Postecoglou & Lange (& Paratici) Watch

Football BSider are now saying that, if Man Utd sack Kieron McKenna, we should absolutely go in for him

This would be the same Keiron McKenna who was in charge of our U18s and apparently did well, then went to Man Utd where he was appointed AssMan and various man Utd sources have said he commanded about as much respect from the players as a referee who doesn't given them penalties every ten minutes

Also, we have an AssMan, namely Cristian Stellini, so what we'd effectively be asking McKenna to do if he was sacked was to take a clear demotion

But apart from that, yet more solid journalism...

 

Chuck him back in with the kids, if we've got space.

 

What poor example? He usually is the player who runs the furthest. I don't see that he hasn't tried his best. It makes no sense to me that he will get his mojo back by being at PSG. They have much better players than us so how would he get in their team if he is too poor to play for us?

 

Lamela got subbed off before him. Just saying.

 

Dele left and we got three injuries. Lose.

Levy presided over a period where we bought a team worth more than £500m for less than £100m. He is the only Chairman in the League to turn a mid table team into a CL finalist without access to unlimited funds. Seems to know more about football than almost every poster on here....

 

I don’t really get the point in loaning him at this point. Maybe in January 2021 but he’s had multiple managers since then and nobody can get a tune out of him. Half a season somewhere won’t do him any good imo.

The trouble is that we just don’t have a position for him. We don’t play with a 10 and nobody apart from me seems to think he can do a job box to box. And even as a 10 he’s not a creative force like Eriksen, at his best Dele was basically a second striker, working (masterfully at the time it has to be said) off the space created by Kane, Eriksen and Dembele. So I don’t see where he gets into the team.

Having said I don’t see the point of loaning him, he does have a contract to 2024. So I’m not sure we can even find a buyer with that long on his contract. I’d be in favour of finding him a good 18 month loan and looking to find a buyer off the back of that, unless at that point he’s turned his career around and we’re suddenly playing a system that would suit him.

Dele at his best is a systems player and while I believe he can do well as an 8, most people don’t seem to agree. So we need to find him a shop window and sell up, otherwise we’ll lost him for next to nothing in 1.5/2.5 seasons.

 

I wouldn't say that, necessarily. Levy knows more than Alan Sugar, though.
He understands that you can largely place a club's wage bill next to the league table, for the most part.

 

And yet we never play him there and wonder why he's playing ****!

 

To be fair I think there’s been more wrong than just positional play. Go and watch videos of his play in his first few seasons. He was sharp, aggressive and direct in his movement on and off the ball. Quick across the ground too. He’s more languid now, watching him is like seeing a player wearing boots that weigh 10x what the other players do. The snappiness and directness of his play has diminished greatly. He too often looks like the older kid playing 5 a side who just wants to jog around and do tricks but unlike that kid he’s not a foot taller and greatly more skilled than everyone else. Whether this is attitude, a reaction to injuries, I don’t know. He could be a victim of the Eric Dier bulking regime too, which might account for his different movement. That’s not impossible to undo though.

That said he clearly put the effort in when he played the first few games under Nuno, on the left of the 433. I think he was leading the league in running stats and ball recoveries after the first 3 games, or was close to. He has it in him to be a good player as an 8 but I think expecting a return to his early position and impact is off the mark.

 

His confidence is shot and he's playing out of position all the time.

Got given a chance under Mourinho, started scoring again, then got dropped and moved around.
Started under Espirito Santo, worked his arse off, then got dropped and moved around.
Left out under Conte, only to be shoved onto the left wing with a player returning from injuries.

If we banned our managers from playing players out of position, then they couldn't field a team.
Our balance is shot and it's damaging the players' form and confidence.
I'm sure they're not blameless. We're not giving a lot of them much of a chance, though.
Defensive managers, failing to fill squad holes and some people giving up has ****ed us.

