Tonda Eckert

Spors has admitted he was appointed as a successor, but this is 2/3 years earlier than planned.

Two things for me;

We need to have a decision of sorts done before the January window. Players will want to know where they stand

The longer Tonda is interim and he does ok, the less likely he will want to return to be our u21 manager. He’ll have a taste for it etc

It would be very saints for him to leave, get the Barnsley job and have an amazing career and we instead appoint Carrick who gets sacked in April

saintlyhero said:

Spors has admitted he was appointed as a successor, but this is 2/3 years earlier than planned.

Two things for me;

We need to have a decision of sorts done before the January window. Players will want to know where they stand

The longer Tonda is interim and he does ok, the less likely he will want to return to be our u21 manager. He’ll have a taste for it etc

It would be very saints for him to leave, get the Barnsley job and have an amazing career and we instead appoint Carrick who gets sacked in April

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Yes, that's a large part of my fear again. We're the architects of our own downfall much of the time, but also victims of circumstance brought about by the foolishness.

He will be begging to go back to the under 21's if we get turned over next game!

The Charlton game is massive for a couple of reasons.

Obviously, another 3 points adds more weight to his argument for getting the job longer term. But particularly as no one can argue that this is an easy game. Charlton are in great form and have only lost once at home this season.

I also think beating Nathan Jones would win him a lot of support amongst Saints fans!

Got to be honest. It is very boring isn't it?

I haven't posted for ages, come along every now and then to check out comments, latest news, and nothing much changes.

They either seem to do it too quickly and get a strange manager or hang on and hang on and get a strange manager.

Oh well - such is life.

I don't see any optimism here whatsoever!
Thanks SR

The thing is that Tonda is already under contract. So all this give him a contract until the end of the season talk is weird, I know we did it with Selles and presumably that came with a bit of a pay rise for him.

That was very short-sighted of SR so I would be massively surprised if they repeated this again.

The best thing to do is to keep him in interim charge and make him work for a new contract(exactly what should have happened with Selles).

If he does well, then sign him up to a new contract as manager, if not so well, he can go back to U21s with a thank you.

Simple really!

st_brendy said:

There's no need to give him in contract in order for him to remain overseeing things.

If he does well in the next game, give him the game after. And if he does well in that, give him the game after that. And so on, and so. It could last days, or weeks, or months.

I wouldn't even be thinking about upgrading him from caretaker for sometime yet. It's not like Norwich, for example, are suddenly going to swoop in and appoint him as their next manager if we don't act fast to secure him.

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Problem with that approach is our players don’t seem to respond too well to an interim manager who has been told he will have the job until the end of the season. They seem to stop working and just coast

AshbySaint said:

Problem with that approach is our players don’t seem to respond too well to an interim manager who has been told he will have the job until the end of the season. They seem to stop working and just coast

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So not much different to when we have a permanent manager then

Saints_Alive said:

A big reason why i'm hoping that they don't choose to make Tonda manager for a length of time is that he appears to be wedded to picking the same 3 CBs system that Still did.

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Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm pretty sure that won't change regardless of who the manager is.

Saints_Alive said:

A big reason why i'm hoping that they don't choose to make Tonda manager for a length of time is that he appears to be wedded to picking the same 3 CBs system that Still did.
I don't think that it makes best use of our resources as Fellows and Azaz are not playing in their best positions and we are too light in central midfield still.
We really have the players to dominate lesser teams if we play with less defensive players and more attacking ones and we still haven't seen Fellows, Azaz and Leo start together in the 4-2-3-1 I believe that they were brought here to play in.

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Unless we move on a centre back or 2 then I can’t see any manager moving away from 3 at the back. Having 4 who would likely expect to play most weeks (and Quarshie who we should give as much minutes to develop as possible) means playing a back 3 would seem a good idea to most managers.

The issue with the back 3 for me this season has been far more the wing backs not being wing backs and knowing their role. Still unsure on Welington and if he’s more a wingback or full back, Fellows possibly can play RWB as you’d hope he won’t have too much defensive work to do.

Agree about Azaz, Fellows and Scienza. My feeling is that we did want to play 4231, and recruited accordingly. But we wanted to shift another centre back or 2 (we signed Quarshie very early in the window, I think with the belief that THB wouldn’t be here). When we weren’t able to move one of the centre backs on it tied Still’s hands somewhat (especially if you buy into the “core rotten group” containing THB and Stephens)

So yeah, the squad make up is flexible enough to play several formations, it would appear that certain players “need”, in their own minds anyway, to be playing and that forced the decision