Managers. Are they really that important?

[No2]

Haha! Sometimes? He's a prize cunt and unpopular for a very good reason.

 

As to your last point, "improve the team", well, maybe this is where I am really coming from. I don't want to "improve" the team. I want to win the title.

 

And unless we get a Mourinho in - and even if we did - we need money, LOTS of money to do so.

 

Because managers don't make that much difference anymore. Money does.

 

So if we can't get FSG to plough enough in - and all suggestions are that they won't - we are going to be battling it out for between 7th and 5th place - a lucky fourth MAYBE - for the foreseeable future.

 

And that's not good enough.

 

"Improve"? No. Losers improve and use that kind of language.

 

I want to win.

 

And we are so far away

 

I agree we're miles away from winning the league but not so far from coming 4th. Our shitness this season has masked the shitness of Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs, their fans will be on their forums contemplating mass suicide too, UTD fans have reason to be concerned too. IMO we really aren't that far behind them, they're shit too. If RVP goes to City then that sends City further down the road but brings Arsenal right back into the pack with Spurs and ourselves for 1 spot, when the dust settles and sun comes out we'll be able to look at this from a more positive point of view.

 

We all want to win the league but to get there we need a manager who can get us 4th first. If we can build towards 4th then CL money leads to 3rd/2nd/1st, there is no other way. You started with a big long post about managers when basically you should've said "I want Arab owners and I want them now", that's a depressing state of mind have.

[Dr. J]

A good manager is someone who gets the absolute most out of his players, If he does that, his position in the league will depend on the quality of his players. If he gets to decide what players to buy/sell, promote/discard, all the better.

 

Did Kenny get the most out this lot?

[silverlining]

A good manager is someone who gets the absolute most out of his players, If he does that, his position in the league will depend on the quality of his players. If he gets to decide what players to buy/sell, promote/discard, all the better.

 

Did Kenny get the most out this lot?

 

No. But I don't think this squad has enough to get into the Top 4, either. It's not like if we'd had a better manager than Kenny we would have challenged for the title.

 

He has underperformed this season, but not even a Mourinho would have improved us that much.

[Kennys_spell]

Very interesting piece that mate - but fuck that. If we didn't have a manager who would I blame? Who could I say that I have better football knowledge than and show everyone on the football forums!

 

The number of posts on this board and every other football fan forum would decrease by 90%

[dirk grout]

No. But I don't think this squad has enough to get into the Top 4, either. It's not like if we'd had a better manager than Kenny we would have challenged for the title.

 

He has underperformed this season, but not even a Mourinho would have improved us that much.

 

That statement is completely false. We would have a shitload more points if Mourinho was in charge of our team this season. Obviously.

[Dr. J]

I agree - never rated us higher than 6th this season. Football's a laugh sometimes. Where would Arsenal be if porcelain Van Persie had been out his customary 20 games? Or if Newcastle hadn't had the season to end all?

[silverlining]

That statement is completely false. We would have a shitload more points if Mourinho was in charge of our team this season. Obviously.

 

Yes, more points undoubtedly. But I wonder how many more. I don't think we'd have been challenging the two Mancs for the title.

[Magic Sponge]

If my Auntie had bollocks, she'd be my Uncle.

[TheHowieLama]

That statement is completely false. We would have a shitload more points if Mourinho was in charge of our team this season. Obviously.

 

We would? A shitload?

 

The only we way we would have a shitload more points is if we had scored a shitload more goals.

[Captain]

I think the manager is the single most important man at the club. He decides which players stay and which go, and who to bring in.

 

If you're unable to sign enough top players, you'll never win the league. No manager, not even Mourinho or Mr. Ferguson, could win the league with the dross we've brought in lately.

 

So yeah, it's massively important to have the right manager.

 

As for whether they stay long or not, that's a different debate. But when you have results like Mr. Ferguson, it sorts itself out.

[dirk grout]

Yes, more points undoubtedly. But I wonder how many more. I don't think we'd have been challenging the two Mancs for the title.

 

Perhaps not but we would have certainly been above newcastle. Did anyboday actually watch villa play last season? Downing was their player of the season, and young played well enough to secure a move to the mancs. Downing has not even been half the player for us that he was for them. In fact, every time I saw him play for England under capello he always looked good. Kenny is not getting the best out of him. The manager is the most important person at the football club. By far. Our players our far better than our results suggest. Our pathetic showing for the first hour in the cup final was, unfortunately, down to poor decisions from the manager.

[No2]

That statement is completely false. We would have a shitload more points if Mourinho was in charge of our team this season. Obviously.

 

I hate that cunt with a passion but I've never seen him field a side that didn't try. Not a comment you could make about our team this season.

