Wandy

If you want any evidence of how on edge they are about our respective futures, then their reaction to Lyon denying the news about the Guimaraes transfer is a perfect summary. Absolutely ecstatic about it.

A trophy-winning NUFC will truly send some of them over the edge completely. Hell, even CL qualification regulars will probably do it.

I think Exile may also have a contender for the title of most bitter SMB on their forum. Step up Mackem2017, who thinks this transfer window of ours has been “legendary”. 
 

Have to say I really will miss the "Mackem Messageboard Gold" thread. The one on here dedicated to our loony neighbours can be quite juicy but never quite reaches the savagery of that one on TT. RiP.

Shame that toontastic has gone. It wasnt very active but I liked the different flavour it had to the other NUFC boards.

Skunkers was fantastic in its heyday but was slowly dying as it had lost some of it's edge before the rug got pulled. Some of the members are still here https://sk0nkers.boards.net/ but its not even remotely as good as skunkers. Walter the Mackem is still there but dont think toontoon migrated over to the place.

Back down to an 8 after being on a 9. Today needs to be season-defining and we need at least 3 top class players before the next match.

Well done Eddie, you really, really needed to win that and you did......

Hopefully a watershed moment and he can kick on from that.

We need 5 players in the door by the next match.

4 minutes ago, Whitley mag said:

It would be hard to argue Howe’s case if Smith gets Norwich out of it and we go down that’s for sure.

 

I wouldn’t be comfortable with sacking Howe before end of the season, but if the above scenario played out it would be hard to argue his case, even more so if he gets heavily backed with signings next week.

If he doesnt start getting results and pronto he's a goner. End of Feb at the latest.

20 minutes ago, GWN said:

 

 I get questioning him, fair enough but to use words like crowd bearing teeth is off the scale and shows little knowledge of football . Utterly ridiculous going on like that .

Dear me. 

Bearing teeth just meant being a bit more critical. Not actually asking for him to be sacked.

26 minutes ago, Geogaddi said:

No wonder the rest of the country think we are deluded morons mind, some on here wanting a manager out after ten games .

Who said anything about wanting him out? He has got to do better, results-wise, that's all.  Playing nice football but getting beat every week is not acceptable. Fulham did that last season and look what happened there.

Just remember that only two weeks ago we had one of the worst results in our history, so the idea that the current manager is blameless is bullshit. He has also had the luxury of the most supportive home crowd for at least 15 years and we have little to show for it. Even Rafa didn't have that luxury and Bruce achieved results against the exact opposite backdrop. The honeymoon is over and it's time that the support showed it's teeth a little more as we are sleepwalking into the Championship. 

27 minutes ago, TRon said:

 

He should have shown more flexibility IMO, and yes results do matter, but long term I think he would be more of an answer than someone like Rafa or Mourinho. Tbh, I'm getting fed up with this harking back to Rafa, he's shown nothing since he left here, he flopped in China, now he's made an even bigger mess at Everton. I really don't want to rag on the bloke, but it's disrespectful to Howe to be talking about him after 11 games. 

Benitez wouldn't be the long-term answer to getting this club back into the top 8 but I think he'd keep this squad up. It wouldn't be sentiment that would have me harking for him to return, but more like pure pragmatism. We absolutely need to stay up this season. I really don't understand the relaxed attitude towards relegation from some quarters. It will be a disaster and nobody can say with certainty what the consequences of it will be.

8 minutes ago, TRon said:

 

Agree. I like him immensely, but you have to make the best of what you've got. I know this squad has serious failings, but I think shoe-horning players into his preferred formations rather than picking one that suits the players he's got has backfired. 

 

Let's see what he can do when he brings in players to do his own style, he's still got 18 games left. It's stay up or bust basically. 

I don't think he has 18 games to be honest. With Benitez now lurking in the background I think he has about 5 games to show that he WILL get us out of this. Not saying that would be the correct thing to do but I just think it will happen. The murmurs in the fanbase have started and if we are still bottom three at the end of Feb then I think there will be a helluva a noise from that same fanbase.

