That's possible, especially if the new HC doesn't produce a recovery to at least mid table. My objection to now would be changing both SD and HC at the same time.
As far as I'm concerned, Knapper's player recruitment is not the issue. His sacking of Thorup and recruitment of Manning are why I want to see him gone. I wouldn't make any judgement re. any player on the basis of this season so far; and any negative judgements I'd make on the basis of last season would not be on any of the youngsters either.
For me the decision to sack Thorup has been the biggest mistake by far, yes we were on a bad run at the time, but he clearly knew he was going to do surgery in the squad - particularly in defence, and would be trying to ship out the players that didn’t want to be here and troublemakers - Sainz, Nunez and Duffy. He should have trusted HIS original plan and stuck with JHT, perhaps made some coaching changes instead so that Johannes had staff he wanted. Obviously Manning has turned out to be a failure but I could see the logic in the hire, if we could have joined last seasons attacking output with a better defence then we would be in the top6 conversation. Other than that player recruitment wise we are majorly lacking width and pace with Diallo out injured. Jurasek is the only other player that could offer anything close but I’m not sure he wants it enough.
I couldn't see much logic in hiring Manning other than his having Championship experience. His teams were not known for being exceptional in either attack or defence. If you look beneath the raw figures for goals conceded, Bristol's xGA was actually marginally worse than Norwich's last season, and the gap between the teams in Norwich's favour attack-wise even greater. What made Knapper think Manning could tranform our defence while maintaining our potency in attack is beyond me.
