JohnMaddocksAxe
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- 30 Apr 2008
- Messages
- 2,854
I guess this might be a long post so can I be the first to say ‘zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz’ or whatever the typical response is. No-on is forcing you to read it.
Anyway, the owners have made the decision today. Some people agree with it. Others aren’t so sure.
What has been predictable has been the long line of washed up former players and clichéd media commentators who have been lining up this evening to come out with the well-worn prejudices and ‘jobs for the boys’ agenda that occurs every time a high profile British manager, especially those that were high profile players, gets sacked by a wealthy owner.
The clichéd “How dare they do that to a football man like XXX (in this case Mark Hughes), they know nothing about football” response has some grounding in real events but, like most clichés, it’s horribly over used and relied on by fools as an all-encompassing argument.
The fact that our owners are richer than everyone else and foreign with it just means that the idiots in the media feel even more detached from them and therefore even more justified in making snide digs (not to mention less fearful of upsetting someone who might be in the English football establishment – which is the concern that shapes most football punditry in the UK media).
So they are all out in force. The owners are, according to them, wealthy fools who know nothing about football or how to build a team and Mark Hughes is another brilliant football man, one of the best managers you will ever find who has been criminally undermined by people who don’t know what they are doing.
Over the past twelve months I’ve held the opinion that it is the knowledge that exactly this sort of reaction would occur if they were to dispose with the manager that has led to them being, in my opinion, overly loyal to someone who has produced very sketchy results in his job.
If this had been part of their thinking, when it shouldn’t really be, the tonight has proved that they would be right to anticipate it.
They could, as has happened before with wealthy new owners, have dismissed a manager who wasn’t their man within weeks of getting here. They didn’t.
They could have, as a huge amount of clubs have, dismissed a manager that took their team to the relegation zone last Christmas. They didn’t.
They could have pulled the trigger when the disappointing results continued over the second half of last season. They didn’t.
They could have, as many new owners have, decided that the start of their first full season was the point to put their own man in place. Just like that well known, foreign, non-football man Francis Lee did.
They didn’t do any of this. Instead, in the face of nothing but disappointing football results served up by a man they did not appoint, they backed him to the hilt. They gave him 16 months of being able to do anything and appoint anyone he wanted at the club. To such an extent that the turn over of staff was huge.
They gave him the most money even given to a manager in world football and backed his judgement 100% in the transfer market.
He was supported in and given the money to make happen everything he wanted at the club.
Yet the results stayed sketchy and the team remained, to the eye of most observers, unorganised, uneasy and without a fixed style of play.
Meanwhile the likes of Bruce (at Wigan and Sunderland), Hodgson, McLeish and Redknapp are building teams in similar periods of time, under financial and organisational constraints that are on another planet, that produce results and consistency that is very similar to City’s. With much less talented players.
There is no argument whatsoever to suggest that the owners did not back the manager. They just eventually decided that he had not shown enough on pitch progress to justify the continued, unrivalled backing that they give to their men.
The sixth place target that people cite is a smokescreen. The statement on the website clearly states that new targets were drawn up when they accelerated the transfer backing in the summer. The target was changed from sixth to top four. Players have said it, others at the club have alluded to it. Now this virtually confirms it.
People might not like it but it is true. Top six was not the target this season. At least not since big money was spent in the summer. And the manager knew it.
So stop using it as a stick to beat the owners.
The last eleven games (and the results and performances of last season too) are nowhere near what is needed to get near that target. Combine this with the team looking, if anything, less organised as time goes on (rather than the promised gelling) and they are certainly not breaking any promises. The top four target is drifting away. Even worse, it is drifting away to the likes of Spurs and Villa. Something that no-one considered a serious proposition at the start of the season.
Seeing City fans so eager to jump on the back of the media line and accuse the owners of being the ‘unfair know-nothings’ that the cliché clingers wish to portray is astonishing.
They have backed someone who wasn’t their man to the hilt. Results have never reached a decent level and they have taken a decision to bring in someone who, in their opinion, can achieve that.
The progress that those who are berating Abu Dhabi seek to claim that Hughes made at the club all relates to vague off the pitch claims or transfers. For an outlay of £200m, I would hope that the quality of player in the squad has improved beyond recognition. Being able to sign good players with £200m is surely the minimal requirement of any professional football manager.
Being able to bring much cited ‘professionalism; to the club that doesn’t result in improved results and league positions and sees a team constantly look like strangers, long ball men and little signs of improvement is neither here nor their really. If ‘professionalism’ doesn’t improve things on the pitch then it just becomes a cliché. A professional team is one that gets consistently good results. Not one that just runs its backside off every day in training but shows little consistency on the pitch.