Just now, Manxst said:

Sorry- I thought you said his form last year was due to Bruce’s coaching?

“Its a squad that finished 13th last season under a cretin of a manager. If he could get a tune out of them”

 

And now youre saying he’s been ‘Bruced”? You can’t have it both ways. 
 

I’ll say it again- we only survived last year because of a never to be repeated stroke of luck that Willock hit record breaking goal scoring form. 
 

yes, Howe could improve Willock- he’s probably playing as bad as anyone in the squad at the moment. But he’ll never be a world beater.

No I said he got a tune out of the team. Willock arrived fresh and full of enthusiasm but by the first few games of this season the Bruce coaching effect quickly kicked in. 

Already stated that Willock is no world beater but the current manager should be getting at least some kind of a tune out of him.

My main point in all this is that it's about time proper pressure and expectation was place on Howe's shoulders. He has understandably been given a free ride so far due to that state of the club and playing squad two months ago. But its now time to see if he can deliver at a big, high profile club when the pressure is on.

Just now, Manxst said:

You say Willocks form was down to Bruce last year? So why couldn’t he get a tune out of him at the start of the season again? He’s a bang average player who hit the purplest patch of form his career will ever see. 

Because he got "Bruced". Agree that he's average, but he's also better than what we are seeing now. 

Just now, Manxst said:

Willock had never played as well as that beforehand. And he looks nothing like it since. Either under Bruce (again, this season), or Howe. 

He'd never been given the chance by anyone beforehand. And yeah, we know that Bruce had ran out of ideas to get anything out of this team. But I think Howe should have gotten at least something out of Willock by now.

Just now, Manxst said:

That’s what the league position says, but we all know that the sole reason we survived last year was because of a never to be repeated patch of record goal scoring from Willock. Without that, we’d have been down and out long before with the squad we still have. And that wasn’t down to Bruce. It was simple good luck. 

Who says its never to be repeated? Why can it not be that Howe is not getting the best out Willock at the moment?

Just now, The Prophet said:

 

It can't, but he has been handicapped by more or less a third of a season. Its a massively mitigating factor.

Nah. The season is completely saveable right now with 18 games to go. We are not adrift and our direct rivals are garbage. No excuses.

7 minutes ago, The Prophet said:

 

We shouldn't, but then he did take over a team 11 games into a season who had no fitness and hadn't been coached whatsoever for about three years.

True, but that excuse cannot be used now, 2 months into his tenure.

9 minutes ago, Kid Icarus said:

I think you're kidding yourself there like, it's not only a Championship squad, but a Championship squad that's now 5 years older. Take ASM, Wilson, and Trippier out of the equation and those clubs have better squads, especially Watford.

Its a squad that finished 13th last season under a cretin of a manager. If he could get a tune out of them then Howe should be able to too.

8 minutes ago, MarkyMark said:

If Howe has took us down after having three quarters of a season, I think he’s cooked.  It would mean continuing the same form as the first half of the season - I’d have serious doubts we’d suddenly start winning next season. 

If we go down then he deserves the sack. Quite frankly this team should not be finishing below Norwich, Burnley & Watford, even in it's current state.

We simply must win this game. Got absolutely zero confidence that we will though.

1 hour ago, 1878 said:

Hi all. Long time, no post!

To give an Everton perspective on Benitez - although there are some wider problems with the ownership, it's impossible to overstate what an incredibly bad job Rafa did here and how much damage he's been allowed to cause to the structure of the club in such a short time.

 

Although the fans were against his appointment, he got a very fair crack of the whip once he was actually in the job. The fans being against him was overblown by the media. It's only after a horrendous run of results and performances that the crowd turned on him.

• DOF - instead of trying to work with Marcel Brands, he made it his mission from day one to oust him, starting by cutting him out of all summer recruitment. This culminated in Brands resigning from the board and leaving the club during the season.
   
