I also meant to say in response to lyndhurst that I am available to work for him anytime he wants a crap job doing. Clearly mediocrity is ok in his world. In fact never mind the jobs just send me my pay cheque each month and I will give you nothing in return. I'm not even one of the fickle ones either as I pay my money as I have done for many many seasons now and have never, that is never deserted the club. I probably will get carried there in my coffin if the funeral is on a Saturday matchday but by that time the congregation for the event is likely to be very small. I'm entitled to moan and carp about Argyle. I've paid thousands for the privilege. I still think Brent has done nothing and Fletcher is pants. I still think the fare on offer is worse than pants a lot of the time. Hang me for it.
Brent has spent nothing.. oh he has bought a few other bits in Plymouth? wonder if he did pay for them or was it a gesture for helping out with keeping argyle going. we will never know.. as always we never get the truth..
The carp coming out of Distant is making me turn in my shallow grave. Distant was churning out this same bull when Argyle were sliding out of the Championship. Now just a short 3 years later he is still churning out the same carp after Argyle have slid out of League 1 and are now about to slide out of the league system altogether. Still Distant won't budge from his faith in the "business model". Distant reminds me of an arrogant banker, one of those types who brought the western world to its knees but yet still thinks his broken idea of how business should run should continue unchecked. Around him normal people are suffering and in turmoil but he is blind and a closed mind to anything other than the brainwashed garbage he's spent his life believing in.
A bit harsh there surfer. I may not agree with notdistant but I don't think he's blind to the subject. These days for me the proof of a person's word is in the actions not what is being said. I refuse to believe in the motives anymore blindly accepting anything they say. Been there done that and got the kicking. Brent may turn out to be good for the club in the end but I'm just not seeing anything much positive yet. Until I do then for me he is another chancer who speaks the right words at the right time and does little or nothing. It's getting past "the jury's out" this season already because unless something is done, preferably now, then this is going to be another failed season. Hopefully it won't be a failed complete disaster.
Sensible I don't and never have, doubted your commitment nor that of most others on here; otherwise why would you spend such an inordinate amount of time making yr points albeit that I rarely agree with your stance. Its a bit like spoiling a ballot paper- ultimately futile but better than simply ignoring the process altogether. At least it demonstrates that someone cares enough to pass an opinion. However much James Brent may or may not have invested in the club or how much profit he may (or may not) ultimately make out of "PAFC Ltd" and associated businesses (and as far as I can see nobody on here knows the real truth) my problem remains that no one has offered an affordable and practical alternative solution. Ultimately, success will be judged by league position and a stable financial structure which as history shows isn't achieved by overspending to achieve short term benefits. Equally JB will be judged by his actions so I suspect that despite what appears to have been a decent performance, after tonight's result Carl Fletcher sadly will only have 2 or 3 matches to get some results- it is after all a "results business". I hate mediocrity both in my professional and personal life, but unlike some others that sit near me in the Lyndhurst, neither do I get any perverse pleasure from berating the team from kick off to final whistle regardless of the performance/score-and before there is an avalanche of people saying they pay their money and are therefore entitled to vent their feelings, clearly they have, and are; but it is still bloody irritating.
Perhaps I was a bit harsh on Distant but skim reading his posts I was overwhelmed with a flashback to the same points being made by Distant as we slide out of the Championship. Surely now with the same rot under a new regime and staring ejection from the entire league square in the eyes, surely the time must have come for a re-think from Distant???! Over on PASOTI all the rage is being directed solely at Fletcher but my eyes are on Brent. Only Brent can pull the trigger, Fletcher is just an employee out to get as much as he can financially and with his family in mind, same as any other employee would. He will not leave of his own accord. The normal practice and expectation for a manager of any club in this much peril is the exit door. However, we all know that Argyle don't do normal so what will actually happen is anyone's guess. Soon though, all spotlight will be on Brent and he will be the one deemed to be failing by not taking the necessary remedial action. Does he want that blackmark against his reputation? Does he want to jeopardise his goldenboy status with the council?
