The NHS needs more privatisation where needed, there is tremendous waste in the NHS, much more accountability is required as well as more funding.
Some sense from Jermaine Jenas (much more than his MOTD colleague’s Tweet yesterday): I’M an advocate of giving managers more time to turn things around but there are certain clubs where they do things differently, and Watford is one of them. I’m talking about clubs who control all the buying, bring in a head coach to manage things and then chop and change things as they see fit, that’s what the Hornets do. Chelsea are similar, and you could maybe even throw Southampton in that bracket as well. Watford seem to be getting a lot of criticism for their handling of Marco Silva’s sacking and immediate appointment of Javi Gracia as his replacement. First and foremost, I still think Silva is a top, top coach, and I do believe he’ll end up in one of the top positions one day. But Watford are the type of club that – if you’re a manager – you know how the club is being run. Gracia is the 10th manager to work under the Pozzo family since 2012, they go through them at an extrorsely rate. My feeling is that Silva knew exactly what he was walking into – it was at best a two-year job, and considerably less as it turned out. Everton obviously came calling and he acted coy in front of the cameras, but my view was that he wanted to go there. At that point, surely Watford have a responsibility to their own club, their fans and their players to keep a look-out for their next manager? Their form was one win in 11 Premier League games – that’s sackable form in today’s game. To be fair to Watford, so far their approach to management is working for them, so I don’t understand why they’re getting so heavily criticised. With Everton, West Brom and Stoke, one of the fans’ biggest criticism of their boards when they sacked their respective managers was ‘where is the preparation?’ and ‘was there any thought put into who is going to be our next manager?’ These clubs have been criticised for not thinking ahead and not having something concrete lined up, but that’s exactly what Watford have done. They’ve probably realised they could well have lost Silva this summer anyway, due to his desire to leave and the way this season has panned out, so they’ve got themselves on top of the situation, got the man that they want to replace Silva and they’re all set to move on. I don’t blame Watford for what they’ve done, at all. And as their manager Silva should have known how the Hornets operate, so I don’t think he should be surprised by the decision. People may look at the strongly worded statement Watford issued as an excuse for poor form, but I think they’re right. The minute that interest from Everton emerged, things seemed to nose-dive. I wouldn’t put that solely down to Silva, I’ve no doubt he tried his best to maintain his concentration and focus, which is the easy part, but managing that in the dressing room is the difficult part. That definitely had an impact. Whether they needed to release that statement is another matter, perhaps they could have let it go, but I have to say I do agree that Everton’s interference with their manager changed things at Watford.
If a mid table EPL club pay 13M for a 20 year old then he could think that one day (which is what i think he said ) he would like to move to one of the "big clubs" that could mean Spain,Italy PSG or 3 or 4 clubs in the UK .He was doing well when the rest of the team was doing well ,So we hope he will kick on again in the last 7 games of the season once we have our best 11 back
An extremely sensible view on Silva's tenure as coach. FAN'S VIEW: Silva had to go after the way it fell apart
Succession planning is an important part of any business, and I think is something the Pozzo's and Duxbury are very tuned into. When Zola resigned, Sannino was appointed very quickly. When Sannino resigned, Garcia was appointed very quickly. Garcia's illness and short term appointment threw them a bit, McKinley was appointed, and sacked very quickly, and Jokanavic appointed very soon after. Was Jokanavic already seen as Garcia's replacement and the heart issues threw them of track briefly? Once Jokanavic left, QSF was appointed very quickly. Was he already identified as the coach we needed first year in the Premiership to make us difficult to beat? When QSF resigned, WM was appointed very quickly When Mazzarri went they did take a bit longer than normal, but were after Silva from the start When Silva went, Garcia was appointed very quickly. I think the board have succession planning as part of their ongoing running of the business, as would any well run business.
The question remains as to whether this is good business practice or not. Would you like to work for an employer who was continuously talking to replacements behind your back ? Alternatively would you like to be the replacement - waiting, placing your career on hold, waiting for someone else to fail ? It is bad man management in my eyes which, ultimately, means bad business as well.
I think it is an ethical flaw in their business model... we used to pride ourselves on our managers over the years... we had 9 between 1977 and 2001... and three of them were the same person!... We now have had 10 in 7 years....
In Richarlison's defence: 1. he was never prolific in front of goal; 2. he's been playing his second season without a break... he's knackered!; 3. Why we're putting all our faith into a 20year old South American kid thousands of miles from home is beyond me.
Dyche - to my mind unfairly treated as his subsequent success has shown, but it was a brave new dawn and the owners had every right to bring their own man in. Zola - Did what he could then hit a wall and quit. Sannino - stopped the rot but underachieved after the summer and lost the dressing room. Garcia - heart scare, what else could they do? McKinlay - a mistake, swiftly corrected. Slav - got us up but defensive naivety probably cost him the contract he was holding out for. Flores - started well, then bored the pants off us, being content with mid-table mediocrity we had a bad second half of the season which was not good enough with the squad available. Mazzarri - just couldn't get to grips with anything be it the language, the players, the fans, the football.... Silva - self evident on current form alone before analysing anything else. So far as I can see they've only made one mistake in sacking a manager, and the coaches that followed all came to a natural coda in their tenure.