• Scouting - after ousting Brands, he fired the chief scout and head recruitment person that had been appointed by him. As far as I know, they have not been replaced, with Rafa just doing his own thing in the January window. This means that after sacking Benitez we basically don't have a recruitment department.
   
• Medical - he fired Danny Donachie, the long serving head of medical, who was very popular with the players, citing too many set backs in injury recovery. After appointing his own people, DCL promptly had an injury set back that kept him out for over a month longer and Yerry Mina broke down 15 mins into his first game back. Presumably his medical people will all go with him and we'll have to bring back Donachie et al or hire new staff.
   
• Coaching - for me, the one upside of the appointment was that he had a reputation for being a great coach who had his teams organised, well drilled and disciplined, especially defensively. What we actually got was a complete shambles. The defence has been all over the place from the first game of the season until Saturday's nadir at Norwich. There was never any shape to the team and they regularly looked lost on the pitch.
   
• Tactics - I knew from his time at Liverpool and yourselves that Benitez was quite negative, but he really took it beyond a joke here. I can't think of a single game this season where, no matter how poor the opposition, we didn't start the game by conceding all impetus to them even at home. I think he recently set some sort of record for consecutive games conceding the first goal.
   
• Formations - he often played a negative 5 at the back system, including against lower league opposition in the cup. The main failing however, was a weird insistence on playing a two man central midfield week in, week out, which got overrun by opposition midfield threes every time and lost us game after game. I don't think midfield pairs work generally in football these days, but especially not when Doucoure aside, there's a severe lack of pace available in central midfield (Allan, Davies, Gomes). Him apparently seeing Sean Longstaff as the answer to this was terrifying.
   
• Results - 1 win and 6 points in his last 13 says it all. Ok the squad isn't great, but it's nowhere near 1 in 13 bad. Last season, we finished top half and could still qualify for Europe on the final day. Mike Walker is widely regarded as the worst EFC manager of all time but before his sacking, he managed 1 win and 7 points in 13 games. Benitez also went out of the cup to QPR and suffered the heaviest home derby defeat for 40 years when he played his suicidal midfield two against Liverpool's three. 
   
• Injuries - this was Rafa's constant excuse, and true enough, at one point we had a few key players out at the same time. However, apart from DCL, there were spells were he had pretty much everybody else available and we saw no improvement. The squad was fully fit vs Norwich and he served up the worst result of the season.
   
• Rondon - fair enough, sign him on a free due to limited summer budget/FFP and working with him successfully in the past. But once it became very clear that the guy was overweight, unfit and couldn't run or even win a header anymore, just admit your mistake and drop him. Starting him was literally like playing 10 vs 11 every week. Do not persist with the guy for the entire season to the point where he becomes a lightning rod for fan frustration and starts getting booed onto the pitch by his own supporters.
   
• Youth - the club have got two good young strikers, Lewis Dobbin and Ellis Simms (who impressed on loan at Blackpool last season). He refused to give them a chance ahead of Rondon in DCL's absence until the recent Chelsea game, when he was forced to play them and young centre back Jarrad Branthwaite due to Covid. They all acquitted themselves very well in a battling performance to steal a draw, Branthwaite scoring the winner. They've not had a look in since. Dobbin is out of contract at the end of the season and has a host of clubs after him. Sacking Benitez will hopefully convince him to sign a new deal, because he was a cert to leave otherwise.
   
• Left Back - aside from the well documented petty fallout with Digne, he also sent away our only other recognised left back Niels Nkounkou on loan to Belgium before the season started. This kid looked like a great prospect playing in the cups under Ancelotti last season, especially attacking-wise. With Digne frozen out, we had to play a centre back (Godfrey) and a finished right back (Coleman) out of position. When the January window opened he spent £20m on Mykolenko to replace Digne and in the two games so far vs Hull and Norwich, he looks absolutely miles off being a Premier League level player. A total mess entirely of Benitez's own making.
   
