With the transfer window closing on August 9th, this isn't the pre season to waste 3 weeks appointing a Manager again!
I was looking at his program notes in the Stoke one the other day, and his signature actually has MP2 in it. Check it out if you get the chance.
People are thinking with their emotions, not their heads. Posters have been saying we have more than enough talent and a monkey could keep us up, to better pin all the blame on MP2. Yet when Hughes accomplishes the relatively mundane task of keeping us up, suddenly he's a miracle worker. If Austin's shot (which was a fantastic effort and seems to be overlooked) had bounced just a few inches in a different direction and Gabbiadini had not been able to pounce first then we would have drawn that game. And then in all likelihood, we would have lost to Manchester City and been relegated. If we had gotten relegated and Hughes had offered to stay another season, how many would have voted to have him back? 25%? But because we finally got the lucky bounce we'd been due for so long, everyone loves him right now and probably 75% of fans would keep him. And yet if you really think about it, it would probably be more desirable to keep Hughes if we go down than if we stayed in the Premier League.
You really can't see the difference in the way the team have performed under Hughes and under Pellegrino?..it's chalk and cheese to me.
It'll be nice to know who our manager is pretty sharpish. They can focus on sorting out the squad effectively.
It's easy to pick out single moments and say "if this, if that", but the fact is we deserved to beat B'mouth, Everton and Swansea. And this is after just four games (three away) of assessing the squad. Bloody good achievement. If it had been an exotic-sounding European, you'd be creaming yourself over him.
And narrow defeats against two top six teams where we deserved more... I'm convinced we would've gone down under Pellegrino, we were bad and getting worse....
Not really, no. I don't judge managers on three games. Did we really deserve to beat Everton or Swansea? We were not exactly very good against either side. Could easily have been two draws. Funny also how a heartbreaking draw to Everton is deemed to be us having been robbed of what we deserve, when all the other points we've thrown away in late games have been due to managerial incompetence.
As someone else has said lots of ifs or buts. Surely you cannot help to see the guys have shown so much more passion since sparkys tenure. Emotion doesn’t come in to it when you are talking factual
Did we really deserve to beat Everton or Swansea? ___________________ Yes we did. We were better than both. Did we deserve to beat WHU at home and Crystal palace away. No we didn't. Over 90 minutes, it did not feel like we were the better team.
I didn't think they had given up as much as people felt during Pellegrino's tenure. The most disappointing game all season IMO was vs West Ham. I don't know who to pin that on. Hughes was already here, but maybe hadn't had time to reverse any problems. It's always pretty sketchy to gauge player attitudes. Again, this is the kind of thing where if we had drawn Swansea there would have been posters asking where the club's passion and pride were. Do we even know if Hughes was the one that inspired them? Maybe they just inspired themselves. When the team wins or gets a positive result, the supporters all believe they showed great passion and commitment. And when the team loses they are all just in it for the money and don't care about the club. Even if I were to agree that there is increased passion and that is a result of Hughes, it seems our club is highly temperamental and the good vibes can be lost in the course of a few games. I do think there are arguments for retaining Hughes. Just that most people are not making them. TBH, managers are pretty easily sacked so I'm less bothered by the support for Hughes than I am that we are going back to the old trope that the team was great, everything was fine, and we just had a bad manager. If we do nothing this offseason we could well go down with Hughes, and I won't blame him very much.... but probably everyone else will.
It is relevant because we were a complete shambles under Pellegrino at the end. Mark Hughes should stay because in a few short weeks he turned a team that had only beat the bottom club in the league since November into a team that could gain enough points to keep us in the league. Make no mistake it was no "mundane task", the way we were playing under Pellegrino we would have finished bottom. Hughes' greatest achievement was to get the squad to believe that they could win matches again even after the Chelsea setback which left us FIVE points adrift from safety. The way you talk it's as if picking enough points up in the run in was a formality.
ISIRTP, What I'm failing to understand from your comments is; We're not saying the team was great or total crap. But MP coached all the confidence out of them. How many matches did we start well, score a goal, then retreat? Loads. You could see him on the side lines stopping them from going forward. He was so scared to lose that he lost them.
I dont believe I said the team were great............I did say some have regained their passion and that is what got us through. However I'm truly having trouble in understanding why you are suggesting that Sparky didn't have a hand in our probable survival. Mopo's way of doing things just wasn't working. Thats why they sacked him. Sparky only had 8 matches to turn it round and he is due as much credit for that as the players.......More probably because of his tactics that definitely worked. Again I have said in the short term we need to steady the ship a bit put up some new sails still with Sparky at the helm. He is as good as anyone that is likely to be available and who would actually like to come to us. Other that is than the untried unknown managers abroad. We have done that over the last two season and it aint worked. So why not give someone that does have experience of the premier with the right backing and see what happens. I'm pretty sure it is abetter bet than an unknown..........
We played like **** all four games. As we did most of the season, unfortunately. No. The way Saints posters are talking about the supposed level of talent on the squad and the incompetence of Pellegrino it SHOULD have been a formality. But it definitely was not. I'm actually somewhat okay with giving Hughes some credit for being the difference maker who kept us up. If so, he turned us from a really ****ty team into a team that was just slightly less ****ty enough to stay up by the skin of our teeth. Which is great and all, but does not negate the fact that we are still crap even under Hughes. There's a positive looking trend line here, at least looking at results. We took 7 points in 3 games which is much better than we'd been doing no question. But did our play really show that much of a difference or was it really more that we played three bad teams? All three of those games were ugly. And it's fine that the team that wanted it more/had more passion/dug deep, etc. got the edge and that was us. But it still doesn't say much. I don't think we should be having gut checks and needing to scrape deep to beat bad teams. There's not any particularly strong reason in my mind to just extrapolate a 3 game trend line out over the whole of the next season and think we will just go up and up. I think you have to look at the whole of Hughes's tenure. Which I get is inaccurate because he inherited the team. But I also don't think you can cherry pick three games. I don't think we really know what we will get from Hughes.
We don't know what we will get from any new manager, we could we get a De Boer (or another Pellegrino *shudders*) for all we know, Hughes is the man in possession and he has fulfilled his remit so far.
Oh, so we looked confident in the closing minutes against Everton then? I don't think so. I'm seriously just asking this-- Putting aside the results, did we actually play well in any of our last three games-- well enough that you would be happy to see us play a whole season at that level? Did you truly see a team full of confidence and ready to take on the world? I'm guessing that the answer for most of us is "No," even though we did take 7 points. So people are assuming that Hughes can get this team playing better than he had them playing at the end of this season. I don't see a justification for that assumption.
Relegation scraps a rarely very pretty, but against Everton we dominated possession and played some good stuff.