And one from a Sunderland fanzine who doesn’t get it : Let us be cruelly blunt. It is not how football should be but no one outside Watford bothers too much which of the main English divisions – Premier, Championship or Leagues One/Two – they play in. Remember how little the rest of football truly savours a Wear-Tyne derby and multiply the couldn’t-care-less-factor by a dozen. It is a small-time, small-town club with a modest fan base and, or so it perhaps should be, modest levels of expectation. In other words, it is what we have always admired as a properfootball club, morally streets ahead of the London and North-western brands that dominate the game. One of our Watford interviewees last season put it quite well: Salut! Sunderland: are you happy with Vicarage Road despite its obvious limitations or would you be seriously excited, despite the nostalgia, if the club had greater ambition and looked for a Premier-sized ground? Del Day, Watford fan: I love Vicarage Road and never want to change it. We are a small, family club that is more than happy with the size it is. Let’s be honest our real hardcore support is around 10–12,000. The rest are there at the moment because we are doing well. That never lasts, being a Watford fan is a transient business, its either great or it’s awful. The ground is more than capable of fulfilling the needs of success and failure. There are perks to being responsible for Watford FC. They’re close enough to London to make recruiting decent foreign and demestic talent – ie young men whose heads, along with the heads of their Wags, are turned by thoughts of life in or near the capital – a lot easier than it is for any North-eastern club. Then, if a glance at the table shows them in 10th place, as now, or fifth, as they were not so long ago, does that not in itself suggest the sort of overachievement of which any owner capable of joined-up thinking should be proud? Ah, someone wrote, but just four points above third bottom. Leaving aside the thought that Sunderland would have relished being four points above the drop zone at any stage of last season (or now), there are still 10 clubs below Watford and none has a better goal difference. So what better time than to fire the manager, Marco Silva? That is the kind of kneejerk logic that drives the suits of varying nationality who now run football. Eight defeats in 12 games is a poor run of form. But when the club attempts to justify the crazed policy of getting rid of managers – even when called head coaches – at the drop of a hat (I make Marco Silva’s replacement, Javi Gracia, the 14th in 10 years, which makes Sunderland’s questionable obsession with firing and hiring look almost like a period of calm, rational stewardship). The present owners, the Pozzo family, can be blamed for only nine of the departures, though the fact that these started with the dismissal of Sean Dyche, as reward for taking Watford to its highest position in four years, gives an idea of the scale of crude ruthlessness involved. The excuse this time is that Silva lost his way after being approached for the Everton job. I have no doubt he found it a tempting proposition. I also have no doubt that smart owners should be honoured, not indignant to see their managers in demand, and grateful to hang on to them. Surely they are not expecting a degree of loyalty that they would never dream of giving. Out with the old, then, and in with the new. Javi who? Perhaps an unfair question since he’s managed almost as many clubs as Watford have had managers. But never, it seems for very long. The Telegraph tells us he’s been “out of work since last June, following an unhappy season in charge of Rubin Kazan”. The Pozzos claim the catalyst for their decision was “that unwarranted [Everton] approach, something which the board believes has seen a significant deterioration in both focus and results to the point where the long-term future of Watford FC has been jeopardised”. First game in charge for the new miracle worker? Southampton away in the FA Cup on Saturday. Check the betfair £100 free bet offer to find up-to-date odds. My hunch is that there will be no new manager bounce and the bookies currently agree: 9/10 for a home win, 27/10 draw, 13/4 away win. I await with interest a sharp upward climb of the table, from the present, utterly realistic 10th, and a narrowing of the odds against relegation. Or another swift sacking.
