Lessons from Mourinho and Leicester

[FlemishDuck]

In Engineering, similar challenge's often lead to similar sollutions. Sucks if youre sollution looks too much on a patent then. Like The French and Brits build Concorde, and then the Russians build a very similar Concorde like plane and they were accused from having copy'd from us, but i do believe that the same applied in that case, just a matter of solving the same challenge.

To some degree you could compare it to footbal, but only so much. As long as you have the same material to work with in players and the same teams to fight against with their unique threats, i think that many managers will bring similar sollutions. When you look at it over multiple years however, then team's change a lot in terms of the material they work with and that of their opposition, the challenge's and building blocks change. At this level, i wouldn't be surprised to see only little change on the short term, and needing to give managers a few years perhaps before the full inpact of their work starts to kick in.

If anything, i think it's unwise to change managers to much or too fast, some teams change managers practicly every year or even in shorter time than that, probably not a smart thing.

 

[Blue Mooner]

I'm sorry but I disagree. I get what you're saying that people tend to overestimate the manager effect, but I think you're doing the opposite & underestimating their importance.

You use Chelsea & Mourinho as an example yet you could say the opposite, last year was their team that good? Not really, but he set them up to not lose in the big matches - his tactics gained tough points & made rivals drop points against him. This year it wasn't his fault, he set them up well, the players just didn't perform for him - so yes that shows the importance of players, and last season shows the important of the manager.

You'd struggle to find many football people, or City fans with any semi-decent knowledge of the game, who think that we're setting our teams up in the correct manner for most matches. Yes I agree that form, and confidence & the ability of the players is important - but you still need to set them up right. Nearly all our problems are stemming from the same mistakes being made by the same players over & over again, yet our manager won't adapt or change for these problems, I struggle to see how you dismiss that as unimportant? People can blame Yaya for being lazy, but we know that he will be lazy, which then makes it the managers decision to either drop him (solves to lazy problem) or protect him by adapting for his laziness to stop it being a problem - by not doing so for me the blame then shifts towards the manager, if you know something is a problem you should change it rather than just ignoring it & letting the player take blame.

You say have faith in the team, I think you'll find that most fans do indeed have faith in the team, and are in fact using that faith as the only thing that makes us believe we're still in with a chance of the title. Personally I think this has been our biggest problem though, tactically we're not on the same level as the top teams, so we just rely on having better players & rely on them carrying us to victory - which in the PL has worked sure, we have the best team hence we have won the league a couple of times & won a couple of domestic trophies, but we're nowhere near the level of the really top tier teams & to take that step for me you need a top tier manager.

The assumption seems to be we're getting a new manager next season & that it is likely a top manager. It will certainly be interesting to see if this has little to no impact as I can only assume you expect from your post, or if we concede far less goals next season.

Stable - good comments - and yes I think our difference in view comes down to 'how' important we believe a manager is to a teams success. Up to a point, they are very important, put me in charge for example, my training would be sh*te, I haven't got my UEFA badges and whilst I have my views on formations, positions etc my tactics would probably be non-existent.

However, once a manager reaches a certain level and has 'proven' he can win things the assumption has to be the guy knows what he is doing, his methods have been proven to work. I disagree completely that 'all' our problems are down to how the players have been set-up. Take Arsenal, the reason we lost the game was down to a fantastic finish and a very poor mistake.

People seem to think you can 'tactic' every second of the game !! There are millions of variables in any game, sometimes the opposition are simply better (for that read Barca & Bayern) but people always seem to make out it's to do with tactics and 'set-up'. Players have brains, they're not being programmed, decisions are made in split seconds, dive in, don't dive in, if a player doesn't do his job, how can that be a managers fault ?

Obviously, I'm not completely dismissing the need for a good manager but I think fans in particular put far too much store on it's impact. My view personally is that this is the 'Sky' effect and the continual deep analysis of games - it obviously serves their purposes to use all this fancy technology they have developed and yes it is interesting but I take most of it with a pinch of salt.

