Recent improvement in attitude

Agreed 100% with your first paragraph and this discussion started with me playing devils advocate too... interesting discussion though. My supervisor just turned up to work now so will have to reply in more detail later

 

Does he not realise how important this is?

 

When I see some of the comments on here I have to wander if some of us actually know what higher management is really like. Sadly when the top managements decisions go wrong they tend to blame people lower down the chain. Which is understandable to a certain degree but continued failings have got to be the top of the chain decisions. You just cant keep blaming the team manager, as a director you too have responsibilities. I would be very surprised if the new owner would accept another failure without some sort of action. Who knows.......?

 

Where did you wander?

Is not also possible that it is a combination of all of the above?

 

We have a full 25 man squad, 24 of you exclude Gardos and Clasie. With 2 'adequate' players in every position.
We have enough 'adequate' players.

We lack any exceptional attackers but that's not really a hole you can just go out and fill on our budget

There aren't any glaring holes, ask any member on this forum, and we've had discussions on many times in the past, and they come up with a different answer. Target man, pacy striker, pacy winger, creative AM, somebody to shoot from outside of the box.

For me the biggest hole is a pacy right winger. But we have a 'pacy' right winger in Redmond. So if that is a hole why have 2 successive manager not used our 'pacy' right winger in the pacy right winger hole for more than 45 minutes over two seasons?

If you analyse Reed's decisions individually, I come to the conclusion that's they're usually the correct decision.

I said his biggest mistake was sacking Puel but we don't truely know the reason for that. If he had completely lost the players then it was probably right to sack him, even though he was the correct manager. Before that his biggest mistake was bringing in Redmond as he didn't suit the manager. But we didn't know who the manager would be so it was a choice between rolling the dice with redmond - filling the glaring right winger hole, or buying no attacker. Would you really say buying no attacker for last season would have been the right decision?

Then his mistake was not bringing in a manager consistent to the previous one for whom he scouted the players. This season, after having to sack Puel he brought in Pellegrino, a manager who played almost identically to Puel. Which is quite a remarkable achievement really since 2 managers are usually like snowflakes. He also didn't roll the dice with an attacker this time.

Personally I think he made the wrong decision with bringing in Pellegrino, I think he should still have been looking for a manager similiar to Koeman who played traditional wingers, not Puel. Past that I think most of his decisions have been the right ones. He's just been unlucky on his rolls of the dice. And football involes a lot of luck.

To answer your question, I don't think he's untouchable, but he would have to be making a lot more wrong decisions before I would consider getting rid.

 

Australia...............At some stage you have to ask certain questions. Yes of course but continued failings..........You have to start looking at higher up the scale. Or even on what basis are these decisions being made. We are only making judgements from the outside as fans. Even we can see when things are not right. We all have are own ideas how things can be corrected. A director on the other hand has to get it right and if he doesn't...........?????

 

Interesting discussion and one other thing I will throw in is that there will always be someone who takes the opposite view to you. So for example, couple of people have mentioned sacking Puel was a bad decision by Reed, the fans that wanted him gone would say that was a good decision/correct thing to do, but hiring Puel in the first place was a big mistake by Reed. Or taking so long to sack him was a big mistake, so either way Reed will have been wrong in someone's eyes.

 

Very true.....however a director lives or dies by his decisions.......if you go back 5/6 years perhaps we should be asking wether his decision making has been on the whole good or bad or indifferent.............Consensus is probably indifferent. IE some good, more bad? Depends how you look at it.

 

Add to this that we've basically rolled the dice once too often, & I think you're spot on. You can't keep losing players and expect to get lucky with the replacements every time.

We still have a decent PL squad imo. What we don't currently have, is much of a team. I don't really know who is to blame, and I don't even think that matters; what does matter is how we turn this around. There were definite signs before last night that we were starting to do that.

In other words, I have no clue what the answer to our problems is. So I'll just hang in and see what happens I suppose.

 

In the world of commerce, Beddy, if a middle manager messes up he packs his bags. But if the CEO of a huge concern messes up, he moves on to another huge concern, and gets a the chance to mess up all over again . (See Adam Crozier at the FA and Royal Mail, for example)

 

West Ham please.

 

I think the only failling Les has is that he sometimes tries to hardball for too long. We missed out on Toby because we wanted to wait for the cheap option. We waited far too long with Koeman and Puel was obviously a last minute or at least 3rd/4th choice. Same with Pellegrino. That may well be more down to instruction from above. He may have been told that he must wait for better offers.

So in the end I think rather than it being Les's fault entirely it is that we have missed the boat several times because of dalliance/trying to save a few quid.

As for Pellegrino, last night seems to have cancelled out the upturn. 4-1..at home.......to Leicester?? He is going to need a very good December to stay in the post IMO.

All the names that were "in the frame" before we ended up with Puel?? All the names that were "in the frame" before we ended up with Pellegrino. Both were brought in late so obviously not the first choices. We could have had Silva in the summer I am sure IF we had gone straight for him and not pondered around.

