The game at Boro needed a positive approach but Phelan chose instead to be cautious, to go for a draw and maybe nick a goal for the win. Fortune favours the brave and I'm afraid Phelan has shown himself to be a fat, bald coward. He makes Bruce look like Bill ****ing Shankly. Before kick-off I bought tickets for Spurs. My god, they will demolish us unless we stop being so passive.
and yet Phelans record is better than Bruce - Phelans not the problem - 1. the two ****s in charge who are slowly demolishing their gift and 2 the performance of some of the players is lamentable - the passing tonight was like we had half a dozen Meylers in the team
They have and I've said that; it's clueless football. My problem is MP isn't going to get any better in terms of turning anything around, because he is the classic over-promoted manager, regardless of profession. His appointment was a financial and operational convenience with nothing to do with talent or potential. I was critical of MP as a No. 2 nevermind as the manager. When SB left (I wanted that for a long time, but the poor circumstance was typically Allemesque) I knew we had problems; I spoke of MP's lack of selection choice as being a mask to his ability. I also spoke of some players discussing how they could play elsewhere (Jake for one), some scoffed this thought, they were wrong. Criticise tactics by all means, but each new management challenge is one too many. I won't get on MP's back because he is as much a victim as us - albeit a very well paid victim. Nothing will change until the owners do.
It will be a replica. The original is in my lad's possession nowadays, It was the year he was born. Have a photo of Keith .Edwards with him aged 6 months at the open day. There is one with Mike Smith but that one never gets an airing.
I am sorry to say I was wrong about Phelan, he just cannot cope with this job. Listening to his after match comments, that was more worrying than the performance. The players on the pitch last night should have been good enough to get a result against a poor Boro team, but they just aren't performing. They are defending too deep, the distance between the midfield line and the back 4 is too wide. Any decent team last night would have humped us. Yes, we are short of attacking options, but with the players we have we can be a lot better. Seems that is probably the last we will see of Hernandez also.
Phelan can only choose the players he has available, and he can only select the tactics that those (limited and bereft of confidence) players are capable of enacting. We simply couldn't have gone gung ho and attacked last night. We didn't have any fit and decent strikers. We are just about clinging on to the bottom half of the Premier League. That, coupled with a splendid League Cup run, is a tremendous achievement in my book, no matter how woeful last night was. I was at the game last night and I thought Henriksen was our best attacking threat. Genuinely surprised to see him get so much stick.
With a few exceptions, city do not seem at the moment to have players capable of executing any game plan whatsoever, certain recently recruited 'players' have been particularly woeful.
The players we had on the pitch IMO man for man were as good as Boro's if not better, but Boro wanted it more. Ramerez was the stand out performer on the pitch and made the difference. Yes, we are short of attacking options, but that doesn't excuse not creating chances and getting service to Dio. We just sat too deep for the whole game, until they scored, then we decided to push up and started to threaten them. Poor tactics by Phelan, which is what he has employed the last one or two games at home and got away with it.
I will always support the team, same as I did under Hateley, Molby & Parkinson. Doesn't mean we're any good to watch. He deserved a crack at the job & was the only person who wanted it, due to the idiots in charge. He has, however, shown he can't do the job he's employed to do. His team selection is weird, the same players play bad but still get picked. His tactics are a mystery, nothing changes when subs come on for the same players that were subbed in the previous game because they were poor. I don't know who had a say in the players we bought, but if it was him, I don't believe it is, they were ALL terrible & unnecessary signings.
Really?! Seriously? They've got Negredo up front. We've got Diomande who couldn't make our bench in the Championship most of the time. They've got creative players in Ramirez and co in their midfield and attack. We've got a load of defensive centre mids, no creativity and only one winger. We go 1-0 down and all we can bring on is Bowen, Huddlestone and Meyler. I think people just look at Boro and us as both being bottom end, recently promoted sides and think therefore we must be on a similar level to them. We're a million miles behind them. They finished above us in the summer and then signed about 10 quality players. We struggled at the end of last season, lost half our squad to other clubs or to injury, lost our manager and entire coaching staff, signed a handful of players in the last two days of the window who seem to have been picked out of a hat by Ehab, got even more injuries since then and now are making up the numbers by chucking kids into the first team. And people think we should be able to compete because it's only Boro. Obviously if we played a trendier formation and Jak was in goal we'd be mid-table.
We're obviously lacking talent and lacking players in some positions, but we're not helping ourselves. That team selection last night was ****, how many games does Phelan have to watch before he realises that Mason on the left wing is the same as starting with ten men? Too ****ing many, obviously. We've only got one winger, because the other is playing right back. Why the **** aren't we taking advantage of the fact that we have two decent wing backs and a spare centre back on the bench to go 3-5-2? I was happy to make allowances for Phelan, as he's been dealt a ****ty hand, but he now looks and sounds completely clueless. His post match press conferences are embarrassing, he seems completely out of his depth and if he comes across that way with us, how must it be for the players?.
In that case, our manager must be better than theirs to have closed the gap a bit. Because in terms of resources, they really are a million miles ahead of us.
Posted this before MP was appointed , the fact that he'd been a no2/coach for over 20yrs was a worry, but the one I was really concern about was his time as no2 at Norwich, why did they go for a young relatively unknown manager instead of MP when the managers job became vacant, I personally think they thought he wasn't up to the job.
The players seem absolutely fine with Phelan. Davies last night said our problems are because of the failures in the summer transfer window. Not often you hear a player say that. But then we're not a normal case.
No it if we actually tried to play we might get something. We set up to lock out the opposition yet our team, defence and midfield in particular under Phelan is a chaotic disorganised mess. We might not have the players capable of going out dominating games but at the very very least they could be organised and be hard to beat. We are nothing. ****ing useless at the back, ****ing useless in the middle and ****ing useless at the top. And that's not because of what players we do or don't have, it's because Mick is incapable of building anything at all from the pieces given to him.
They're not, we've still spent a tonne on our squad. Don't know where you keep coming up with this delusion from.
