calmness personified at the moment. Something has changed this season he seems completely on edge and under pressure to deliver more than ever.
 
Every manager does indeed have his flaws, but most of the greats at least reach semi-finals and finals in their flawed seasons. We may do that, but its worrying that we're looking exactly as we have done ever in the champions league and when the same flaws are there that are always there, you should sort them. This team is far too good to be scraping a 2-1 win against BMG.

I think MP is a decent manager with blind-spots. You don't think he blind-spots are either there, or are a problem I guess...Let's agree to disagree.

I posted the other day - I find it hard to use a one size fits all approach for problems within a particular match. So for me it's not that Pellegrini has this one thing which he does which leads to us struggle in the CL. I thought for example, that if you were to compare the defeats last season against the defeat against Juve you'd see the matches had a very different pattern in terms of both 'control' and our general pattern of play.

I'd agree that this team is too good in a way to be 'scraping' a victory against most sides, but for me that's the beauty of football. We may well have a billion pound squad, but on any given day at the highest level you can get turned over for a variety of reasons, some of them down to the manager and some of them down to individual performances on your own side, or in fact the opposition just being that little bit better on the night.

To bring it back round to Pellegrini and the champions league - he has taken far worse sides than ours far further in the competition, so i think he has the chops and the pedigree and the know how to make us successful in that competition too. I don't even think that's a particularly controversial thing to say. It's a knock out competition so you will without doubt need a little bit of luck along the way to win it, but there's nothing in his make up or DNA as a manager which suggests that he has a blind spot stopping him from doing well in Europe.

All managers have blind spots too. I'm not the only person who thinks that the 'virtues' of a manager like Mourinho are being laid bare this season for what they are. You can play %'s with a vastly superior squad and be immensely successful which he has done. But the flipside is that when that kind of pragmatism stops delivering results you're left with a team with nowhere to go because they aren't coached to express themselves or do the unexpected. So your flair players basically become expensive 'runners'.

I also think that Pellegrini has continually preached 'balance'. Yes he wants to entertain and yes he wants to play attacking football, but he is the first person to also want a balanced side which defends well. Which we did with ease before Vinny/Manga got injured. He personally drills the back four, again something which you wouldn't expect from someone who isn't arsed about defending (like Wenger for example).

There's a lot which needs to be balanced before simply rushing to castigate the manager. Again I don't think that's a particularly controversial thing to say when we've been beset with injuries to key players.
 
I love the way you can't see the enormous hypocrisy in your first sentence.

That reserve back four were all we had available. If we'd have had some of our first choice defenders available we'd have won that game easily. Throw in the fact that most of our biggest names are half fit, and our new boys are still gelling, and we are missing an incredible amount of chances as a result, and that's a damn good result tonight.

We are fine. Mark my words. We will go up the gears as the big guns get fit and improve.

I agree about it being a fine result,The method we used to achieve it was unnecessarily stressful though. I really hope you are correct Dave about the highlighted bit,because the potential is certainly there,whether we ever realise it under Pellers I'm not convinced.
 
We need to find a way of playing for the trips to Seville and Turin which is somewhere in between how we played yesterday and how we played in Rome.
 
I posted the other day - I find it hard to use a one size fits all approach for problems within a particular match. So for me it's not that Pellegrini has this one thing which he does which leads to us struggle in the CL. I thought for example, that if you were to compare the defeats last season against the defeat against Juve you'd see the matches had a very different pattern in terms of both 'control' and our general pattern of play.

I'd agree that this team is too good in a way to be 'scraping' a victory against most sides, but for me that's the beauty of football. We may well have a billion pound squad, but on any given day at the highest level you can get turned over for a variety of reasons, some of them down to the manager and some of them down to individual performances on your own side, or in fact the opposition just being that little bit better on the night.

To bring it back round to Pellegrini and the champions league - he has taken far worse sides than ours far further in the competition, so i think he has the chops and the pedigree and the know how to make us successful in that competition too. I don't even think that's a particularly controversial thing to say. It's a knock out competition so you will without doubt need a little bit of luck along the way to win it, but there's nothing in his make up or DNA as a manager which suggests that he has a blind spot stopping him from doing well in Europe.