These owners are the best thing ever to happen to this club.
However, I don’t buy the mantra that the owners are always right. In my opinion, Thaksin was a disgrace who was nearly always wrong.
And in this respect I will concede that I felt for Hughes today. Managing a team when you know you are going is not nice. It definitely could have been handled better on a non match day. It most probably put him in an embarrassing situation and it could have been avoided. It was not good.
He will, however, be ridiculously rewarded for not cutting the mustard at this club. With figures that most of us would struggle to relate to. That still doesn’t make it right but it does mean that he is not so much the victim that some are making out. He will make plenty out of not being up to scratch. Unlike people in ‘normal’ jobs who don’t cut it.
And, unlike in normal jobs, you have to remember that this is football. Managers get removed in unsavoury circumstances more often than we care to remember. This is the club that had Frank Clarke hear he was sacked in the radio, had Horton facing a full season of being asked if he was being sacked and had approached Keegan behind Royle’s back. And there are worse examples at other clubs. None of that was right and it doesn’t excuse the circumstances today but these things can happen in football. Every manager knows it can and go into it knowing that and knowing that if something like that does happen they will be hugely compensated for it.
The last thing that is astonishing is people saying that Mancini is a disappointment. The man has a managerial record and list of trophies that dwarfs most managers in this league, including the man he replaces.
He wouldn’t be my first choice in a world where I could choose anyone at all but we don’t live in a world like that and he, without doubt, has the experience of working with, moulding and managing the sort of players we have and aspire to have, in the sort of trophy winning situations we want to be in.
I feel there is a bit of a “don’t know that much about him, he can’t be that good” reaction to him on here tonight.
Well, he can be and he will be expected to be. He will be given the complete backing that the previous manager was and he will be expected to move the team on much further. And rightly so.
If his main positives in 18 months time are spending millions and millions and having decent players to show for it, whilst results on the pitch remain sketchy then he will be subject to the same questions. And rightly so.
But I doubt he will not have moved the club on it that time. Nothing in his managerial history suggests he can’t.
And, ffs, these owners are the best thing ever to happen to this club. They might have made a mistake in timing today but compared t everything they have done right since coming here it nowhere near justifies some of the embarrassing comments about them tonight. Leave that to the idiots in the media whose comments are determined by who is their mate or by a disgusting over reliance on footballing clichés.
Rant over. A full ten minutes of my life wasted. Cue ‘boring bullshit’ posts. But, hey, you were mug enough to read it.
Anyway, the owners have made the decision today. Some people agree with it. Others aren’t so sure.
What has been predictable has been the long line of washed up former players and clichéd media commentators who have been lining up this evening to come out with the well-worn prejudices and ‘jobs for the boys’ agenda that occurs every time a high profile British manager, especially those that were high profile players, gets sacked by a wealthy owner.
The clichéd “How dare they do that to a football man like XXX (in this case Mark Hughes), they know nothing about football” response has some grounding in real events but, like most clichés, it’s horribly over used and relied on by fools as an all-encompassing argument.
The fact that our owners are richer than everyone else and foreign with it just means that the idiots in the media feel even more detached from them and therefore even more justified in making snide digs (not to mention less fearful of upsetting someone who might be in the English football establishment – which is the concern that shapes most football punditry in the UK media).
So they are all out in force. The owners are, according to them, wealthy fools who know nothing about football or how to build a team and Mark Hughes is another brilliant football man, one of the best managers you will ever find who has been criminally undermined by people who don’t know what they are doing.
Over the past twelve months I’ve held the opinion that it is the knowledge that exactly this sort of reaction would occur if they were to dispose with the manager that has led to them being, in my opinion, overly loyal to someone who has produced very sketchy results in his job.
If this had been part of their thinking, when it shouldn’t really be, the tonight has proved that they would be right to anticipate it.
They could, as has happened before with wealthy new owners, have dismissed a manager who wasn’t their man within weeks of getting here. They didn’t.
They could have, as a huge amount of clubs have, dismissed a manager that took their team to the relegation zone last Christmas. They didn’t.
They could have pulled the trigger when the disappointing results continued over the second half of last season. They didn’t.
They could have, as many new owners have, decided that the start of their first full season was the point to put their own man in place. Just like that well known, foreign, non-football man Francis Lee did.
They didn’t do any of this. Instead, in the face of nothing but disappointing football results served up by a man they did not appoint, they backed him to the hilt. They gave him 16 months of being able to do anything and appoint anyone he wanted at the club. To such an extent that the turn over of staff was huge.
They gave him the most money even given to a manager in world football and backed his judgement 100% in the transfer market.
He was supported in and given the money to make happen everything he wanted at the club.
