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2021/22 Rafael Benitez

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Bluebonic said:
I agree that in the main his influence has been positive, he got them fighting and refusing to lie down and die if we went a goal behind. I am definitely one of the haters, however Dave, his obstinance will be his undoing. Unless he was i jured, taking Gordon off was a very poor decision. playing with Rondon is like playing with ten men at present. To take off Gordon who was working hard instead of taking off Rondon was a critical error, compounded by the introduction of Iwobi. That effectively reduced us to nine men and with Allan flagging, Davies being Davies, our midfield crumbled. I personally doubt even the inclusion of Mina would have plugged the breach in the wall after that?

hopefully next game he starts with Richy instead of Rondon and Gordon comes back in.
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I agree Benitez lost the plot on subs the other day. But Mina prevents that 12 minute collapse. I have no doubt about that. The set pieces especially dont happen for Watford. And Mina against WHU would have stopped them bagging the points from two aerial errors one after the other.

He's been a massive miss.
 
davek said:
I agree Benitez lost the plot on subs the other day. But Mina prevents that 12 minute collapse. I have no doubt about that. The set pieces especially dont happen for Watford. And Mina against WHU would have stopped them bagging the points from two aerial errors one after the other.

He's been a massive miss.
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He is a massive miss but Mina couldn't stop us having a similar brain fart of a collapse against villa when he was playing - it's more of an issue than just one player.

Truth is that there are so many players just not up to the job in the squad - to rectify it will take years.
 
davek said:
If you were told at the start of the season that a manager we had was handed less than £2M to spend in the summer, lost a first team player because of extra-football matters, and then was forced to field teams without our first choice strike partnership for over half the season so far, you'd have been amazed if someone told you that he'd got the team to 8th in the table.

You know you would.
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Correct. There needs to be some realism. Unfortunately, modern football doesn't have it. It's nonstop drama. A team wins, they could get Europe. A team loses, should the manager be sacked?

I was dead against Rafael. 100% but the points you make are the ones I've repeated often too. Any team would struggle too. The West Ham game, I wasn't even angry. They're a good team who scored from a set piece. We had too many key players missing. The Watford game is a different matter. But it doesn't sit 100% with the manager. He played his part, but those players are a total disgrace. It's time that fans started pointing fingers at the real culprits.

That game, it wasn't Moshiri, it wasn't Bill, it wasn't Brands, it wasn't Rafael who let 4 goals in, in 11 minutes. It was that spineless, gutless group of players. I've never felt so disconnected to a group of players before.
 

Egil Olsen said:
It's not normal for us to win at anfield either, but last year we did. Still, when we counted the points after 38 games, the position was quite normal. People have a cognitive bias to put too much into individual matches / events, and usually let it override rational arguments.
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That's true. If it is a one off. We'll see over the next few games. If it happens on more than one occasion it is worrying, if it happens several times it is a pattern. At that point 59 points will seem a long way off, and I don't care what anybody says about points versus positions, if we finish on 49 points and finish 12th, for example, it will be very different from finishing 10th on 59 points as it will point towards a downward trajectory. Without wholesale changes at this club we will be in trouble sooner or later. Has a club ever spent so much money to get sustainably worse. Leeds spent a ton of money and got relegated but they at least got better for a while first.
 

We've won one in six games from hardly the hardest run.

The footy is crap and we can't defend set-pieces.

So it's absolutely fine that he's coming under criticism. Regardless of all the off-field issues, which aren't on him, we should be winning more than one game against Villa, QPR, Norwich, Man Utd, West Ham and Watford, with three of those games being at home.

That doesn't mean he should be sacked.
 
davek said:
If you were told at the start of the season that a manager we had was handed less than £2M to spend in the summer, lost a first team player because of extra-football matters, and then was forced to field teams without our first choice strike partnership for over half the season so far, you'd have been amazed if someone told you that he'd got the team to 8th in the table.

You know you would.
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He had a good start to the season, almost everyone acknowledged that, but the last two performances were insipid and we are now entering a very tricky run of games. You can talk about injuries and the mentality of the squad until the cows come home but the basic fact is we were leading the game on Saturday with 12 minutes to go with all of those problems and threw it all away, at least in part, because of some bizarre decisions by the manager. If he is to be credited for the start of the season he can't be completely absolved from criticism for the last two games. That would be irrational.
 
Time has passed since Saturday. Benitez made daft choices with substitutions and persistence with Rondon are bad, bad mistakes that he is responsible for.

I don't blame him for the long term and oft-seen mental weakness of the team when things go against them. I don't blame him for the paucity of quality players after the first 11 which means injury or suspension = no expectations of points except against the very worst of the worst. These he needs a lot of time to have a chance of reversing. I blame Brands and the boardroom bozos far more and these I am reserving my ire for right now.

Add into this, his inherent rs baggage and here we are, were a lot of us would have predicted with him. A godawful 5 goals conceded against Watford apart, who would have bet against key players being out, yet another season fading away and a toxic swell against him all before Christmas (let alone Halloween!)?

Zonal marking has to go. Rondon has to sit on the (reinforced) bench and get on anyone with speed, mobility and willingness to work their backside off up front.

Then in January and next summer, some serious attempt to strengthen the team. Along side this, trying to get some of the youngsters into the first team squad who even if not the right quality, know the system and add energy so slugs like Gomes and the Un-nameable don't slow us down to a stand still.
 
steven said:
He is a massive miss but Mina couldn't stop us having a similar brain fart of a collapse against villa when he was playing - it's more of an issue than just one player.

Truth is that there are so many players just not up to the job in the squad - to rectify it will take years.
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Supposedly if Mina had been playing against West Ham and Watford they wouldn't have walked away with the 6 pts. lol
 

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