I have to say - that win did give me a hint of satisfaction, as it meant we were the ones to officially end Allardyce's record of never being relegated. Every cloud...
It took a while, but we finally rid ourselves of the "Big Sam keeps you up" line we've heard for far too long
There's no shame in that. We'd probably put the Relegated Fat Sam trophy in our cabinet, next to the Put Pressure on Leicester Then Chelsea and the Nicest Stadium in the Realm trophies.
Tbf Jose had nothing to work with and Sam was brought in 4 or 5 games too late, nobody will hold that against them. They are good at what they do but miracles are not in their locker.
Theyre both past their best by a long distance. Spurs squad needs overhauling but Jose didn’t get the best out of anyone except possibly Harry Kane Big Sam will hopefully never be seen in the PL again as his brand of football is awful and outdated
I agree unless you are desperate in which case he turns an absolute shambles into a coherent team who get results. Played very nice football with Bolton too when he had the chance to pick his players, never blame a man for using the players he is given to the best of their ability.
Bolton was how long ago though? Struggled at West Ham, Everton and Newcastle though. His level was fighting relegation and imo he’s not even at that anywhere
Let’s see if the next manager improves this defence before we decide that it’s an easy task to turn turd into gold. Let’s see if the next manager gets backed properly...not with players with potential or bogofs but real players ready to improve the first team.
They are away to Chelsea next - could be mathematically impossible by us beating Wolves at home. Normally you'd say that is within our abilities. Good knows how we'll play at the moment though. As for top 4, Utd play Leicester and Liverpool (Tuesday and then Thursday). I wonder if they'll consider playing reserves v Leicester.
They'd be mad not to tbf...they get to screw Liverpool over ! BTW we have lost both our home matches to wolves since they were promoted!
The only real job of a coach is to get the best out of the players. Unless he said in the interview that the squad was a bunch if crap and I expect to be relegated whatever I do then he needs to accept responsibility for his failure. Similarly Jose. He publicly stated that he wanted the chance to work with our squad. He didn't improve us a jot despite spending £100m or so on new players.
The obvious point is any player can be coached to be so much more than the sum of their parts, for example look at the various Southampton players like Schneiderlin, Shaw, Rodriguez and Austin who looked like worldbeaters when Poch was coaching them, yet once they moved away from his coaching they were much of a muchness at their new clubs And this is something that really needs to be asked about the ubermensch, because I have no idea what coaching our players were getting because there's no evidence of anything from them on the pitch. They can't have been working hard on their fitness as they regularly look gassed by the 80th minute (and often earlier), they clearly haven't been coached on defensive drills as the same errors happened again and again, they weren't coached on set pieces as we were disastrous at both ends of the pitch, they weren't taught the "win at all costs" mentality as we weren't hurling ourselves to the ground in the opponent's penalty area when we needed an equaliser, so what the hell were we working on? And this is the thing, there's certainly players in our squad who can be coached into being useful as there's evidence of them being trained to being useful either at other clubs or even while playing for us, and that's what really needs to be addressed because there's some players who can walk into the team and perform every day of the week (Kane, Son), some who clearly need coaching to make them effective (Lo Celso, Bergwijn, Reguilon, Ndombele, Rodon, Tanganga) and some who we have to accept are write-offs at this point (Aurier, Sissoko, Dier)
Its not an easy task but Jose still failed regardless if you think he was backed or not. He couldn’t get players playing to the best of their ability