TheBrownBottle

I agree, they do - but that doesn’t mean mistakes won’t be made. I think they have here - and in isolation, that’s ok (well, you don’t want to make mistakes, but not every transfer will be a hit). The problem is that not one of last summer’s signings look to have improved us. Elanga’s signing is probably the most damning of all, as the fact that he is at his best just a pacy winger is suggestive of a manager who wasn’t looking to evolve the team’s style at all - he was ‘more of the same’. There’s no transition - just bad signings. I’m not sure where the lad goes from here - no-one will be queuing for him, that’s for sure. I think he’ll be here next season if Howe is - I think Woltemade is the most likely of the summer signings to go, then Wissa if someone can be mugged for him. But the player Elanga reminds me of more than anyone is Obertan - there is zero footballing intelligence rattling around there. Maybe Howe will eventually get something resembling a tune from him - but he’ll never be close to worth what we’ve wasted on him.

Pro rata he definitely has - with the proviso he was starting from a higher base, of course (before the inevitable comment re this)

Absolutely - Arteta can be used to justify picking your man and backing him, and also to justify the idea that ‘who can you name who could do the job’ doesn’t hold water because it’s possible to appoint the right man from nowhere.

The top manager in the league had zero experience before taking his current role; which suggests that the idea that these head coaches are irreplaceable because there’s no-one out there might be overstating things

Yes

John Cleese in real life is now getting just as angry about things even less important than parsing Latin correctly. But that’s one for the politics threads.

It’s almost right - it would be imitatus fui. It is the first person singular perfect active indicative of sum you’d need to use. Knew I was doing ancient history for a reason - who ever said distance learning was pointless?

100%. Our bridge as well. If only there was a good Latin translation of ‘Ctrl+P’ and they could have it as their motto

Feels very Spurs-y

Savinho surely should’ve had his valuation reassessed due to it being a RPT?

He could be here for 10 more years, he could be here for 10 more matches. It’s folly in the modern game to hang everything around a head coach - this is part of why last summer’s window was a complete disaster. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to who we were signing - and a manager is likely to think short-term. The worry - as others have stated - is that we’ve appointed a mediocre ‘yes man’ into the DoF role. Howe’s managed to get far too much power, in no small part due to an absentee ownership.

This is how their season review VHS looked after what is still their best season in 70 years: They’ve no clue how pathetic they are.

Well that rules them out then

Take the transfer fee away - if we’d promoted him from the youth team and he’d produced 0 goals and 1 assists from 25 PL appearances we’d be asking what the fuck Howe was playing at, the lad isn’t good enough - perhaps we’d talk about a loan period if he was a kid, but if the player was 24 next month we’d say it’s obvious he hasn’t made it and we should be releasing him in the summer.

I’d say they do, but I’m reliably informed that we’ve been shite not because of any fault of the manager, but because we’ve played more games than everyone else. But if those games are glorified exhibition matches, there’s no problem.

I’ve always found it interesting that Thiaw is agreed to be a massive super duper success despite the fact that we now ship two or three goals in pretty much every home match and don’t look to have any more steel away from home. I’ve seen before on other threads that we can use a calendar year as an assessable metric - so here’s one - if the average goals conceded in league matches this year was replicated over a season, we’d ship 72 goals. Our defence looks frail and completely unorganised. The entire side is not functioning at present.

The Qarabag games are the extra games we’ve played compared to everyone else. So we should be fine, then. Apparently playing a close to first XI in the early round of the LC had no impact either. Either the extra games matter or they don’t.

That’s a view that is absolutely setting up for failure

Both those clubs and their support bases are utterly fucking wretched tbh. Bunch of cunts living in the late C17th.

We shouldn’t sack him on the basis that we’ve got plenty of proof that he is capable of turning all this around, but I can’t agree that no-one except Howe would have this squad higher than 13th at the moment.

I reckon there are other managers out there who could’ve done better than Howe this season with this squad.

That 5% ST rise would be less than a competent commercial team could’ve got for a training ground & kit sponsor

Given our commercials were lower in 2021 than they were in 2008 (not even factoring inflation), is that down to the genius of those running the show, or simply the kind of correction that all of us who wanted shot of Ashley absolutely anticipated? We are where I’d expect us to be. We’re not on commercial boosters.

Having seen the club sack Dalglish, Gullit (he walked before he was pushed, granted) and Robson a few games into a season I can confirm that there are definitely good and bad times to get rid of a manager regardless

It’s why European teams tended to play weak teams in the LC until the later rounds - if you get there, it’s all-out to win a trophy. But you don’t throw everything at it when you’ve got a bunch of additional matches until January. I’ll never advocate playing weak teams in the FA Cup, but the League Cup should be an obvious one when you’re in Europe.