Memphis

Looking back at the timetable, it seems that this all became public after 12 October, so it's not as if he was daft enough to bet on football after all of this emerged. 

This is a continuation of his previous infractions and I would hope common sense would prevail and his lengthy ban would suffice as punishment, but knowing the FA, I doubt it.

Feels as if the season of short squads, injuries, and upheaval is catching up to us. We just look mentally and physically tired every time we step on to a pitch. It's been quite some time since we've looked anywhere near our best, and I think it was always going to be inevitable that we would feel the pain of having squeezed by as long as we did. I think it's silly to blame Howe specifically, as he's merely a part of the whole club philosophy when it comes to training and squad management. I do think we will need to reassess how we do things this summer and prioritize depth more than we have. But it would be harsh in the extreme to make sweeping changes on the back of what feels like an inevitable drop in form. 

To me, it simply means this summer will be absolutely critical not only in terms of player recruitment, but also a reimagining of how we balance the squad and how we handle our fitness levels.

8 minutes ago, Yorkie said:

Additionally, hiring the Brentford moneyball master would be deciding to suddenly implement a very particular approach to recruitment, for which there's no evidence of us actually desiring to do so up to now. Is there anything to indicate that such a model would work for a team with aspirations of Champions League football, as opposed to promotion and consolidation? If we were to go in that direction I'd hope that it's because we've identified it as the approach which works for us, rather because he's a 'name'.

 

On that note, I think it's plausible that we didn't know exactly what we wanted when we appointed Ashworth, and so the murmurings about the role not being what he expected potentially ring true to me. With that in mind, Eales & Co may now have more clarity on that, and we might therefore see someone appointed to a different title and with a different role - rather than a straight swap. So it could be someone we've not heard of or expected.

 

I think this is well stated. 

We are in a different position from a financial standpoint than when we hired Ashworth, but more importantly, we are now fully staffed behind the scenes. Knowing how things went with Ashworth, we may well decide to change the remit of the Sporting Director role. Or replace it with something else. Whatever the situation, I would expect whoever is hired to be indicative of that chosen direction.

There is a great deal of speculation and argument over a lot of things none of us can know or will likely ever know:

1. The specifics of Ashworth's role in our transfers

2. The specific things he has done to create and build out our infrastructure 

3. The nature of his relationships with the coaching staff and the owners

4. How indispensable (or not) his specific knowledge and methods are

5. How much of our methodology leaves with him and would have to be rebuilt or reimagined

We can speculate all we like, we can claim to talk to friends of friends, we can scrutinise public comments, none of it will actually help us have concrete information to address those issues above. 

At the end of the day, he is obviously very good and very well-thought-of within the industry. And it can't be a good thing for us to have to pivot to a new Sporting Director after only a year or so. But to say it's a crushing blow or to say that Ashworth was worthless are equally knee-jerk reactions that aren't supported by data. We will never truly know those answers, and that's OK. 

The fact remains that we are supremely wealthy as a club and are extremely attractive to prospective employees. I have no doubt that PIF, Staveley, Ghodoussi, and Eales will find a fantastic candidate and we will continue apace. 

And yes, they can either pay £20mm or get fucked. Zero motivation, I'd imagine, for anyone to do Ashworth a solid here. 

With the importance of this role and the sheer amount of proprietary knowledge he would have, I'm not surprised we baked in a massive gardening leave into his contract. Him leaving immediately would damage us greatly in the short term simply from an information standpoint. I'm thrilled to see us taking a hard stance. PIF will have no problem paying him for putting his career on hold if it means keeping our secrets from them until 2026. Money well spent.

More like Dan Ashworthless if you ask me

We didn't crumble in the last 20 minutes because we weren't dog tired from having played 4 matches in 10 days or something crazy.

There's not much more to it than that. If we had a deeper, healthier squad, we would have been seeing this all season. As it stands, once we've been given some time to breathe, we can play this way again.

A rested Howe team is a dangerous Howe team...

Fabulous performance so far. Isak injury puts a big stink on it, though. Just that kind of year, I guess.

Unrecognizable from some of our earlier away performances, THIS is the team that I've used to seeing.

Xabi Alonso is a million fucking miles ahead of Gerrard as a manager. And a billion ahead of Lampard. We can only hope it somehow ends up being Gerrard. It's nailed on to be Alonso and he's a good choice. 

From a brief look around the internet, he jumped into the U18s at age 16, was spending some time in first team training this year, highlights show him to be capable of seeing a nice pass and having enough pace to get into dangerous positions. Definitely looks a player.

I think they're both definitely Men Intensely Loving Football

Irrespective of what happens from here, Trippier's contributions to the club were massively important. His leadership, professionalism, and quality helped us immeasurably when we were seriously facing the prospect of relegation. That should never be forgotten. But if he's sold, this is now a sliding doors moment - and it could go one of two ways:

1. We sell Trippier for a nice fee and use that fee and the room it opens up for us appropriately to continue our rise as a club. Livramento slots right in for Trippier and we don't miss too much of a beat on the pitch. The players at the club understand Trippier's age, our financial situation, and where things are this season, and they react with long-term optimism about the project in spite of the sale. The summer sees us spend lavishly and keep growing.

2. We sell Trippier for a nice fee and the players immediately get upset, thinking that the project is stalling, and the future here isn't as bright as they expected. Other players start to see their heads being turned by offers and they start to doubt whether or not this is the right project for them. The rest of the season dwindles away in a sea of rumour and discontent and the summer is a reclamation project as we have to rebuild not only players but also attitudes. 