I doubt very much it is all Les. He obviously doesn't have a free reign a la Cortese so he must have to follow a brief of sorts from above whether that be from Ralph or Kat (previously) and it may well be that he had to ponder and try to save pennies (millions of )

 

I suspect there's been, not exactly disinterest, but less than total commitment from the very top for a while now. The takeover clearly dragged on much, much longer than expected and I suspect that was part of the problem.

Pellegrino has yet to convince me but I don't know that we'll see much difference unless (until?) the new owners start flexing their muscles. I thought the below (from football365) was an interesting write up of him so far:

Mauricio Pellegrino
If Claude Puel discovered the issues with Southampton’s shooting, Pellegrino hasn’t solved them. Southampton’s shot conversion rate last season was 10.1%, the lowest in the division. It has increased marginally to 10.9%, but then Southampton are taking fewer shots and creating fewer chances.

The difference is that Puel could organise a defence, something that seems to be troubling Pellegrino. If the issues with Southampton’s attack are frustrating, their defensive numbers are alarming. Pellegrini’s team are allowing 47% more shots on target than they were last season.

Marco Silva has also seen an increase in shots on target faced at Watford, albeit not to this extent. Yet Silva has counteracted that with improved attacking numbers; Watford are simply a more open, expansive team.

Pellegrino hasn’t done that. Southampton are as bad at scoring goals as they were under the last manager, and worse at defending. The last manager got sacked.

 

Not untouchable. But he carries the vision and ambition of Nicola Cortese and Markus Liebherr. On the whole he has done a remarkable job, with only one major error. The failure to replace Pelle. The rest of the apparent slide, from sacking Puel to our inconsistency, stems from this one failure. One could possibly say that the club had too close an ear to the fans' concerns by sacking Puel. Personally, I don't think the club were overly concerned by the style. Puel obtained results on several fronts. And now he's proving his own point. But sacking Les.? Not even close.

 

If Saints were to sack MP2, in the next few weeks, he would be the second manager who would not have been backed in the transfer market.
Yes I get it about the sign players by committee scenario etc, but the manager still has the final say on which players he would prefer to try to get in as his first options.
Claude showed at Nice that he likes players who can hit very quickly on the counter. He has the same at Leicester, and things are starting to look good for him.
He didn’t have that same quality with us, and the rest is history.
In all walks of life, as a manager, you need to surround yourself with people you can trust to put in a shift and do a good job for you, even when you make the wrong call.
If you don’t have that you develop, retrain or change the personnel. Maybe MP2 should have the chance to change the personnel to fit his way, so he can at least be judged fairly.

 

Spot on Badger.

 

A good attitude, especially when struggling, is essential. I think we're all aware that Puel had a problem towards the end of the last season....the team seemed to give up and decide it wasn't down to each of them as individuals. You would think that a change of manager would make them up their game, but the lethargy continued....despite a couple of good players added in the person of Lemina and Hoedt. We have seen an improvement recently....and we mustn't assume that is all gone after one poor game. A quick smack round the chops and a decent run out at the weekend and we'll feel better again.

 

Fran nails it I think. Individuals is what we have, team spirit is what we used to have. We are lacking greatly in leadership and direction at the moment. We can't see what is supposed to be going on with the team and I've heard conflicting accounts from players and manager on how we are supposed to be playing. It seems confused and divided.

I think on balance the board have made difficult decisions but they have left us in a bit of a mess, turned us into a rotating door of players and manager and no foundation on which to build. Sacking the manager would seem to be at odds with that but until we have the right person in charge there's no other option, we don't get to stockpile and train them up. A change of leadership at the top however would get rid of a person who has delivered/overseen great success and provides continuity across the last few seasons. I agree with the failings, our sales and lack of key signings but it hasn't been a regular period at the top with new owners coming in, maybe they have had their hands tied. You would think as a PLC more information would be available.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/dec/14/mauricio-pellegrino-commitment-southampton-players

Food for thought here. Last season we had a divided changing room with players both backing and undermining the manager. This season we obviously have problems. MP2 comes out and questions the commitment of some players, indicating that they don't want to be here.

“Not too many players are in this situation. Obviously we have to start to choose the players that want to help the club 100%. They are human beings and sometimes they don’t have a good moment. I understand this. But their behaviour has to be committed with the club 100%.”

Do we back MP2 and get rid of VVD as we did with Fonte? Do we rebuild the 'team' from the manager up or do we bank on individuals?

 

[QUOTE="If you don’t have that you develop, retrain or change the personnel. Maybe MP2 should have the chance to change the personnel to fit his way, so he can at least be judged fairly.[/QUOTE]

Put it this way then, would you support selling VVD and Bertrand and any other bad eggs to steady the ship and start a foundation to build on?

I'm certainly convinced that we are underperforming just as we did last year. I'm not convinced that MP2 is the best manager we've ever had - to put it mildly. I'm totally convinvced VVD and Bertrand are two of the best players we've ever had. However, when they turn it on for Man City, UTD and Arsenal in front of Guardiola and Mourinho but dont get out of first gear against Leicester it makes me wonder whether they're playing for the club or themselves and whether MP2 and Puel have been having fruitless struggle to get players commited to the campaign.