Last manager who City fans really wanted sacked

TBH, I was alarmed after we went from the controlled football under Mancini, to a manager who set us up 4-4-2, waited for the whistle to blow, & yelled "CHARGE"!!

We beat a newly promoted Swansea 4-0 at home in MP's first match, but we had little control & it could've been 4-4 if Swansea had a decent striker.

Some fans loved the "taking the handbrake" off approach, but it left me cold because I knew this all out attack tactic wouldn't work at the highest level, & once the opposition figured us out, we'd suffer.

After Manuel's first season where he was an unknown quantity, so it proved... The PL had figured us out. I'll never forget losing at Wet Spam & Fat Sam saying he exploited the obvious weakness that many fans were constantly complaining about to win the game easily. But Pellegrini wouldn't change.

We had Zabaleta & Kolorov as our preferred FB's, but who were both as slow as a pair of stoned slugs. Teams kept lumping balls over the top into the channels to a pair of whippet wingers on either side, who'd have the freedom of the pitch to either go for goal or pass to their greyhound striker mate gratefully waiting for a one-on-one in the middle.

It happened game after game, but yet there was never a change. I'd received cast iron info in 2012 that Pep was lined up to replace Mancini, but City couldn't be seen to be sacking him after the Agueroooooo moment, hence Pep took a year off & went to Bayern.

Because of Pellegrini perceived lack of tactics & UEFA's FFP restrictions, we went backwards after Mancini imo. It took Guardiola a season to properly assess where we were at, but after spending £200m on a new defence in 2017, City have never looked back.

Good or bad, all managers have contributed to the colourful history, that the istree clubs reckon we don't possess.
I agree with all of that mate.

It was fun at the beginning under Pellers (his first 6-9 months or so) when were were smashing in goals for a laugh but as someone above said, he had zero plan B so for the next two years just sat and had a snooze while we got battered.

And fans took out their frustrations (unfairly IMO) on the likes of Navas and Kolarov, two highly gifted technical footballers who were sent on a fool's errand week after week by poor management.
 
I loved Pellegrini! The first season was absolutely class with him. And the third season was very much a "hold the fort" for Pep job and he did okay despite us having a lot of dross to clear out. He did better that season than Pep when he arrived the next year to be fair to him!

I don't know about that.

We finished 4th and on 66 points with the performances being absolutely rancid for the most part. If United hadn't conceded a late goal to West Ham days before the season finished, we'd have finished 5th behind the rags. Yeah, we won the league cup but there's no way that team was better than the one the year after. With the Pep team you could see we were heading in the right direction and were just a couple of full backs away from making the turn.
 
I thought Machin did alright, took us up but then we needed someone to take us to the next level and kendall did that, he would have won us a cup 100% if he'd stayed.
I actually began to dream under Kendall, difficult start but just before he left we were looking a proper team and club. The fans and team came together and I genuinely believe we could have chased the title with a little luck and a couple of additions.

Him leaving was devastating, a huge backward step for all involved.
 
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I agree with all of that mate.

It was fun at the beginning under Pellers (his first 6-9 months or so) when were were smashing in goals for a laugh but as someone above said, he had zero plan B so for the next two years just sat and had a snooze while we got battered.

And fans took out their frustrations (unfairly IMO) on the likes of Navas and Kolarov, two highly gifted technical footballers who were sent on a fool's errand week after week by poor management.
Mate, many of us saw what was coming, & like you said, it seems MP had no plan b. Playing a high line defence with Demichelis, Kolarov & Zabaleta was suicide.

Pep mitigated those weaknesses the best he could in his first season, but once he got the defence he needed in 2017, he turned us into Centurions.
 
Pellegrini at the end of the 14/15 season. Everyone could see we were going backwards and that he wasn't the man to stop it. He was wasting huge resources on bad buys and was allowing the squad to stagnate and grow old, freezing out handy squad players and replacing them with absolute duds. Had we not signed De Bruyne and Sterling in preparation for Pep fuck knows what our squad would have ended up like in that 15/16 season, a year that was also flat as fuck and is probably the worst football we've ever played since the takeover. There was a point that season where our entire back four was over 30 and we were getting rolled over by literally any top six team who came to the Etihad. Battered by Liverpool, Leicester, and Spurs, beaten by United, dropped points to Arsenal. It was only because of Chelsea's implosion that we got points off any "big six" team at home that year. We didn't win an away game between 13th September and 2nd January, and the year before in 14/15 we won one away game between December 27th and 2nd May.

In less than two seasons he absolutely decimated the squad. In our B-team during that 13/14 season we had the likes of Pantilimon, Clichy, Navas, Javi Garcia, Milner, and Dzeko who came in and made sure we never missed a beat. Two seasons later and our B-team was full of absolute dreck - out went Garcia, Milner, and Dzeko and in came Fernando, Bony, and Mangala. Zabaleta and Demichelis were allowed to grow far too old. Caballero ended up being a decent buy but was horrible in his first season. We were relying on an 18-year-old Iheanacho to get goals for us. The team had such a weak centre, finished level on points with Van Gaal's United side, and, were it not for a combination of an emotional last night at Upton Park and a bomb scare at Old Trafford on the final day, we'd have cocked it up under pressure and finished 5th. How that side made it to a Champions League semi-final and won the League Cup is honestly beyond me. It's easy to forget but Txiki's reputation as a DoF was in the gutter that season after spaffing £70m up the wall on Mangala and Bony while allowing Dzeko and Nastasic to drift away for peanuts.

It's the sort of season we'll have to prepare for again when Pep leaves. Pellegrini getting ahead of the club's announcement about Pep coming in took a pretty average season in the league and absolutely derailed it. Then it was constantly used as an excuse to forgive some of the most uninspiring football I've ever seen a City team play - uninspiring football we'd already been playing for 12 months by that stage. When City announced they were breaking the £60 barrier for PSG tickets it was definitely the most distance I've ever felt from City post-takeover. I was pretty ill at the time and going to home games took a lot of physical effort that I wasn't willing to expend anymore. Funnily enough Facebook provided me with a memory this week of me watching the 4-0 win over Stoke on a dodgy stream in a flat in Camden - owned by a guy who wrote 'Rehab' with Amy Winehouse and 'Overload' with Sugababes - because my girlfriend at the time had a university open day in London and I'd gone with her instead of seeing City. God we've been lucky under Pep.
 
I don't know about that.

We finished 4th and on 66 points with the performances being absolutely rancid for the most part. If United hadn't conceded a late goal to West Ham days before the season finished, we'd have finished 5th behind the rags. Yeah, we won the league cup but there's no way that team was better than the one the year after. With the Pep team you could see we were heading in the right direction and were just a couple of full backs away from making the turn.

Well we won the league cup and got to the CL semi finals so it was better than Pep's first season!

It wasn't good football and Pep was building us up to what we've then gone and achieved so I'm not suggesting for a moment Pellegrini was a better manager. But there was context to his time at the club. Mancini was questioning decisions, not accepting the FFP challenges and threw his toys out of the pram over the Van Persie signing. We signed a lot of dross and Pellegrini's first season was quality. We definitely were on a downward slope when he left, but I don't think the fault lies completely at his door. The club needed a huge overhaul and under Pep we did just that.
 

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