I hope it's 1, but there are a lot of people outside the club who would want to see 2. Huge challenge for Howe's leadership and the leadership of our ownership/Ashworth.

I think it's a bit silly to think a club that has spent tens of millions of pounds on infrastructure improvements, facilities improvements, medical staff improvements, and more is going to let the manager decide by himself whether or not a player is fit to play. Howe can no more make that determination by himself than he can buy a player by himself. He's a (very important) member of a staff that values his input but doesn't make their decisions based on him. He will play the players that are deemed fit to play. Questions can be asked about why and how those players are deemed fit to play but he's not dragging out some half-injured man by the scruff of his neck to go run out there for 90 minutes. 

He's already shown over his career that he can adapt. His sides are quite different here than at Bournemouth. They adapted last year and changed the press style and point of attack. I expect that we will adapt a little this season as well, but the truth is that injuries and suspensions have undone us and there's precious little he could do about it. He's the best manager we've had in an age and I can't think of a better one to lead us from here. Patience is difficult but vital.

15 minutes ago, leffe186 said:

That would be the Spurs who lost three players to injury last week - GLC, Davies and Veliz . To add to all the other ones.

 

You’re right, but it’s no guarantee you won’t get injuries. Sometimes the lick just deserts you.

Sometimes you lick the dessert and sometimes the dessert licks you

Just now, Kanji said:

 

Of which, in our case, we had no system in place, no hierarchy, no back office teams, bare bones in every single department, no cohesion whatsoever. 

 

*just wait until the pile-on that it was actually and still actually is Tony Bloom's doing at Brighton. 

Exactly. The man was starting from absolutely square fucking one. We barely had any departments and like fuck did we have a structure or a culture in place. So, yeah, it's going to take time - I'm quite sure the owners are thrilled with what he's been doing.

https://trainingground.guru/articles/dan-ashworth-inside-the-mind-of-a-technical-director

I may have posted this before, but it's worth a re-post given the current discussion. I think if you listen to this you can help to understand what Ashworth's role is and how he envisions a club setup. He likens himself to the hub of a wheel and the spokes are each department - medical, scouting, academy, first team, women's team, business - who all report to him. He then fashions a strategy to maximise all of those areas in keeping with the desires and goals of the owners. 

By all accounts he's a brilliant manager of people and departments, and I think it is to his credit rather than to his detriment that Brighton is continuing so well, that would indicate that the systems he put in place and oversaw are working well even as he himself has departed. I think he's putting all of that into place here and there's a lot more to it than simply the transfer strategy window to window. It seems to me he's putting a much more coherent system in place for the long-term, but that will certainly mean that there are short-term ups and downs.

I would be interested to read the inevitable report that will be commissioned about the relationship between our style of play/training and the injury level. I support Howe completely in the way he leads and the way he represents the club, he seems like a genuinely good person. I also think his style may be leading to our injuries and his loyalty to middling players may be exaggerating our depth issues. 

It's far more complex than a lot of our fans care to admit. But you can hold both of those opinions - that he's a good man and a good manager, and that his style may be problematic for us - at the same time.

We've exhausted the squad. They're spent, mentally and physically. And there's unfortunately no Plan B for how we play, so we're just kind of out there right now. 

Those deficiencies can be papered over at home, when the crowd and the atmosphere can make up for it. But it's all laid bare on the road and I think that's why our away form is what it is. 

Need reinforcements in January.

I'm trying hard not to freak out about how good he already is and how good he could end up being. He looks so calm at all times, picks out great passes and runs, and just looks so much more mature than his age would suggest. 

One thing is clear - Dubravka is not good enough. Absolutely awful performance. 

Look exhausted, more mentally than physically - particularly in attacking positions, just not many ideas.

There was an implicit bargain in the adoption of VAR. It was: you will have to give up some of the spontaneity and joy that football provides, but you will be rewarded with a product that is much more accurately officiated, and some of the injustices of the past will be rectified. It was a sacrifice for what was sold to us as "the greater good".

Obviously VAR has utterly failed to live up to the bargain. And it has robbed us of even more joy, even more of those spontaneous moments that make football what it is. 

The original sin is trying to achieve perfection. Players can never be perfect. Neither can officials. And that is part of the fabric of the game. In every attempt to achieve perfection, it will become more and more obvious that not only is that an impossible goal, but even trying to achieve it will make the game worse. We have to accept that mistakes will happen no matter what. Mistakes pre-VAR at least kept the fabric and flow of the game intact. We have vandalized a beautiful piece of art by incorporating all these breaks and we still have an utterly flawed system. It's scandalous.

The answer is not more technology. It's never more. It's only less. Goal line technology, fine. That's a black and white concept. Use it. Anything else, anything that requires subjectivity, get technology out of the game or you'll only see it damaged further.

The thing that I think makes Eddie Howe a truly world class manager is his unusual (for this level of manager) ability to learn from his own mistakes. He took time after Bournemouth to overhaul his thought process defensively and has now become fantastic at drilling defensive shapes with us. 

For Milan and Dortmund, he didn't want the players to train at the stadium the night before the match, preferring to stay in Newcastle longer. But for this match he took the team over earlier for training and we absolutely looked far more comfortable as a result. 

He modified our pressing structure last year as the season went on, he modified the formation against PSG to operate more flat in a 4-5-1 rather than the 4-3-3, I could go on. 

He's humble and ready to admit when he gets it wrong. I was always told, 'Never waste a failure.' and I think he's a great example of that concept. 

And the players obviously respond to his methods. I cannot ask for more and I cannot imagine a better manager for us in the position we are in.