A lot of eyes are on Brent now given our past history of recent years. This is where myself and notdistant and lyndhurstgreen see things differently. I think lyndhurst that you miss some of my point. I am not saying there IS somebody out there as an alternative although there may be if Brent were to offer the club up and you don't know anymore than me what the answer to that one is. My point is that some people hold Brent up as a saviour. From where I'm sitting he doesn't appear to have saved us just put off the final demise for a period. Why should I be grateful? I would rather the club had died than somebody come in with fancy words and take what is left whilst having one eye on the exit door. Neither you nor I know what is in his mind and that wasn't his intention all along. We hope it wasn't but hope is in short supply these days. When I realise that putting my hand on the iron when it's on is going to get me burnt I stop putting my hand on the iron. Similarly when I realise that putting my faith in somebody running Argyle is not necessarily what it seems then I stop looking through my green glasses. All this talk of "subsidising" the club is in my humble opinion a load of rubbish. Subsidising it with what exactly? Money gained from the sale of a club asset is the way I see it rather than him personally forking out money he hasn't made from the club itself. I don't care about what he makes outside of Argyle except that I care if he is making it on the back of a football club he intends to throw to the wolves eventually when he can make no more. I don't care that some people have looked into his eyes. I want to see something positive he does in reality. Sacking Fletcher would be a start and even if he has to dip into his long pockets to do it. Show me committment to the football bit of his empire. As for booing well I've commented on that before. I don't do it and never would. In my view it is pointless but if some wish to vent their spleen that way well it's their perogative. They seem to do it when the play is worse than rubbish and I don't hear it generally. The paying customers want to have something to cheer about and not have to show displeasure. It is up to the club to give them that and they can't complain if they don't. The alternative is that the paying customer stops being that which is worse for the club than a bit of cadjolling.
Sensible Your emotions are getting the better of you. A saviour is, according to the dictionary "a person who rescues another person or a thing from danger or harm". Brent is therefore a saviour, just as a drug addict, benefit scrounger, wife battering burglar who throws you a lifebelt when you're drowning is a saviour. Whether the club now lives within its means and goes on to prosperity and success certainly remains to be seen but the most significant thing Brent has done so far is to - yes - save the club. You seem to overlook this fact and as Lyndhurst has said, there was nobody else and despite your vague hopes, I don't see what's changed now so that a queue is silently forming. The situation now is dire but emotions ARE getting overheated. I saw the first goal conceded against Fleetwood somewhere. At the time, this was held out as another example of hopeless defending, down to Fletcher even though he was 50 yards away without his boots on and I took that as being the case. In fact, there was a pretty aimless attempt at an overhead shot on goal which dropped perfectly onto the head of a Fleetwood player 4 yards out. No doubt at all that Argyle need to improve their defending on corners, free kicks and it would seem long throws but that goal, as with the one against Dorchester, was as much about bad luck as anything else. No amount of organisation in the world stops those sorts of flukes. The time for a decision on Fletcher is fast approaching with the transfer window looming. Personally, I don't think changing the manager will make an ha'p'orth of difference - we've gone down the route of signing young, skilful but lightweight players, which is fine, but we need a spine of large, rough individuals who shave in the morning in this league - certainly at centre back and centre forward and probably one in midfield too. I'm not sure the money is there to change course like that now and I'm dubious of the impact any manager makes on a given set of players. Interestingly, there were calls to sack Fletcher and re-employ Reid last night. Probably tongue in cheek but we are still paying for Peter Reid after all. Sack Fletcher and we'll be paying for Reid, Fletcher and A. N. Other too. I'd rather forego the new manager and get the extra players in.
But is a saviour one who throws you the lifejacket, pulls you out of the water only to strangle you on the shore? Not much of a saviour then I would suggest and stretching the definition somewhat.