Yet the results stayed sketchy and the team remained, to the eye of most observers, unorganised, uneasy and without a fixed style of play.
Meanwhile the likes of Bruce (at Wigan and Sunderland), Hodgson, McLeish and Redknapp are building teams in similar periods of time, under financial and organisational constraints that are on another planet, that produce results and consistency that is very similar to City’s. With much less talented players.
There is no argument whatsoever to suggest that the owners did not back the manager. They just eventually decided that he had not shown enough on pitch progress to justify the continued, unrivalled backing that they give to their men.
The sixth place target that people cite is a smokescreen. The statement on the website clearly states that new targets were drawn up when they accelerated the transfer backing in the summer. The target was changed from sixth to top four. Players have said it, others at the club have alluded to it. Now this virtually confirms it.
People might not like it but it is true. Top six was not the target this season. At least not since big money was spent in the summer. And the manager knew it.
So stop using it as a stick to beat the owners.
The last eleven games (and the results and performances of last season too) are nowhere near what is needed to get near that target. Combine this with the team looking, if anything, less organised as time goes on (rather than the promised gelling) and they are certainly not breaking any promises. The top four target is drifting away. Even worse, it is drifting away to the likes of Spurs and Villa. Something that no-one considered a serious proposition at the start of the season.
Seeing City fans so eager to jump on the back of the media line and accuse the owners of being the ‘unfair know-nothings’ that the cliché clingers wish to portray is astonishing.
They have backed someone who wasn’t their man to the hilt. Results have never reached a decent level and they have taken a decision to bring in someone who, in their opinion, can achieve that.
The progress that those who are berating Abu Dhabi seek to claim that Hughes made at the club all relates to vague off the pitch claims or transfers. For an outlay of £200m, I would hope that the quality of player in the squad has improved beyond recognition. Being able to sign good players with £200m is surely the minimal requirement of any professional football manager.
Being able to bring much cited ‘professionalism; to the club that doesn’t result in improved results and league positions and sees a team constantly look like strangers, long ball men and little signs of improvement is neither here nor their really. If ‘professionalism’ doesn’t improve things on the pitch then it just becomes a cliché. A professional team is one that gets consistently good results. Not one that just runs its backside off every day in training but shows little consistency on the pitch.
These owners are the best thing ever to happen to this club.
However, I don’t buy the mantra that the owners are always right. In my opinion, Thaksin was a disgrace who was nearly always wrong.
And in this respect I will concede that I felt for Hughes today. Managing a team when you know you are going is not nice. It definitely could have been handled better on a non match day. It most probably put him in an embarrassing situation and it could have been avoided. It was not good.
He will, however, be ridiculously rewarded for not cutting the mustard at this club. With figures that most of us would struggle to relate to. That still doesn’t make it right but it does mean that he is not so much the victim that some are making out. He will make plenty out of not being up to scratch. Unlike people in ‘normal’ jobs who don’t cut it.
And, unlike in normal jobs, you have to remember that this is football. Managers get removed in unsavoury circumstances more often than we care to remember. This is the club that had Frank Clarke hear he was sacked in the radio, had Horton facing a full season of being asked if he was being sacked and had approached Keegan behind Royle’s back. And there are worse examples at other clubs. None of that was right and it doesn’t excuse the circumstances today but these things can happen in football. Every manager knows it can and go into it knowing that and knowing that if something like that does happen they will be hugely compensated for it.
The last thing that is astonishing is people saying that Mancini is a disappointment. The man has a managerial record and list of trophies that dwarfs most managers in this league, including the man he replaces.
He wouldn’t be my first choice in a world where I could choose anyone at all but we don’t live in a world like that and he, without doubt, has the experience of working with, moulding and managing the sort of players we have and aspire to have, in the sort of trophy winning situations we want to be in.
I feel there is a bit of a “don’t know that much about him, he can’t be that good” reaction to him on here tonight.
Well, he can be and he will be expected to be. He will be given the complete backing that the previous manager was and he will be expected to move the team on much further. And rightly so.
If his main positives in 18 months time are spending millions and millions and having decent players to show for it, whilst results on the pitch remain sketchy then he will be subject to the same questions. And rightly so.
But I doubt he will not have moved the club on it that time. Nothing in his managerial history suggests he can’t.
And, ffs, these owners are the best thing ever to happen to this club. They might have made a mistake in timing today but compared t everything they have done right since coming here it nowhere near justifies some of the embarrassing comments about them tonight. Leave that to the idiots in the media whose comments are determined by who is their mate or by a disgusting over reliance on footballing clichés.
Rant over. A full ten minutes of my life wasted. Cue ‘boring bullshit’ posts. But, hey, you were mug enough to read it.