Back, sack and crack - should Ralph stay in post

Ralph is going nowhere and should the nightmare of relegation happen, he will still be here, if he wants to be. Ralph is a very good manager but he is being let down by a number of players, and when that happens, as SaintinNZ has said, there isn't much a manager can do about it. With the number of squad players who are not performing, and the lack of replacements available, I can't but feel sorry for Ralph. The expectations we all had of Ralph were unrealistic, especially given the poor recruitment, poor players and the complete mess that is our club ownership and management.

Ralph has made far fewer mistakes since he has been here than most of our players make during a single match. For my money we should be very grateful that Ralph is here because no one can know whether any other manager could or would do any better. My guess is it would be more of the same lacklustre crap performances we all know so well.

We need some new players, new coaches and an owner that has a vision for the club. That will take a while and a lot of money. Gao clearly won't fund all of it so we had better hope he can sell the club so we can get back to following a team that has energy, passion and the ability to turn in some pretty spectacular results from time to time. We are never going to be world beaters but with Ralph, some decent players and a winning attitude throughout the team perhaps we can all start enjoying it again.

.....and make Danny Ings our team captain because with his his work rate, encouragement and positive outlook, he bloody well deserves it.

 

You may be correct, but if we do get relegated if be amazed if he were lining up as our manager come Aug 2020. I’d also say you dont know if any other manager should have done the same or worse.

I am not sure we all had unrealistic expectations, I thought we would struggle but not as much as we have, but my biggest surprise is the way Ralph has got players playing out of position, and the downturn in form of PEH and Redmond. Now i am not blaming Ralph solely for latter, but if he is a manager it is job to get the best out of the players he has, and I think he has fallen short so far this year. Ings has been great, and I think that is down to Ings as he is fitter so far this season. Let’s remember he brought in Che Adams to play ahead of Ings (in my opinion) and it didn’t work out, Danny came in and has been superb. Is that down to Ralphs management and coaching - I am not so sure...

 

He does the bare minimum and is back on his heels most of the time. He annoys the hell out of me.

 

I cannot go along with this. He was excellent today and I have felt that he has been amongst our better players this season. It would be ridiculous to leave him out of the squad as he is easily one of the most talented players in the team. I think the dip in form of JWP and Redmond this season has exacerbated the problems at the back but with the likes of the transformed Boufal, Djenepo, Ings, Bertrand, McCarthy, Romeu, Redmond and JWP in the squad, it is not difficult to feel that the team has under-performed. I think we need to get to grips with the defence and this may require as many as three signings before the team starts to put some distance between the other relegation candidates.

As I said previously, I don't feel that the current side is any weaker than last season but the form post-Christmas has not been replicated. Whilst I feel Ralph has to answer for the bizarre experimentation with formations which has contributed to the problems, we are in a very similar situation as last season where the experimentation ceased at the point we started to grind out performances. With a settled squad, the performances improve . The issue for me is that the pool from which to select players who can be relied upon is small. That said, there have been bonuses with Stephens seemingly not the liability he was now he has returned to the squad.

Some of the problems have been of Ralph's own makings and I think this has probably seen the scales removed from the eyes of some supporters who believed Ralph was so good that the likes of Spurs would have him lined up to replace Poch. I cannot see that scenario ever happening yet he is clearly not the walking disaster zone that Mark Hughes and MP 2 were. The style of football when we decide to play at tempo and press is more enjoyable than under Puel although I would concede the performances as not as pragmatic as under Claude. For me, I think we can only start to judge him once he has been allowed to acquire his own players. I recognise that Adams has under-whelmed but I can see the same happening with him as was the case with Redmond whose early performances also drew criticism.

 

I agree Ian, he was excellent today. But... he wasn't earlier in the season. Its only the last month or so that he has looked committed. Ralph was obviously trying not to use him for a reason, whatever that may be and no player is bigger than the team.

It will all be water under the bridge if the current team spirit is maintained. testament to his professionalism and Ralphs man management if he can get everyone back onboard the train.

 

No doubting his talent but there have been a few rumours of him being a whinger and a bit of a **** stirrer. I'll be delighted if he shows his true class for the rest of the season and gets another England call up, he is certainly good enough.

 

So, coming up to the end of Dec, most wanted ~RH to stay, a number wanted to defer till this moment, and so really negative people wanted him gone...

 

I don't know what to make of Hassenhuttl now, other than obviously it would be stupid to sack him right now.

We are playing good football, but we're also playing with a simple, somewhat compact 4-4-2, utilizing a lineup that was in place before he got here. Cedric is back at RB, McCarthy is back in goal, Bertrand is back at LB, Ings is back at striker. Armstrong has always been available and probably deserved more playing time.

I can give him a lot of credit for being flexible in his lineups and tactics and making the necessary changes, as not every manager would do that. But that would also mean that he was the one who ****ed it up in the first place. I can also give him credit for rallying the squad and getting them playing with the right attitude again, but that also would mean he was responsible for their poor mental state in the first place. He tried to do something rather different and unique with the team, and it failed miserably. Now he's playing how I think most managers would have played in the first place.