• Right Back - the club have been desperate to replace Coleman for a couple of years and Rafa finally signs a good prospect in Nathan Patterson for £12m this month. Well done! However since then, Coleman and Jonjoe Kenny have started the games and even when dragged off for playing horribly, Benitez still wouldn't put Patterson in, instead moving Godfrey there. Pretty bizarre stuff.
   
• Work Environment - since the sacking, it's been said that the atmosphere at the training ground has been horrendous all season and that the majority of players are relieved to see him go. Notable that only Andros Townsend (who obviously had a pre-existing relationship with him) has made a social media post about Benitez since the news broke.

 

Things I would give him credit for:

 

• Demari Gray - one of the shining lights this season and an absolute bargain at £1.7m. Seems to have unlocked his potential. Struggling to think of anything else positive.

 

In my opinion, Benitez is very much yesterday's man and is finished at the top level. Throw in the fact that he could start a fight in an empty room and no Premier League club should touch him with a barge pole. Eddie Howe has been linked with the Everton job a lot over the years and I've never been keen on him tbh, but I'd have swapped him for Benitez in a heartbeat. I think your fans need to take off the rose tinted specs with Benitez, look at the reality of his performance at Everton (and China before that) and forget about the idea of him coming back to save the day. You're much better off sticking with Howe.

Fair do's. You've convinced me. Howe it is then...till the end of the season anyway.

18 minutes ago, Pilko said:

 

You, along with everyone else, were not saying this when Bruce was in post. It's revisionist twaddle designed to absolve Howe of any responsibility and I don't know why he's getting a completely free ride from so many. He's pissed away points along with the players.

Yep, there is definitely some revisionism going on. People wanted Bruce out because "anyone could get better results with these players". Now that the new guy isnt getting better results its all because the players arent good enough and "Pep/Klopp couldn't do better" with them. It's bullshit. Howe got the job based on him saying in the interview that the team wasnt performing to the best of their ability and he could rectify that. So far that hasnt happened. And I doubt he just meant that he could just get them playing better but with similar results.

10 minutes ago, Colos Short and Curlies said:

I think its now or never for Rafa to come back.

 

We know he was definitely AS's first choice and that the consortium made tentative approaches before appointing Howe so there remained an ambition for Rafa to spearhead the revolution 4 months ago.

 

So the question for them to now ask and answer is 2 fold - firstly if we are in the Championship next year who is in the dug out and then secondly do they have more faith in Howe or Rafa to make that question redundant.

 

If the answer to the second is Rafa then they need a real long hard look into question 1.

 

There is no value in keeping Howe if Rafa is the choice when it goes wrong and I doubt the consortium will be anything other than cool and collected in making the call either way

I reckon that Howe has the next 5 matches to show he is going to get us out of this mess or he's a goner.

36 minutes ago, Tomato Deuce said:

I don’t believe there’s a single manager we could realistically hire at this point who’d be better positioned to keep up this squad than Howe. Anyone we get in would be starting from square one AGAIN, albeit with the same squad; it’s not plug-n-play. We’ve committed to Howe to let him implement his system come hell or high water. It’ll either come off this season and we’ll stay up, or he’ll be revamping the squad next season in the Championship.
 

Y’all are kidding yourselves if you think Howe was hired as a mercenary manager with the sole mandate to keep the squad in the Premier League. He’s quite clearly someone PIF is investing in with a view to the bigger picture. *Even if that means we’re going down with him.*
 

And it has nothing to do with loyalty to Howe. He’s working with Bruce’s broken squad, trying to get them playing actual football instead of “hoof it up field and run around a bit, lads.” I’m not saying results haven’t been disappointing and we’re not in need of significant investment. 

There's not a chance that PIF hired Howe in the belief that we might be relegated this season and therefore he'd be the man for the next 3 years regardless. If we go down then he has failed and should be sacked. I'm near certain that PIF will take this view too, otherwise losing will be being rewarded. That's not how a successful, winning organisation operates.