TheBrownBottle

But it isn’t. Howe assembled an expensive squad and then - once again - completely and utterly failed at squad management. He didn’t rotate when he should have. And if he did want to prioritise that boring, bloated league phase of the CL then he should’ve been fielding reserves in the LC while we were in it. The whole ‘fatigue because of fixtures’ holds a lot more water if we didn’t look just as shit in August and September. The line then was ‘Howe’s teams click, they need time’.

Completely agree - and if anything, Isak was papering over the cracks.

If the implication is Robson shouldn’t have been sacked when he was - you’re right; he should’ve been sacked earlier.

In all honesty if Howe was serious about doing better he’d have sacked off a chunk of his coaching staff and his permatanned bestie and got fresh coaches with fresh ideas. Every top manager I can think of in the modern era has done this.

Yep. It’s not even an argument in favour of squad size, but about coaching technique.

I’m struggling to picture telling the Liverpool board that results will pick up once he’s got time on the training ground by being out of European competitions being a winning argument. Could be wrong, like.

We’ve got the same master negotiating skills as Howard Wilkinson when he rang Alex Ferguson to buy Denis Irwin and ended up selling Eric Cantona for a million quid

43 goals conceded since New Years’ Day. It’s an unbelievably shit defensive record - which Howe acknowledged. It’s about 1.9 goals conceded per game.

If the club was strong enough to tell him to focus on coaching the first team - and also that a change of style is absolutely required (I don’t think a 4-3-3 pressing system is the future) then all good. I don’t see those characters at the club atm - and I’m not sure Howe would carry on under those circumstances, either.

Isak was a club / board problem, not a Howe problem. I think it is a problem though if a football man like Howe has a scattergun approach to his replacement, especially if he’s not willing to change the system or approach to accommodate his replacement.

I’m not against this as an outcome tbh

Yeah, completely agree - this is one of those areas where the club utterly failed Howe

I wouldn’t rank most of them above Howe - but I also don’t know what they’ve have achieved if they’d been able to spend three quarters of a billion in the transfer market, either. It isn’t that I think that they’re better than Howe - but I do think it lays out that in the modern game the role has fundamentally changed. A decade ago you could pretty much write a list of ten managers who’d get a job at a PL club regardless of how many failures were on their CV. These days, clubs are very much set up in a different way - as we should be, but aren’t (mostly a failure of the owners, with some of it on Howe). Interesting re Hopkinson - I don’t doubt at all exactly what you’ve said, and if he’d replaced Silverstone I’d have a very positive view tbh. But running a football club? There’s bot all on his CV to suggest he can.

Because we weren’t ever likely to sign them given who was in for them. How much time did we waste on Sesko for example, despite knowing full well what his and his agent’s feelings were? Pedro was linked with Chelsea for yonks. Also, Ekitike, Sesko and Pedro had been linked with us for years - it ties back to a concern re there being a very small list of targets during that period and very little real scouting work done afterwards. If you played the window out again, you would probably be best to sell Isak to Liverpool quickly and go in for Ekitike (and I absolutely blame the club not Howe for the Isak situation - from his contract to faffing about in the summer).

I didn’t think he was bad in a standout way - but that’s probably more damning it his teammates than owt else

I honestly never understand the ‘he wasn’t first choice’ patter. Targeting players who go to bigger clubs isn’t good scouting or management - it’s the opposite. It’s also a piece of piss given that everyone in football knew that the big boys were interested in them. Woltemade was an extraordinarily poor signing, given Howe’s lack of flexibility to his approach. He can’t have been blindsided - all these guys do is live and breathe football and are paid handsomely to do so. He should’ve been able to see Woltemade’s unsuitability to the system by watching a single match.

Agreed, but it’s a much stronger point if we didn’t have three strikers in the squad - all signed by Howe - at a collective cost of about £140m

I do think that those of us of an older vintage have seen this all play out more than once before - for me, the Ashley era was a ‘blip’, not the norm. NUFC has always been a club where once shit summer can just push the brakes on huge progress - ‘97, ‘03, ‘12 and now ‘25.

Other than an eight game injury-ravaged spell we were never as consistently poor as we’ve been this season - and one of the excuses given is that he’d ’learn from it’. I see no evidence of much learning having happened.

I haven’t either tbh - but I also don’t think it needs to be a ‘name’. I hadn’t really heard of Silva, Iraola, Farke, Glasner, Slot, Le Bris, Hurzeler, Andrews, Edwards, Pereira, or Nuno before either their current role or before coming to England. This is why I’m not onboard with the ‘name someone who could do better’ crack I’ve seen (which I know you’re not suggesting). My biggest concern is that I’m not particularly convinced by either the DoF nor the CEO, and I’m not sure they’d be looking for the right type of coach. The structure at the club is all wrong, and unfortunately one of the reasons I’m not convinced by Howe is that he’s actively pushed it in this direction - which by many accounts was also the case at Bournemouth.

no, definitely not - I just hadn’t realised that we had a midfielder as top league scorer this season. I can’t remember that happening since 97/98 - but it probably has. Howe sits just below KK and above SBR for me as our best manager in my lifetime - Dalglish is firmly nowhere near that.

It’s still up there with my least favourite seasons, and we reached the cup final and beat Barca in the CL.

I can remember what KK looked like after we blew the title - the man seemed to age rapidly in six months. I’d hope no-one on here has anything but respect for Howe and his achievements at the club - but what’s happening at the moment isn’t good for the club and likely not healthy for the man. I think time is probably just about up, but that doesn’t change my view that the man has written himself into folklore and should have a statue at SJP.

I didn’t know that. Fuck. Feels very ‘John Barnes as top scorer’ territory. We were shit and had a cup run that year too.

He does sound like someone apologising to the wife after pissing the bed again after yet another night on the terps, having told her he wouldn’t do it again