 

Agreed. The balance is miles off, particularly at CM, and it’s really bad. It’s probably the priority position in January, along with a backup striker. Conte hinted at his lack of satisfaction in a press conference a couple weeks back so it can’t have escaped his notice either.

 

because poch might still have a hard on for him. Playing in a more inferior league with much better players so that he can show off his attacking talents where his team dominates the ball and puts chances on a plate for him might have given him that mojo and teams might have wanted to take a punt.

As of now and since his lack of a move, people have only seen how much worse he has gotten and whilst theres no guarantee the above might happen, it's certainly looking a better option than where he is now (as useful as winston bogarde for chelsea)

 

Is left wing not one of his positions under poch (not as an out and out winger though, like inside left). I remember the triangle up front of kane, ali and eriksen was so deadly with him starting on the left side.

Was conte playing him as an out and out left winger?

 

Conte played him on the left of the front three in a 5-2-3 against Mura.

When Eriksen was in the team they tended to switch between the two positions with both quite central overall.
It added some extra responsibility to Rose, but Dembele's left-footedness tended to cover it.
When Son got regular starts it meant that Eriksen had to go to the right more often.
Wasn't an issue with Walker steaming up and down that wing all day, but became one when he left.

 

2 CB are needed in January too.

Has to be a busy window with at least 4 coming in and hopefully just as many going out.

For once I want to see the club bring in signings before they focus on selling.

 

Realistically only one is needed, based on how our back three and front three are deployed in a pretty similar way to how Chelsea's were

In terms of our back three and theirs
Ball playing CB: Luiz for them, Dier/Rodon for us
Mobile RCB: Azpilcueta for them, Romero/Tanganga for us (and Davies in the same role at LCB)
Conservative LCB = Cahil for them...so, yeah, this is where we need a CB in January

Obviously we'd need a second ball-playing CB if Rodon gets loaned out, unless we shift Tanganga into the middle and use Sanchez in the Romero role, but realistically the conservative LCB is the role we're short in and that's where we need to be looking - and given Romagnoli or Badashile have been linked in recent weeks, those are the sort of CBs we need in that role

 

Dele was great at making those runs beyond Kane. Good in the air and full of energy, he was well suited to the role.
Not sure he’s proven himself capable of being effective in a different role.
And with no Eriksen to play the passes to create chances for him, he looks redundant now.
When you value a player, you have to look at the bigger team picture and how they fit in. It’s the old John McGovern argument - as an individual player, he looked very ordinary, but as the lynchpin of Clough’s Derby and Forest teams, he was gold dust.

 

I think having one CB who is aggressive in defence is good, so that’ll be Romero or Sanchez on the right. I think we need a true left sided CB to start ahead of Davies, and ideally an anchor to compete with/replace Dier. Tanganga is more suited to the RCB role IMO, so I can see Rodon leaving because it’s just mad he’s never got a proper run of games. Japh can cover both the right and middle roles.

Ideally we need at least 3 starters, those two CBs, a progressive CM, and a rotation striker/heir to Kane.

 

Realistically the one place any comparison with Conte's Chelsea team falls dead is we have no direct comparison with Kante or Matic, and that's definitely an area we need to mend (and have needed to since, ooh, the summer of 2018) because once we have a midfield that can stamp itself on games that will speed up identifying the weak links in the team, because if the team's got a strong core and one or two players continue to mess up, those one or two players are those who need to be moved out PDQ

Not to be confused with how anyone who was a defender kept messing up during the ubermensch's tenure, which was a result of an utterly nonsensical system where our defence sat on the edge of the 18 yard box and our midfield was overrun because it was ill-equipped to sit on a lead yet our manager who won things once assumed they could anyway

 

That's only about £5m less than what we'd receive in transfer fees right now anyway...

Though being genuine, I'd struggle to think we'd get above £15m in January and based on how transfers have been during covid our best bet is likely going to be a loan to buy deal, though to who I'm not quite sure as I'd imagine the PSG ship has long sailed, unless Poch truly wants to show he's still one of us.