And another Pozzo-tive one (mostly). I’m just posting them up as I find them as I think we’re probably getting more coverage than ever before! Marco Silva sacking: Watford aren’t short-termists, they’re the opposite Sometimes life seems to throw the perfect juxtaposition at you. But it’s not always as gleaming as you think. This week, the news of two shocking yet unsurprising Premier League happenings did just that: Alexis Sanchez’s move to Manchester United and the sacking of former Watford manager Marco Silva. Shocking because Sanchez looked for all the world as though he was going to join Manchester City, or because Silva had started so impressively with the Vicarage Road club. Yet unsurprising because of the ferociousness of the Chilean’s desire to leave Arsenal and the fall from grace the Portuguese has suffered since his interest in jumping ship when the Everton job was available before Christmas. These two very different cases suddenly came to be understood in similar ways by their sheer proximity to one another: Sanchez and Silva, the Premier League’s mercenary duo. That’s probably an unfair characterisation of what happened – especially with Sanchez – but it’s stuck. And yet neither of these men are the most unfairly characterised of the whole saga. That title probably has to go to Watford Football Club itself, the subject of numerous vindictive think-pieces and half-baked ‘hot takes’ over the last few days. Having the temerity to sack their manager after a run of only four wins in 17 games has been deemed as further evidence of a club wedded to short-termism. And in order to illustrate that fact further, the most-used stat has to be one claiming that the Pozzo family – Watford’s owners – have gone through ten managers since their arrival in 2012. Unkindly, both Oscar Garcia, who took charge of four games before stepping down due to ill-health, and Billy McKinlay, one of his coaches who took charge of just two games, are included. Eight managers in five-and-a-half years might not be a whole lot better, but using the inflated version stat shows this is about agenda setting, not fairness. The fact that modern football itself is firmly wedded to a principle of short-term gains is presumably just an aside in all of this, but Watford have been made the poster boys. Ironically, though, it is the Hornets who are one of the the most guarded against the excesses of the modern drive to win at all costs. Whatever you think about the fluid nature of Pozzo family’s conception of football club ownership, you can’t deny it is firmly set against short-termism as a core principle. Managers and players may come and go at speed, but the overarching plan makes them one of the best-organised clubs around: there is a very obvious long-term plan. Indeed, just compare Watford’s slick Sunday with the sackings of most other managers in the Premier League this season. Everton lasted over a month in limbo after sacking Ronald Koeman. In that time, David Unsworth presided over just one win (technically, his second win in charge came after the appointment of Sam Allardyce) and an embarrassingly early exit from Europe. Recently, Stoke City went through three managers before finally settling on Paul Lambert. Watford, instead, sacked Silva and within minutes news came through that Javi Gracia, a man on few Premier League radars but who is clearly well-known to those who make the decisions at Vicarage Road, was set to be appointed. What Watford have done, then, is set an identity for the club above the level of the manager and the players. Usually, when a club appoints a manager, they look for one who can instil an identity into the club. Then, once that’s done, they aim to carry it on. Manchester City’s appointment of Pep Guardiola was a search for a playing style now implemented by the coach. The next man will have to hold the skills to carry on the same work. At Watford, no coach has done that job. Instead, the manager, just like the players, are brought in simply because they fit in with the identity of the club and the way it likes to operate. Most teams do it with players, identifying a pool of footballers they’d like to sign. The Hornets seem to do it with managers, too. For what it’s worth, i’m not a huge fan of operating in the way the Pozzo’s do. To me, it seems a little corporate – loaning a player from Udinese to Watford feels a bit like an investment bank moving one of its employees ‘to the Watford office’ for a few months. But just because I don’t buy into the method doesn’t mean I have to falsely characterise it as something it’s not. Over the last few days, plenty have done that. But what makes it worse is that it’s been done for a particular reason. Watford are being portrayed as a club who show a lack of commitment to their managers and their players, and who are attempting to maintain their Premier League status simply for the money it generates. They’re being made the pin-ups for a dystopian future of unfeeling football, and that’s not fair. And when you actually look at what’s happening, Watford are one of the few clubs around who have a solid long-term plan. Perhaps the Alexis Sanchez furore coloured the debate, but mercenary or not, the sacking of Marco Silva should not be a chance to make a football club out to be something it’s not.
A reasonable piece - but I do wish that journalists who write these things would research first. Whoever wrote this obviously failed to research who actually owns the club. He/she keeps referring to the 'Pozzo's' - we have just the one owner and that's Gino Pozzo. A small point, but an irksome one.
BB, the initial announcement of the purchase of the club referred to the Pozzo family, it was only later that it was stated that Gino would be the owner, so the media use that initial line. We are just as guilty as they are, as we refer to the Pozzo's ownership.
I would be surprised if we do sell Richarlison. The Pozzo model is to sell when players are at maximum value, and unless there is an attitude problem then I believe his value is currently nowhere near what it could be. They also say that they will not keep an unhappy player who wishes to leave. How unhappy is he, we do not know, but if Gomes stays and puts an arm around him he might cheer up a bit. Someone at the end of season awards said that he is still a very young player who has not yet learnt the language. He has played almost without a rest for 18 months and that is asking a hell of a lot from a youngster.
Club still perusing Everton's illegal approach very strongly it seems. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/footbal...alks-watford-avoid-possible-points-deduction/
I really can't see us dealing with Everton, and if we do, it would take a lot of money to take any of our players. Doucoure would have his sights on a much better team than Everton. Richarlison might go... but think if we sell to Everton, we would be demanding £30m+ for him - he must have 4 years still on his contract so won't be cheap. The worry is if Gomes goes in the summer, he might push to go too. I love how we have handled this though... lots of fans (mainly Everton it seems) telling the owners to get over it, but shows we aren't going to be a push over - and think it will show when anyone wants to buy our players too