[fowler9]

Yes, more points undoubtedly. But I wonder how many more. I don't think we'd have been challenging the two Mancs for the title.

 

we wouldnt but perhaps someone else could've won us those daft games at the beginning of the season which we should've done which in turn would have had a big effect as it seems we've only been majorly shit since it became obvious top 4 was out of the equation

[xerxes]

But that's the point. Below your "guaranteed success" managers, any appointment is a huge, huge risk, and in many cases we attribute too much importance to that appointment anyway.

 

I think we need to stop using words like "project" and "long-term" too. It's wishful-thinking and I think our perspective of what the words mean will differ radically from FSG's. I wonder if their's even has anything about football in it. Apart from "Champions League".

 

You and I will both be gravely concerned that we agree.

[piscinin]

Perhaps not but we would have certainly been above newcastle. Did anyboday actually watch villa play last season? Downing was their player of the season, and young played well enough to secure a move to the mancs. Downing has not even been half the player for us that he was for them. In fact, every time I saw him play for England under capello he always looked good. Kenny is not getting the best out of him. The manager is the most important person at the football club. By far. Our players our far better than our results suggest. Our pathetic showing for the first hour in the cup final was, unfortunately, down to poor decisions from the manager.

 

Wow. I'd forgotten about that. I saw him only once or twice admittedly but you're right he was great.

[xerxes]

Alan Pardew is strange one, after he got sacked from Southampton in strange circumstances he spent his time in Germany "retraining" himself. Normally I'd lump Pardew into the category with Phil Brown, Paul Jewell and Steve Bruce, but seeing as he made the effort to engage his brain elsewhere I think he deserves some credit. He has certainly been impressive (although sometimes coming across as a smug cunt) in how he has handled himself this season, could be one to watch.

 

I think that Pardew is a good example that managers can learn.

 

He was brilliant at Reading, yet at West Ham rarely played two world class players in Masch and Tevez. Charlton were in a downward spiral, and all things considered he did pretty well at Southampton.

 

The upshot was a manager who knew the top thee tiers of football really well and took the time and trouble to expand his European knowledge by spending some time with the ultra efficient Germans ( a stereotype which is true and a compliment).

 

In retrospect if you want a manager who is going to have to duck and dive in the lower league and Euro transfer market, but who knows what success looks like, as well as failure, you can see where the seeds of his success were sown. No guarantee of course, but at least you can see the thought process in the appointment.

[dirk grout]

Wow. I'd forgotten about that. I saw him only once or twice admittedly but you're right he was great.

 

The Wales game at Wembley were he was man of the match and completely destroyed the swansea left back stands out, yet when swansea come to anfield, and up against the same player, he does fuck all and dyer, a player nowhere near the england squad, is the best player on the pitch. It makes no sense.

[TheHowieLama]

we wouldnt but perhaps someone else could've won us those daft games at the beginning of the season which we should've done

 

do you mean the stoke/spurs debacle? Didn't we win near half our season total by end of November - and beat Arsenal, and Chelsea in a cup by then?

[Jonny83]

Haha! Sometimes? He's a prize cunt and unpopular for a very good reason.

 

As to your last point, "improve the team", well, maybe this is where I am really coming from. I don't want to "improve" the team. I want to win the title.

 

And unless we get a Mourinho in - and even if we did - we need money, LOTS of money to do so.

 

Because managers don't make that much difference anymore. Money does.

 

So if we can't get FSG to plough enough in - and all suggestions are that they won't - we are going to be battling it out for between 7th and 5th place - a lucky fourth MAYBE - for the foreseeable future.

 

And that's not good enough.

 

"Improve"? No. Losers improve and use that kind of language.

 

I want to win.

 

And we are so far away

 

The key for me isn't improvement, but sustained improvement (and relative to the opposition). If you keep improving in this way for long enough, then you will end up winning. For instance the problem wasn't that Houllier and Rafa "only" got us to 2nd place, that was great in the context of the seasons that preceded them, the problem was failing to kick on further the following year.

 

Even Man City with all their money went something like 10th, 5th, 3rd, to be followed by 1st or 2nd this year.

 

We won't go from 8th/9th/10th this year to winning it next year, but we need to start taking steps in that direction, it's just being realistic, and not in a defeatist way, its possible to be both ambitious and realistic at the same time. And it's not even about fixed "5 year plans" or whatever, it could take 3 years or it could take 10.

[fowler9]

do you mean the stoke/spurs debacle? Didn't we win near half our season total by end of November - and beat Arsenal, and Chelsea in a cup by then?