Of course, it's unrealistic to expect perfection. Every manager is going to cock it up from time to time, that's why they get sacked so often. I appreciate that he was bold and tried to change things, and then realized it wasn't working. Perhaps he always knew he had this in his back pocket if his plans failed. As long as we are winning, it doesn't matter.

I'm a lot less sold on the whole "Austrian Klopp" thing where we are lucky to have him and just a stepping stone on his path to greatness. But if the reality is, he's more of a plain, everyday solid coach then I'm still quite happy with that.

 

For me, Ralph has tried every option to get us playing different formations but the players haven’t been up to the job. No option left but to resort to a 442. I couldn’t give a hoot if it gives the players confidence again and gets them winning. Formation aside we are playing positive front foot football and it’s working.

We are looking at 2 seasons at least before we have a revitalised squad, can’t see it happening any quicker without money which we allegedly don’t have. Simply hope Ralph gets the chance to see this through and still wants to.

 

Or maybe his tactics sucked.

 

His and the three managers before him.

 

Puel got good results. His style of play certainly didn't make the fans happy, but it was effective.

I haven't said that Hasenhuttl is a ****ty manager. Just that he may have been using **** tactics. He has the same team available to him now as he did at the start of the season. If you give him credit for the team playing well now, then he has to deserve the blame for the team playing crap earlier. If the team is decent in a 4-4-2 and **** in 4-2-2-2 or 5-2-3-1 and you insist on playing those formations with players out of position, that's on you.

So really, that leaves two ****ty managers and I think Pellegrino probably would have done a bit better if he'd had Ings. And I knew Hughes was ****, he did nothing to improve the team, he just got lucky and barely kept us up because some other teams collapsed.

But also yes, it's entirely possible to hire 3, 4, 5 ****ty managers in a row. If the squad is so awful, we must suck at recruiting. If we suck at recruiting players, it's not unreasonable that we would tend to suck at recruiting managers as well.

 

Hmm, well the way I see it, he's actually playing 4-2-2-2 now, in that we line up in a very narrow formation when the opposition have the ball in their back line. There were a couple of times against Crystal Palace where it was really clear - line up narrow, the front two pressing the opposition. Once they sniff an opening, the advanced midfielder on that side and the fullback join the forwards in pressing hard, while the opposite AM drifts into the middle. Obviously, whatever "n-n-n" name you give to the system, it is only an indication of the starting position - once things turn dynamic, players move around much more fluidly.

So to come back to the original question, why have we started to look so much more competent in recent games? The obvious thing that Ralph has changed is to dispense with the three at the back configurations - I think he was never really sold on it anyway and saw it as a way to try to be more defensive, but he doesn't have the centre backs to do it (I know people like to see CBs striding out of defence, but even good ones seem to panic a little when they realise they are in the wrong half of the field).

But that alone does not explain the change in confidence. In fact it should make it worse, because with this system you can easily end up with 5 players pressing and the ball in the possession of the opposition. No, in my opinion, what he's done is he has taught one of our players to play the deep-lying midfielder role in the way he wants it done - the player in question being JWP. Last year I'd have have described him as an attacking mid, who could fill in in lots of other places, but was short on pace and who did not have the heading and tackling to challenge Romeu in the DM role. This year JWP is winning headers, going in with crunching tackles and making lung-busting sprints from the halfway line to join the last line of defence when the opposition break. He and PEH now form a complementary pair in the engine room of the team (or at least, they do when PEH doesn't forget how to pass the football).

As you can see, I'm a Ralph fan, but I'm not blind to his faults. The way he wants to play is aggressive and definitely doesn't fit in with the conventional wisdom of how to stay safe in the Premier League. There will be times when we get soundly beaten (hopefully not 9-0 again though). He often doesn't change things as early as I'd like, when the system isn't working (West Ham being a good example). And sometimes I think he confuses the players so they start games too cautiously and become tentative. However, I do think he has a plan and I think right now he's getting a tune out of some average players, long may it last.

 

Great post.

 

It's clearly a 4-4-2 to me. You can see it when we're in our own half. We're nicely laid in two banks of four in a low block.

The "wingers" tend to cut inside and play more centrally when we are in possession, and also to accommodate overlapping runs. So they do kind of end up playing in front of the midfielders. But that's just football in 2020. No one really uses hug-the-touchline-and-send-in-crosses-from-the-corner-flag old-school wingers any more.

JWP has always been a hard-worker and puts in the effort on defense. He's just not that great at it, in part because he lacks speed and size. But he's okay just because of his workrate and willingness to try. There's no way he can play as a defensive mid. As a box-to-box central midfielder he's okay but if you notice he tends more often to play a little ahead of PEH, so he's definitely the more attacking oriented of the two midfielders.

 

Mistaken post

 

What did you think it was?

 

This is also the formation he often used at Leipzig, so the suggestion that he has had to give up his ideas and play the old-fashioned 4-4-2 is pretty inaccurate. The 5-3-2 and assorted variants were when he deviated from past practice, but that's not a bad thing either. Remember how frequently people complained about Poch and his lack of a "plan B"?

 

There are 5 people I would like to hear from.

 

Name and shame ...