Agree with you again Sensible. This "saviour" tag is starting to irk me also. Good analogy you use above. Being hauled from the water by someone who intends to strangle you in order to raid your pockets once you get onboard the rescue boat is not being saved. It is merely altering the form of the demise. When someone is dragged limp and dying from the water the rescue doesn't stop there. The expectation is for the victim to then be offered food, drink, shelter, blankets, first aid and for the rescue boat to alter course for shore with all haste to the nearest hospital. The rescue doesn't stop there either, once in hospital a whole new set of procedures are automatically expected, expert medical attention, surgery, whatever it takes to preserve life. Then the victim embarks on a long course of rehabilitation, counselling and support until they are back standing on their own 2 feet. The man who hauls the drowning victim dramatically from the water is often the one who gets tagged as the hero or the saviour but that initial action is just the first link in an enormous chain of the rescue process. All the initial rescuer does is remove the victim from the immediate danger, the life saving begins afterwards in the care and treatment once removed from the danger. This is the less glamorous part and never gets the recognition it deserves in any story. PAFC has been hauled out of the water but now is left cold, shivering and half-dead in the bottom of the boat. The after-care is completely missing or at the very least is not being administered as it should.
By an astonishing coincidence Sensible, I heard an interview on the World At One today, concerning the sacking of Di Matteo with [I think] Simon Kuper, author of the book Soccernomics. He said that it makes no difference who is appointed, less than one in ten managers actually lift their teams beyond the main determinant of success: which is the wages budget. That is mathematically highly correlated to league position, which hardly varies at all when managers come & go. His best quote was that the vast majority of managers could be replaced by their secretaries or a teddy bear and it would have no lasting effect. When asked why managers get the sack if that's the case, he described it as a form of human sacrifice which appeases the masses but no more. They also discussed how much Chelsea had paid out to sacked managers. Chelsea have spent £90m over 8 years hiring & firing managers. Imagine if they'd spent that on players instead..... OK, we aren't Chelsea by a long way but you can bet your season ticket money [and in a way you are] that the numbers for Argyle would be very much pro rata to its income, perhaps even more damaging relatively at the bargain basement end of the game. This covers the same ground: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/t...places-roberto-di-matteo-as-chelseas-manager/ For those that think changing the manager does make a difference, note the reference to regression to the mean. Managers almost always get sacked when things are going really really badly and statistically that's unlikely to continue even if nothing changes. So things get a bit better and fans attribute it to the new manager: it isn't, it's just the blind influence of statistics [or luck, whichever you want to call it]. I knew I was right, spend the money on players, not sacking managers.
Sounds easy when you say it like that Distant "spend money on players not managers" but the problem is, we have spent money on players, lots of them, in fact we have one of the biggest squads in the division but we're still failing? That tells my casual mind that something is wrong in the management/coaching/procurement side of the club. Giving an unsuitable manager the opportunity to purchase more unsuitable players just further compounds the problem and avoids the root cause. Here's another story, a man goes to the doctors with a broken arm, the doctor frowns, puts the arm in a sling and sends the man on his way. 6 weeks later the man goes back to the doctors and his arm is broken again, the doctor frowns and wraps the arm in a bandage and sling and sends the man on his way. 6 weeks later the man goes back to the doctors and his arm is broken again, the doctor frowns, puts the arm in a plaster cast and sends the man on his way. 6 weeks later the man goes back to the doctors and the cast is in pieces and the arm is broken again "For crying out loud" says the doctor "How on earth do you keep breaking your arm???!!!" The man replies "because I keep smacking it with this hammer". The doctor takes the hammer from the man and sends him on his way. The doctor never sees the man again!! Moral of the story, treat the cause not the symptom.
Surfer, you will like to see Mr Sturrock back. He is good at spending money.. Brent does not want to part with any money , only if its buying Business outside or Argyle or are they gifts from the council?
I'm not saying the results will improve if the manager is changed. Nobody can possibly know that in advance. I'm saying that his tactics are wrong for the players we have. I'm saying the training is not appropriate to the players we have. I'm saying that the training is not in the right direction or areas we need. I would rather see the team lose where I can see what is supposed to be happening rather than sitting there watching them lose without a clue as to what they are even trying to do. That has been the case too often. We experienced a manager previously who came in, with the same budget and everything else that the previous manager had and changed a lot. He was called Sturrock. Not only did he change a lot but we got promoted several times. Di Matteo got sacked today. He took over an ailing team and won two cups which was something the previous manager failed miserably to do. That's two examples. Holloway went to Blackpool and they reached the premiership when nobody gave them a prayer. There are plenty of examples where it has worked. I want a manager who at least looks like he knows what he is doing. At the moment I don't think he has a clue.
