I read an article earlier interviewing Ruban Dias of Man City. He said he doesn't have a preferred defensive partner as all the squad are trained & embedded with the same thinking & way of playing so the person next to him is just a name & should play pretty much the same way as anyone else would.
Our playing style has been a mess for years. Rafael has done nothing to change this so far. Regardless of which manager we've had it seems impossible to get this squad to do what a manager wants them to do & there is no continuity of play like you get with a Chelsea or a Man City or Liverpool etc. A few players have come in & briefly shone but they too eventually lose thier way & fall in line with the rest of the squad who drag eachother down further & further.
Add in the shockingly poor recruitment by the club which seems to be run by an owner who has zero clue how real recruitment should be done which has completely cut the legs out of our DoF who, like the players has fallen in line & got dragged down too.
Our owners solution has been to get a big name manager in to sort out his mess that he created & every time he does it gets worse & worse because nothing has changed & we are now at a point where he's run out of lives. His money can't get him out of the situation he has created this time.
We have to seek out a manager that is up & coming. Someone from another place outside of the normal pool our owner wants to shop in which seems to be only big name expensive bosses. I want someone who is doing well & has ambitions to want to manage a club like ours similar to when we recruited David Moyes from Preston. We need someone who hasn't been corrupted by massive money & silly agents but is also strong of mind & has a clear idea of what he wants & knows how to implement his ideas. I want someone who is used to nurturing talent who can work with a DoF who has experience recruiting young talent to work in a specific style. It feels like our DoF just does what Moshiri tells him to do. Moshi needs to learn to butt out of literally everything related to anything football. Marcel Brands needs to grow a pair & get on with doing the job he was brought in for with young recruitment. Hopefully they both realise this soon because until they do we will be buggered. Nothing can change until thier mindsets change.
The old guard on & off the pitch are quite frankly cancerous to us now. Thank your for your service but please bugger off & quickly. They are beyond capable of changing thier ways & drag everyone down with them. Players & staff, i can count on one hand the amount of them i think could actually adapt & give a crap & genuinely take on board a new way of thinking & progress. Big dunc please leave, get experience somewhere & if it works out then sure, I'll consider you an option for the future but for now please bugger off.
I refuse to believe that we should choose from Lampard or Rooney etc like others have suggested. There is a whole world out there of untapped talent. Talent that would love to manage us. Let's get someone on the way up instead of on the way down & get the same with the players too.
What scares me is that we have a couple of contracts done at the end of the season & I'm positive that Mosh will demand two big signings that turn out crap again rather than several alternative cheaper signings on lower wages that actually work in a system that everyone understands & plays in. So far, Rafael like all before him have failed to show any sort of system at all. How long does it take to show? It's also not good when your ideas only work with your best players. A good system should work or at least show itself even when your hit with injuries. I can't work out what Rafael has changed other than hold Digne back which isn't working. We still hoof, we still only cross, we still get easily closed down resulting in a Pickford hoof, we can't pass between the lines we don't show for eachother, there's no clever runs, no edge of the box interplay, our positioning is crap etc etc
Sorry for the rants about many things. I could've posted this in many other threads. Like many of us I'm just done with these guys now.