Think the big difference in the Marcelo and DF’s 2nd season squads is mentality, you look at Beradi. Alioski, Klich, KP, Pablo, Ayling, Ben White (as a youngster), pretty much all of them - they wouldn’t be bullied by anyone. Yes they lost a few games but not by being bullied. Not sure about this lot.
We don’t need to be world beaters, just the best in the championship. I honestly don’t believe there is a team with a stronger first team 15 than ourselves, it’s up to Farke to utilise them and get the best out of them. Pablo on Bielsa and Leeds: It was tremendous to work under him in my last three years at Leeds. I was 32 when he arrived. As an older player, you might think you already know everything about football, but a manager like him can show you that isn’t true; you can improve and learn. "I played the finest football of my career for Marcelo”
Bielsa shipped out the lightweight players like Saiz, he shipped out those not buying into what he was trying to build like Pontus who was replaced with White. Bielsa is the only coach to get the best out of KP, he is in a different league to Farke (in my opinion). Mentality - Totally agree and that’s why signings were sometimes slow incoming.
Tough match this one squeaky bum time, because a win is needed just to stay in touch with the top teams
No one is saying that DF is anywhere near as good a coach as Marcelo Bielsa, he is a one-off and won’t be coming back but Farke is probably one of the best we can get in our current position. Being more consistent in front of goal and having a better keeper and we’d be sitting top right now. I’ve yet to see hear a credible name to be put forward as a replacement (so not the Potters of this world who’ve made it quite clear they don’t want to drop to the championship).
If potter was any good he would have got another job by now, plenty of sackings happened since he got the boot from chelsea.
If we’d never had Bielsa people people would be delighted with Farke as he’d be out best coach in 20 years. As we’re not seen as an elite club, we’re restricted o shopping for an unemployed manager rather than what scum were able to do. Pick one of europes brightest young coaches then go and poach him
I find it odd that on one hand, according to this forum we have the best players in the league, but on the other hand the same forum pretty much slates them all for being crap.
Ill explain as best I can, collectively best squad in league, individually all crap. Makes perfect sense
Meslier is the only disappointment for me, the rest of them the best in the division as far as I am concerned.
I wouldn’t swap our attacking line for anyone else’s if we are talking any three from Gnonto, Solomon, James, Piroe, Joseph, Ramazani If you mean swap 1 who plays #9 Piroe is still in the top 5 if Farke doesn’t play to his strength that’s not his fault
All miss far too many from the chances we create, which costs us as we don’t have a keeper we can rely on to bail us out. Agree with you about Piroe but whoever’s at fault there’s no point in playing him if he doesn’t fit with what we want to do.
Depends upon what you mean by better. I don't necessarily agree with LoL that we are weak up front, but acknowledge that we do create a lot of chances that we don't score. We also fail to create a lot of meaningful chances on occasion. Would we be doing as well if we had Middlesborough's front 6 instead of ours, or would we as a team be doing better if we had Carrick instead of Farke outlining the tactics. Who knows ? Opinions can obviously differ, on pure numbers Middlesborough, Norwich and Sheff United. On the basis that players that are classed as attackers (by Fbref), then both Norwich and Middlesborough have 26 goals scored by forwards, with Sheff United forwards having scored 24, compared to our 22 which is equal with Bristol City. If you then include assists as well by forwards then we are joint 3rd with Sheff United on 38, 1 behind Norwich and 8 behind Middlesborough. Now according to Fbref, they are classing Aaronson, as a midfielders not a forward. However even with his 5 goals plus 1 assist that would still leave us behind Middlesborough, who's forwards have a combined total of 46 goals and assists. Obviously I don't know how many other teams have players that play in a forward position that are classed as midfielders only (and frankly I'm not going to check if some guy playing for Stoke has 10 assists as a left back because he's been playing as a winger ), so I'm using the best data available albeit, there are flaws Now of course this is all subjective, and is not to meant to try and prove or disprove anyone's opinion, just as always whenever stuff like this comes up, I just like to see what the numbers say. If we just take the 6 forwards that have the most playing time for their club, then for the top 5 clubs in my table above we have the following. ( The numbers below may differ as this is limited to just 6 forwards, where as the table above included all players classed as a forward. Thus we lose 1 assist from the table below, that was made by Rutter)