Read a match day thread or the comments on Yaya, Kolarov, Sagna, Bony, Sterling, Mangala etc If you genuinely believe the fans keep the faith !! That is where the real contradiction comes because if you read these opinions you'd be struggling to understand how we are in the champions league places and Pellegrini is actually a genius.......

 

[mufc1988]

On Mourinho:
The Real Madrid job seems to have left him a broken man. Everything about him has changed.
Even when he wins he seems to feel vindicated, rather than happy.
I was actually surprised that he won it last year but not surprised by what happened this year.

On Klopp:
Way too early to tell if he will be a success.
Also, what would be success for Liverpool?
But what's clear is that unlike Guardiola, he is not tactically flexible.

On Leicester:
They are a success because strikers play like strikers, wingers in wing positions, etc.
Each player knows what he has to do ... Vardy will always be at the shoulder of an opposing defender waiting for a quick cross/throughball from the wings.
Defenders are pragmatic and play safe balls forward quickly.
Pace frightens everyone and as a team they are pacey for 90 minutes, not just 70 minutes.
Good luck with injuries.
Vardy and Mahrez are in the form of their lives.

 

[prestonibbo_mcfc]

Agree to a certain extent, but you'll just have to get used to, when we win its Inspite of Pellegrini
and when we lose it's because of Pellegrini.

 

[stablemcfc]

Stable - good comments - and yes I think our difference in view comes down to 'how' important we believe a manager is to a teams success. Up to a point, they are very important, put me in charge for example, my training would be sh*te, I haven't got my UEFA badges and whilst I have my views on formations, positions etc my tactics would probably be non-existent.

However, once a manager reaches a certain level and has 'proven' he can win things the assumption has to be the guy knows what he is doing, his methods have been proven to work. I disagree completely that 'all' our problems are down to how the players have been set-up. Take Arsenal, the reason we lost the game was down to a fantastic finish and a very poor mistake.

People seem to think you can 'tactic' every second of the game !! There are millions of variables in any game, sometimes the opposition are simply better (for that read Barca & Bayern) but people always seem to make out it's to do with tactics and 'set-up'. Players have brains, they're not being programmed, decisions are made in split seconds, dive in, don't dive in, if a player doesn't do his job, how can that be a managers fault ?

Obviously, I'm not completely dismissing the need for a good manager but I think fans in particular put far too much store on it's impact. My view personally is that this is the 'Sky' effect and the continual deep analysis of games - it obviously serves their purposes to use all this fancy technology they have developed and yes it is interesting but I take most of it with a pinch of salt.

Read a match day thread or the comments on Yaya, Kolarov, Sagna, Bony, Sterling, Mangala etc If you genuinely believe the fans keep the faith !! That is where the real contradiction comes because if you read these opinions you'd be struggling to understand how we are in the champions league places and Pellegrini is actually a genius.......

I agree with you to an extent, like you mention the Arsenal game, you can point at the wonderful finish or the poor pass by Delph/Mangala for their second goal - but you could also point out that our best player (Silva) had a man (Flamini) glued to him as Wenger had told him to do that, whereas their very much in form player who everyone knew was a danger (Ozil) was allowed free reign behind Yaya/Dinho as you can only assume Pellegrini either didn't set us up to stop him, or he expected Yaya to do so to a better extent which I would argue is again not setting us up to stop him as we know Yaya won't do that job (take the 4-2 loss to United last season & Yaya vs Fellaini as a perfect recurrence). Yes it may seem a small thing, but when both goals come through Ozil being unmarked behind our CM's then that small thing our manager ignored could be argued lost us the game - and when that small thing is a recurring theme, it's easy to see why so many pundits & City fans question what is going on to not fix these repeated problems.

Aha, surely you must agree that the match day threads are a horrible example of, well.. of anything. Emotions are at their highest when we're losing & people will post with no regard to whether what they say has much logic behind it when they're pissed off. You're better off looking at the player performance threads in between matches for a more realistic view of what fans think of the team. Don't get me wrong there is certainly some discord & certain players don't have much support - but most will be backed as good enough.

 

[tom]

Ferguson got that shit team to win the prem