The point that he had players running around and fighting for every ball; this did not happen in his first 2 seasons in charge. It took him a good 4/5 years to embed this and get his players to buy into his philosophy.
We finished 7th in his first season so I’m not sure you could argue that our very limited squad didn’t overperform that year. We had more or less no flair whatsoever, Rooney aside, we were a basic functional team. We definitely wouldn’t have carried wastemen like Gomes and Sigurdsson and got the same results.