Re: Is now the time to consider Mancini's tenure at the clubs
Bazzmand Show said:
kiam06 said:
Ajax are no mugs and showed it at the swamp last year and Dortmund and Madrid are better than any English team so I can't believe the arrogance of our fans.
Arsenal played Dortmund off the park last year and beat them twice. I'm not buying that mate. We should be beating teams like Dortmund at home.
OK, first of all Arsenal did not play Dortmund off the park. Both games were really close and one even ended in a draw.
Speaking of Dortmund, while both them and City are very different in several ways, they share pretty much the same experience in the Champions League last year.
Both teams played way worse than in the league. They could not bring the same performances on the international stage and payed for their lack of experience.
But now comes the big difference between them. Dortmund used the mostly negative experiences and learned from their mistakes. They developed and stand now on the top of the hardest group in this year.
In the meantime, City stagnates.
You can of course defend Mancini with the fact, that he won the team two national titles, but for me that is too easy. If you want to rate a manager, you need to take the resources into account.
Some of the greatest managers I know have not even won titles and I still rate them very highly. A good example for this is Mirko Slomka, the manager of the Bundesliga club Hanover 96. This club with a very small budget played for a long time in the no mans land of the league. Slomka lead them into the Euro League, where they impressed every German, getting into the Quarter Finals, where they fell to the eventual champion Atletico Madrid after a hard fight.
People try to excuse Mancini´s and ManCity´s poor performance in the Champions League this year with the strong group, but then I look at the managers of those clubs.
The standing of Mourinho does not need to debated. As much as I dislike the guy, he is one of the most successful managers in the history of club football.
Frank de Boer created a team with seven or eight players out of their own youth academy. They still put up a respectable fight away against Dortmund and managed to beat City last night.
Then there is Jurgen Klopp. This man build a team, that dominated the Bundesliga the last two seasons, including five victories in a row against a world class team, which managed to get in the Champions League Final twice in the last three years. He also lifted the team on a very high level in the Champions League as I mentioned before. He did all that with a starting squad that cost less money than what Mancini payed for one striker (Aguero).
I don´t want to say, that Mancini needs to accomplish what Klopp did in Dortmund, because such a thing is extremely rare, but I look at their performances in the CL and I see no real team, system or tactic.
How can a team with so much investment, so much depth and skill play that poorly? Why is their no growth from their last Champions League campaign? When you have so much quality on the pitch you are bound to look for the problems on the bench and I don´t mean the ridiculous strong reserve players.