So one season ends and another begins as we contemplate how the transition will develop from here, who the new coach will be and what direction he might take the team.
Yes, I thought about that but with the change in management and players leaving already, there's a lot to discuss.
Leeds and Burnley have the best chance of any of the recently promoted sides. Whomever the third team is will likely have a real struggle
Knapper on injuries last season: "We always have to look at how we can be better. Even if we'd have had a fantastic season from an availability perspective we'd still be going through processes where we say: ‘Okay, how can we be even better at that?’ The reality is that we didn't have that season. We did have a season where we were frustrated by availability. It caused us problems. I think it's important to note just how complex the whole world of injuries and injury risk management is. You only have to look industry wide, hamstring injuries are on the rise in football generally. So this isn't just a Norwich City issue. But the truth is that we picked up injuries this year where we were unlucky, but we've also picked up injuries this year where we can do better. Maybe we pushed too hard, and we paid the price for that." https://www.pinkun.com/sport/interv...r-reveals-norwich-city-injury-inquest-summer/
What does he mean "Maybe we pushed too hard"? Is he trying to find something else to blame Thorup for? Or is he owning up to the fact that, if you recruit so many young players you are going to overburden both them and the more Championship-hardened members of the squad?
I think you’re just trying to pick holes now because you have another bee in your bonnet, now directed at Knapper, and you’re not going to let it go. Even during the season we have been asking why there are so many injuries, he’s just stating the obvious. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
Has 'tika taka' football lost its charm? Robin Sainty puts it like this: "Many see Pep Guardiola as the father of tika taka, yet consider this quote from him: “I loathe all that passing for the sake of it. You have to pass the ball with a clear intention, with the aim of making it into the opposition’s goal.” That isn’t what we saw at Wembley. Rather, we saw players constantly spurning the opportunity to put the ball into the danger area in favour of any easy pass to a teammate who was often further from goal, and it was as boring as hell to watch." This is precisely why I lost faith with Hofball last season. As other teams found the way to blunt our attack based possession football and capitalise on it's defensive weaknesses, JHT seemed to have no answers as our season fell apart. Interestingly, his present attempts to woo QPR owners and fans seem to have taken a new tack as he says: “It’s a team that started the season trying to be more dominant in games and then, maybe a little bit more similar to what we discussed with Plymouth, they lost out on some results and also some key players in the team and needed to be a bit more pragmatic to their approach to the game." Gary Gowers is now suggesting a similar shift in Knapper's approach from his original tactical purism to something more pragmatic in the Head Coach candidates presently being considered: "Russ Martin, whose style of play is the purist of the pure, apparently, hasn’t been approached, while Gary O’Neil and Steve Cooper – both of whom lace their football with liberal doses of pragmatism – have been (according to reports)." Time will tell. https://norwichcity.myfootballwrite...ka-has-been-rumbled-and-football-is-changing/ https://www.londonworld.com/sport/football/qpr/next-qpr-manager-johannes-thorup-norwich-city-5135792 https://norwichcity.myfootballwrite...ist-signal-a-shift-from-purism-to-pragmatism/
While I agree with your premise, I disagree with your conclusion that it was JHT's fault. Guardiola suggests that the players did not play the type of football that he coached and instructed, i.e. “I loathe all that passing for the sake of it. You have to pass the ball with a clear intention, with the aim of making it into the opposition’s goal.” That isn’t what we saw at Wembley. Rather, we saw players constantly spurning the opportunity to put the ball into the danger area in favour of any easy pass to a teammate who was often further from goal, and it was as boring as hell to watch.". Isn't it fair to then assume that the same JHT had coached the team to play the ball forward with "clear intention", as he laid out in media, but the players chose to take safer options and pass the ball around at the back. If JHT was a bad manager then is Guardiola just as bad for failing to implement the style of play.
The criticism was against the way Pep's team played at Wembley as an explanation of why they had a disappointing season (for them). My suggestion was that our team experienced a similar decline for similar reasons. Some blame the players for that, but IMO it had far more to do with inflexible tactics which had become too predictable and too easily counteracted. The JHT quote comes from the second article and describes his new 'pragmatic' approach aimed at QPR. The third article suggests that Knapper is now looking for a more pragmatic application of his possession based tactical principles.
Isn't it a problem of the current game and tactics? If one of our defenders or GK has the ball our sole attacker is outnumbered by defenders so it is useless humping it forward and their midfield tight marks our midfield leaving only our defenders, who outnumber their attacker, free to be passed to until one of our midfielders breaks from their marker. We might have to wait for Pep to devise a new system to break his old one!!
I think the distinction is a one of match where otherwise a manager has been successful, vs a consistently problematic style with no sign of the issues being remedied. Guardiola has the advantage that he can point to hundreds of examples of where his players didn’t play like that and so he can convincingly argue they were having an off day not following his instructions. The same cannot be said for JHT, with the majority of the season having the same issues
You are ignoring the fact that Thorup can point to Hoffball's success in the 2023--2024 Superliga, including qualifying for and playing in European competition. I keep hearing people say that Hoffball is structurally unsound from a defensive point of view. But I'm yet to have it explained to me in what respects it is unsound. What I usually hear is just a litany of failings, game after game, on the part of individual players. Again, I keep hearing people saying that Thorup had no answer to the defensive issues. In fact he had a clear idea of how he was going to address this season's failings. Not by abandoning Hoffball but by improving the implementation of it, an essential requirement being bringing in players better suited to the style (e.g, a goal keeper who is more than just a shot-stopper; CBs with more pace and ball-playing ability than Duffy, and more pace and better heading ability than Doyle; a more defensively aware and capable wide left player than Sainz; DMs who actually enjoy the business of defending -- welcome Jacob Wright -- and so on). All perfectly sensible if you are working to a timescale that envisages several transfer windows for reshaping the squad, and a target of promotion by the end of 2026--2027.
JHT was perfectly capable of changing his approach, being more pragmatic. He did and was against Pompey at Fratton Park for example, where 44% of the action took place in the Norwich defensive third, only 17% in Pompey's. That was as far removed from Hoffball as you could possibly imagine. Thorup's problem was that he took the brief he'd originally been given by Knapper seriously. At virtually every pre-match press conference through late-February, March and April, he was asked whether he planned to change approach, i.e. to go more defensive to halt the slide. He said no, giving as his reason "That would not be us". It is inconceivable he'd have given that answer if he thought top six had been a priority, or league position more important than embedding an agreed, club-wide, playing style.