We need a manager who as well as being experienced and tactically aware needs to seriously uplift the mood among the players and instill belief because right now the lads are expecting to conceed goals as soon as they go a goal up, they do not expect to win - infact they don't seem to think they deserve to win. There must be other Holloway-type managers out of work right now. It needs to happen now before it's too late. Everything at Argyle right now is WRONG.
Training, tactics, preparation - all these are in the statistics. Managers, or more than 90% of them, simply don't make a difference, either for good or ill, as indicated in the article. And you are wrong in saying that nobody can tell if a new manager will improve results. The statistics say that unless you find the one in 20ish, he definitely won't, apart from an initial dead cat bounce. Sturrock gets a mention as one of those 1 in 20, who consistently outperforms their wage budget. Now there's a thought...... Maybe Holloway's another but for reasons we've debated, he gets out before the cat hits the ground for a second time, as he did at Argyle and as he's just done at Blackpool, which suggests he isn't a 1 in 20, he just has better judgement as to when to leave. The real star who has consistently kept a club punching above it's weight must be David Moyes at Everton...... Often, changing managers results in random player purchases which further undermines performance - see Rule 1: "New managers waste money, ergo, limit their say in transfers" http://worldfootballcolumns.com/201...ics-moneyball-and-liverpools-transfer-policy/ And for those that haven't seen the film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball and before you say that's baseball, it won't work in football, that's what the baseball coaches said before they got the chop. This is of course essentially empirical business based approach with a similarity to investment appraisal. The flaw is of course that it worked brilliantly for Oakland until the big clubs cottoned on to what they were doing and they did it as well but with more money......
More important than "the manager" as an individual is the coaching/training set up as a whole. This is what dictates the state and outlook of a football team far more than anything else. Swansea are a prime example. Remember when I used them as a model 3-4 years ago when we were in the Championship and they had just come up from League 1? Swansea have sound footballing principles and staff permanently etched into the fibres of the club. They can survive the losses of managers and top players because the wheel of excellence is constantly in motion and just keeps on turning regardless. Look at where they are now!!! One of things that made me turn in my grave recently was when Brendan Rogers was being paraded as some kind of genuis for what he had done at Swansea. I was absolutely outraged, Swansea were already an established sound footballing side lllloooonnnngggg before Rogers arrived on the scene! He merely stepped onto the wheel and allowed the momentum to do its thing. I could have taken over as Swansea manager and probably achieved the same We need someone with a vision to make the whole club work like Swansea. It will take more than one man, it will take a small army of specialists working together with a common goal to achieve footballing excellence. It needs to be sewn into the fibres of the club. It will however need one man with the vision to start the wheel turning. Defeatist Carl Fletcher and his small crew of ex-goalie and ex-nobody are not the way ahead. New manager with the right vision assisted by a team of specialist coaches/trainers is needed otherwise we are finished. Without the right foundations and fibres, any spell of success we might happen upon will just be temporary or "lucky" as Fletcher likes to say. We need to become bullet-proof and solid like Swansea, able to absorb and overcome any adverse situation through footballing excellence built in as standard throughout the club.
One thing for sure is that Fletcher isn't a 1 in 20 on the success scales. He is more like a 1 in 20 on the clueless chart. The fact is that a good manager who knows his stuff and makes the people who are in his team as trainer or player do the right things is out there even if the numbers are small. We need one and even if we get an average one instead I still think that is better than we have. Fletcher in my opinion is poor and his training team even poorer. Anyone would be better than them with the exception of Evans who I simply can't stand. I'd rather have Bobby Williams than Fletcher. I'm not a fan of statistics at the best of times.
