St. Maximin

As far as the draws are concerned though, he was lucky surely? I know stats don’t lie and I also don’t want to compare his managerial ability to Steve Bruce, but surely we think his comfortable mid table finishes (in my view on paper high for our squad) didn’t paint a full picture? Southgate’s victories in big tournaments are beating okay Colombia (on penalties, albeit a great moment for English football) and Sweden sides in 2018 and Germany, Ukraine and Denmark (on paper the hardest two of which were at Wembley) in ‘2020’. Hardly extraordinary achievements and failure to win any of those would have been seen as a major disappointment.

There’s an element of truth in this from the media as a whole and also I don’t like Jordan, but in this case I’m not sure he’s said an awful lot wrong, apart from maybe being a bit harsh about the Newcastle football. Rafa I’m sure often is a nightmare to work with. Somewhat ironically, therefore, having Ashley as his owner helped him as the fans would side with him. Elsewhere, maybe not so much and he should accept that and take responsibility for his mistakes.

Hmmm I’ve seen them described as ‘glorified friendlies’, which I kind of get, but how are they less relevant than friendlies? Besides, the argument that us caring about these defeats is similar to us caring about a preseason defeat is simply not true. Even if you leave aside the fact these are still competitive to some extent, there’s a World Cup coming up and now’s a time to get the team prepared. It’s a short tournament with minimal opportunities to lose games, so I can’t see the comparison between these matches and club preseason.

It really isn’t at all.

I don’t like this idea Southgate fluked his way through major tournaments, but you can’t mention his record without acknowledging the opposition. We clearly did get favourable runs in both 2018 and 2020 and every win we had you’d expect on paper, especially as we were virtually the home team in the Euros. Losing to Croatia in 2018 I’m not too disappointed by as they had an insanely good midfield, but that 2020 final at Wembley was really disappointing and Southgate should rightly get criticism for that. Also for balance I really like what he’s done for the team off the pitch if nothing else - it’s pretty clear he’s had a lot of positive influences on the squad and the fans and their value can’t be underestimated for big tournaments. I just think tactically he’s really poor and as such he’s got a ceiling and won’t take us further. However, I would happily be proven wrong and hope we’ve lowered expectations so much, that it might help the team somehow go on and win the World Cup…

Disgraceful if true - nobody should be getting a selfie with Steve Bruce.

It wouldn’t surprise me but there’s no actual reports of him going away surely?

Not assuming you would mate . He isn't popular here though. Speaking to Everton fans I play cricket with though, they seemed happy enough with how the team had performed since he came in and that he'd need longer to be judged. Perhaps not a new manager bounce, but the performances improved and they picked up form towards the end that kept them safe.

Maybe so, but I doubt he also planned Brighton to get complacent after gaining promotion and Grealish to score a late equaliser. We won the league fair and square, so he has to get credit for that, but it wasn't a smooth ride.

Not saying these things don't have an impact, but the reality is clearly far less black and white then one manager gaining full support and the other not. The general trend with football fans remains the same across the club - they will turn on you when you've annoyed them.

It wasn't cleat you weren't referring to Everton, but if you read his post again it's very reasonable. It is absolutely fair to acknowledge the downsides to his approach (we failed to get a shot on target at home to relegated Fulham for example) even if you're going to praise his overall work. We criticise our best players regularly, so fair enough for managers too.

This has been mentioned before but it's a very unfair comparison. Lampard took over a shambles of a team midway through the season, whereas Rafa took over a team at the start of the season that finished midtable the year before. I know people here want to see Lampard fail because he isn't Rafa/left-wing, but it's fair to say he did a better job than Rafa given the context. Time will tell whether he'll do a decent job overall.

How is that cherry picked nonsense? I don’t get all the bias towards Rafa here - at times it’s like he’s beyond criticism. The fact he did really well here doesn’t mean criticism wasn’t warranted when he was here, let alone elsewhere, but either way it’s pretty clear from speaking to Everton fans that watched his team a lot more than us that he was a disaster. Just because things worked out over time here doesn’t mean they would have at Everton. He’d clearly been making mistakes and likely his decisions off the field were contributing to poor form that just got worse and worse until the point sacking seemed the only logical answer if they were to stay up. It’s not like his style was just taking a while to implement.

Also bringing in the Liverpool connection into it is a Steve Bruce move. Come on Rafa, you’re better than that.

Agreeing with you here. I’m fact I’d say very good job overall - you can’t really knock his achievements, but neither was it a smooth ride any of the seasons and we had to make do with very frustrating performances that wouldn’t look out of place with some of our far less popular managers. I think it’s fair to say he did both a great job here and a terrible job at Everton. His style won’t be effective everywhere and he has to accept sticking with the same approach (on and off the field) won’t always work and he should accept the blame for that. Won’t be the first or last successful manager to get it wrong somewhere. However, I would say his track record from the last 15 years or so doesn’t shout world-class - the game has progressed and his limitations have become more apparent now. For not just his management but how he conducted himself and engaged with the fans, he can stay a legend here though and that’s what matters.

I heard it was ‘Freeman’s on fire’ first, which seems reasonable given the lyrics. Mitro definitely came before Grigg though - some Wigan fan made a video as he was leading them to the Championship and then the Euros were round the corner, so the NI fans then adopted it.

Yeah he comes across a bit cocky at times, but always felt he speaks very well in interviews and seems to have a great attitude. 2022 stats terrific also - Southgate just has his favourites as can barely see any reason why he’s persisting with Mount over Maddison, or at least not alongside. See you in Newcastle in January James. Also Shreeves is such a melt.

We won our last two matches there.

Such a weird thing to say if I’ve understood right. Terrible defending, but errors can’t be fixed. Guess they noticeably declined by magic when Howe had been here a couple of months.

He’s only been there 7 months to be fair. Give it another 11 months and he’ll have completely undone the previous manager’s work, then the gloves can come off.

Obviously from a perspective of mourning the cancellations don’t make sense and are unfair on a lot of the public, but are concerns over policing quietly one of the reasons? If there will be major crowds in London and a higher terrorism risk, they might be taking police away. They wouldn’t admit that if so though.

Bit sad about this even though he was t going to feature this season. He was excellent for us and seemed like a great bloke too. Good luck Fede lad.

I know. That isn’t my point. I’m saying it was at best marginally on, but far too close to tell with the naked eye and if video technology can’t correct it then we have no reason to overturn the original decision. If VAR instead overturned a goal I’d be annoyed, but in this case it’s the fault of the linesman and rules that don’t allow for any leeway, which is a VAR-related issue I admit.

Yeah it wasn’t clearly offside, but in these situations if there’s doubt (and there was) then surely you go with the original decision. Otherwise it really undermines the linesman and highlights their mistakes even more. I’m not anti-VAR but in an ideal world it shouldn’t be used for marginal errors like these. However, in this case I do think it was applied correctly given the current rules and limitations of it.

Maybe not, but then that’s the linesman at fault and not really something VAR should be blamed for. VAR’s lines may not be accurate to the millimetre, but it’s marginal either way and can’t clearly show the linesman was wrong.