 

I mean games like Sunderland, Swansea, Norwich, Man Utd and Man City at home of the top of my head where we've just not been able to break through and get the winner, whilst I like Kenny's style of play at times like these we've needed to be far more effective on the attack and just go for it instead of walking it in all the time

[The Dude Abides]

Doesn't matter a shit what the manager thinks when the player has decided he wants to go to another club. But don't let that get in the way of things eh?

 

Lies.

[G Richards]

The manager can't put the ball in the net himself (though to be fair, Kenny probably could!) But the manager can sign good players and get value for money; the manager can determine the tactics to help win the game; the manager can send out a balanced team so each part has a chance to show what it can do; the manager can make substitutes at telling moments to influence the game and the manager can make sure the team is fired up and ready to run through a brick wall for the cause.

 

If the manager does all of these things - and they are all within his grasp - then he will have a good season, and by extension so will his players and the club as a whole.

 

Money does of course come into it, as if you have unlimited funds it makes your mistakes largely irrelevant, whereas when our manager makes mistakes it really matters. So a manager with less money has to get it right more often than not. It's not a level playing field, but such is the impact of a big disparity in funding.

 

I would suggest that Kenny fell short this season and is, most likely, on thin ice with the owners. However I would like to see him backed in the summer and given another season to put it right. I don't think the team is quite as bad as it has appeared for much of this season, and I hope there is more to come from Kenny as manager.

[Jose Jones]

A very good OP, Silverlining.

 

Managers are vital – the trick is matching the right skill set to the right opportunity.

 

Almost without exception, successful managerial appointments are also more about the skill and judgement in assessing what a manager might do next, rather than judging retrospectively on what managers have done already (Ferguson, Wenger, Dalglish 1st time, Fagan, Paisley, Shankly).

 

In business it is a given that managers often specialise in certain areas, reversing failing companies, expanding businesses, crisis management etc, yet in football we ask managers to be supermen who can do everything, unsurprisingly they cannot.

 

In this country we brand managers as generic failures far too readily. Rafa’s first two managerial jobs? He was appointed manager of Real Valladolid for the 1995–96 season but was sacked after only two wins in 23 games with the club bottom of the Primera División. During the 1996–97 season, Benítez took charge at Osasuna in the Segunda División but after only 9 games and one win he was sacked. In England he would have been unemployable after that.

 

Kenny’s track record here and at Blackburn make him a managerial great, recorded fact. However it is little surprise that a man who hasn’t been involved in the transfer market for over a decade (an entire generation of footballers) and has no personal network of scouts is floundering in the transfer market and that a man with no experience of managing abroad is struggling with 21st century football – that was not what he was bringing to the table.

 

You are right to say that the framework within which managers are working has become more important in recent years. In the past a manager could, in the style of Clough, Shanks, Lyall, Revie control everything at a club- now they are such monsters that a team is needed. At Chelsea, if the scouting has been done right, and the best players with the best attitude have been bought, and the players are coming to play with the best, for the best wages, for honours, the skills required to manage the club are very different to what Dave Jones has needed at Sheffield Wednesday, for instance.

 

You queried the credentials of Martinez. Who is to say what the likes of Martinez, Rodgers, Lambert and Coyle MIGHT achieve in the future? Valancia didn’t hold Rafa’s failures against him before appointing him? Nor did we hold Shankly's non-record before appointing him here against him.

 

What is important is a Board of Directors who know and understand football who are able to gauge effectively the risks and rewards which come with every appointment.

 

Good post that Xerxes.

Managers need to be able to do a number of things (obviously I am simplifying a bit here):

 

1. Identify and sign good players.

2. Set out a team to play football.

3. Make tactical adjustments for specific opposition or during a match

4. Inspire teamwork.

5. Cajole and man manage players where necessary.

 

Depending on what set up a club has really depends on what skills a manager needs to be best at. Chelsea or Man City managers for example need to worry less about signing players as they can waste money if things don't work out. Likewise with Real Madrid, and to a lesser extent Barcelona or Man Utd. As has been pointed out Ranieri probably made better signings than Mourinho at Chelsea, but Mourinho was able to get a lot more out of them from being much better at points 2, 4 and 5.

 

I'd say Kenny is good at the teamwork, man management and setting out a team aspect, but what we really really need at the moment is to sign more good players. If he can get that right we will be in great hands.

[KopOut]

Yes, they are very important. We are going to be top four next season, possibly with Silverware (Europa). If Stoke can make the last 16, we can win it. All this will only happen if we keep the best man for the job. Kenny Dalglish.

[Brownie]

Managers are important because they dictate how the team approaches a game and they build the team in terms of personnel.

 

There's such a fine line between success and failure though that what they're judged on is often too black and white.