Intriguing mentioning ‘grievances with the previous manager’. Also interested hearing about the surprise at the intensity of the training sessions. That makes a lot of sense to me. All good, positive, and correct stuff though.
He's going for something a bit easier. UN Envoy to Syria, West Ham head of stewarding, ex-Russian spy, that sort of thing.
I'm sure I'm alone but I now see us going down. I'm much more pessimistic with Hughes here. The book Soccernomics made the point several years ago. I'm paraphrasing from memory but this is the gist: English football teams decide (after a particularly bad result) to sack their manager. Then they look around for a middle-aged white male English manager who's been sacked by their club for incompetence and pay him a vast sum to do the job at which he was so bad that his last club fired him. I thought more of our club than this and I'm terribly pessimistic about the rest of the season, a very unusual situation for me. I sincerely hope I'm proven wrong. Vin
We may well go down anyway but we were almost certainly going down under mp imo and Hughes is clearly a better manager than him so I'm more optimistic for sure.
I do too. Apart from the non-English part of the equation, Hughes was arguably the most successful Premier League manager Stoke have ever had. It’s only really this season that things went badly, and that could have been down to lack of investment as much as Sparky’s doing.
We can't have that....man up and say that we WILL survive, blind faith is required now, keep any negative thoughts to yourself. COYS
Nah, Pellegrino was ****. But Hughes was doing his best to get stoke relegated before Southampton appointed him. Probably covered in this thread already, but why didn't you go for Marco Silva ?
Perhaps we did, perhaps we didn't. We'll never know, but experienced EPL managers available and willing to step into the hot seat....at very short notice are very thin on the ground. And why this love affair with Silva.....don't get it.
He looks like a quality manager and definitely had Watford firing on all cylinders. Well at least he did until Everton came sniffing. But yeah, might have been difficult to get on short notice and well, Hughes was available I suppose.
I believe the squad will have a massive boost now that MP has gone. I can now see them playing with a smile on their faces, being tactically sound, and overall looking like a different team. Fingers crossed, anyway. Lol
I only wish we had a couple more games. I know it is in our own hands and staying up is fully possible,,,but two or more games would just give Hughes a little more time to get to know the team and try things. Eight games, including some very hard ones, means it has to be all out....even if that means taking risks. More hopeful than under Mauricio (and I hadn't given up hope even then), but would like a bit more time.
Hand on heart, I think we'll go down (and I'll be convinced by that if we don't beat West Ham). But I certainly won't attach any responsibility of that to Hughes, if it happens.
I agree....won't judge him if we go down....just want to see more spirit and entertainment to give hope for next season. However, I would prefer to stay up.