All managers have blind spots too. I'm not the only person who thinks that the 'virtues' of a manager like Mourinho are being laid bare this season for what they are. You can play %'s with a vastly superior squad and be immensely successful which he has done. But the flipside is that when that kind of pragmatism stops delivering results you're left with a team with nowhere to go because they aren't coached to express themselves or do the unexpected. So your flair players basically become expensive 'runners'.

I also think that Pellegrini has continually preached 'balance'. Yes he wants to entertain and yes he wants to play attacking football, but he is the first person to also want a balanced side which defends well. Which we did with ease before Vinny/Manga got injured. He personally drills the back four, again something which you wouldn't expect from someone who isn't arsed about defending (like Wenger for example).

There's a lot which needs to be balanced before simply rushing to castigate the manager. Again I don't think that's a particularly controversial thing to say when we've been beset with injuries to key players.

if he drills thew back four then he really needs to get a hold of Kolorov!!!!!!!!!

I agree with almost all of that...however I just think that we are way below the potential we have. Im not a FIFA/Football manger games person (way too old) but i watch the games, and then watch and re watch the highlights and defensively we could be so much better.....attacking wise we have been fantastic under MP (not quite there at the present but that happens sometimes)...but defensively we are a shambles......yes we miss Kompany but the replacements (baring Kolorov) in out back 4 would walk into most decent top division sides. ......the midfield is all at sea defensively and that for me is where he fails slightly. ......i watch the way other teams are drilled to defend (especially the midfielders when the don't have the ball whereas we seem to attack with reckless abandonment in every game and this is where it goes badly wrong against the best or when we go 1-0 down as teams then just know to hit us on the counter on the left hand side........yet he has done nothing to counter that and that is the frustrating part about him as he must see it.

Fwiw with injuries at present he hasn't got a lot of option but once the players are back fit there needs to be a big improvement in certain aspects)mainly defensively) and this si where my other bug bare comes in....When we don't have the players to play at the very knife edge he likes to play at ...he then needs to be a bit more pragmatic and he doesn't do this
 
I think what MP will have seen so far this season is his reliable MDM has finally showed signs that he isnt able to be the level we need when we have injuries MDM is showing the signs of a defender who is slowly coming to his end at the club. Idealy he wouldnt of been playing regularly if Mangala and Kompany was fit but sadly MDM has lost form and at times is a shambles seeing him in our back 4. The guy was a great signing but I get the feeling that MP is thinking maybe Denayer would of been the better pick for 4th choice at the club.
 
We were getting battered, then scored a goal from a corner and Borussia bottled it after that. Nothing changed, they bottled it. Plus it took 60 minutes for a reaction. We should have been 3-0 down by that point... and even then that reaction was taking off a half fit Yaya who probably shouldn't have started, in Pellers own words. There was absolutely no reactions at all v Spurs or Juve.

I've got nowt against Pellers, but he clearly has some flaws. He'll only ever be a good manager, not a genuine great.
This is the sort of thing that irritates me i.e. saying that we should have been 3-0 down: we should have scored first but we didn't; just as BMG didn't score 3.
 
I think what MP will have seen so far this season is his reliable MDM has finally showed signs that he isnt able to be the level we need when we have injuries MDM is showing the signs of a defender who is slowly coming to his end at the club. Idealy he wouldnt of been playing regularly if Mangala and Kompany was fit but sadly MDM has lost form and at times is a shambles seeing him in our back 4. The guy was a great signing but I get the feeling that MP is thinking maybe Denayer would of been the better pick for 4th choice at the club.
demichelis has done it all in football. don't get me wrong, i agree that this will be his last season at the club, but i think we would look a lot worse with a lad still learning his position, who has only ever played spl football, in the side
 
I think we pretty much will be playing one way and this is it. We just cant do hard fought defensive masterclass performances with the intention of coming away with 1-0 wins. Our players don't have it in their football DNA.

It was a cracking game to watch last night that's for sure despite how bad defensively we were until they scored.

One thing that did annoy me was going 2-1 up with 2 mins left and we get the ball and 5 players bomb upfield including Kolorov! If ever there is a time to see the game out, that is surely it. Even then from the corner, we had no one in the box for obvious reasons and still managed to gift them an attack within 3 seconds of us taking the corner. We really have to tighten up this stuff.
That was bonkers going for a third goal and I suspect even Pellers thought so.
 
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