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O'Neil In, Out and Shaking it all about

Kenny said:
Cling on for a month then get annoyed at the names being linked to replace him
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It will be like a re run of our Summer transfer thread - only shorter one assumes .
 
Just noticed he has now lost 50% of his league games in charge of us
 
Around this time last year i was fully onboard the GON out train, but then we beat Man City out of nowhere and it kind of kick started things. It does concern me that there are some fundamental issues with the way we play/defend that he doesn't seem capable of addressing from a coaching perspective. It could be that plugging Andre into the team helps, but we can't just fall apart whenever he's not on the pitch because GON can't get a grip on the tactical side of it.

I still don't think i really want GON sacked because i do want him to do well. I do quite like him, but something is not quite working if we're still struggling with the same issues months & months on end.

The board are definitely not helping him in terms of proper investment into the team. I think we're signing some decent players but there's areas of weakness too and, it's just not investment. I don't expect Fosun to spend like Chelsea, but this was the summer of financial freedom and we still had a massive surplus on our activity.

For 3ish years under Nuno, i genuinely believed that anything could be possible. I knew of course we weren't going to win every game, but i felt we could win any game. We had genuine ambition, and now we're just in that rut of existing in the premier league for the sake of existing in the premier league. We're now talking about needing a run of games against the teams likely to finish in the bottom 8 in order to get points on the board. It's just quite sad really and as a result, it's hard to get too worked up whether GON stays or goes**, because the fundamentals of the club will remain and the next manager will likely have to deal with the same issues.

** - I appreciate i say that as somebody who hasn't been to Wolves in the GON era, a combination of geography & the ticket prices means a family day out at wolves is now somewhere in the region of £300, which is a lot for us. Maybe i'd get more worked up if i had committed financially to watching these results.
 
Wolf of Ashford said:
Around this time last year i was fully onboard the GON out train, but then we beat Man City out of nowhere and it kind of kick started things. It does concern me that there are some fundamental issues with the way we play/defend that he doesn't seem capable of addressing from a coaching perspective. It could be that plugging Andre into the team helps, but we can't just fall apart whenever he's not on the pitch because GON can't get a grip on the tactical side of it.
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Agree with a lot of your post and I was just thinking yesterday about how our whole season last time out seemed to turn on that out-of-nowhere result against Man City. I thought GON was done for before that, but gave him the benefit of the doubt afterwards that maybe it was the lack of pre-season that had led to the chaos up until that point.

I don't get how GON has found himself in the tactical situation he's now in having had a full pre-season.

The only thing I can assume is that Hobbs didn't get him the players he was expecting to get. Well, if GON wants to stick with the 'project', he needs to find some tactics that work for this squad of players. Lemina was clearly out of position yesterday. He looked uncomfortable, he made mistakes, and it was nuts to have him there instead of players far better suited to the role. His goal papered over this for much of the game. We had makeshift teams for most of the second half of last season. There are no excuses for finding ourselves in the same position again.
 
It shouldn't be that difficult surely. Just look at the players we have and pick the tactics that get the best out of them. It's not like we have a load of terrible players.
 
Banjo said:
Agree with a lot of your post and I was just thinking yesterday about how our whole season last time out seemed to turn on that out-of-nowhere result against Man City. I thought GON was done for before that, but gave him the benefit of the doubt afterwards that maybe it was the lack of pre-season that had led to the chaos up until that point.

I don't get how GON has found himself in the tactical situation he's now in having had a full pre-season.

The only thing I can assume is that Hobbs didn't get him the players he was expecting to get. Well, if GON wants to stick with the 'project', he needs to find some tactics that work for this squad of players. Lemina was clearly out of position yesterday. He looked uncomfortable, he made mistakes, and it was nuts to have him there instead of players far better suited to the role. His goal papered over this for much of the game. We had makeshift teams for most of the second half of last season. There are no excuses for finding ourselves in the same position again.
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Playing all 3 CMs in that formation was weak management. Reminded me of Saunders going 3 at the back against Cardiff because he didn't want to make a decision.
 
Banjo said:
Agree with a lot of your post and I was just thinking yesterday about how our whole season last time out seemed to turn on that out-of-nowhere result against Man City. I thought GON was done for before that, but gave him the benefit of the doubt afterwards that maybe it was the lack of pre-season that had led to the chaos up until that point.

I don't get how GON has found himself in the tactical situation he's now in having had a full pre-season.

The only thing I can assume is that Hobbs didn't get him the players he was expecting to get. Well, if GON wants to stick with the 'project', he needs to find some tactics that work for this squad of players. Lemina was clearly out of position yesterday. He looked uncomfortable, he made mistakes, and it was nuts to have him there instead of players far better suited to the role. His goal papered over this for much of the game. We had makeshift teams for most of the second half of last season. There are no excuses for finding ourselves in the same position again.
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RE: the bolded part here, I don't think it's that much of a mystery: O'Neil isn't a particularly good coach, and the more time he has with the squad the more that becomes a problem.

Lopetegui is a good quality coach, he came in and introduced discipline to a shaky squad - it wasn't necessarily pretty or revolutionary, but it was functional, and it clearly marked a stop to the inexorable decline which had been grinding on and on ever since Lage's first day. O'Neil then arrived, found a squad which was functionally working but lacking in flair, goals, and optimism, and set about trying to fix those problems.

But now we've had more than a full seasons's worth of games with him in the dugout and the trend line is very clear to see - his way of encouraging the team to score more goals and show more flair is to progressively loosen tactical cohesion and rigidity. Everyone's clearly been told to take risks, push forward, be positive, etc, and as much as it helped the players' attitudes to be let off the leash it hasn't actually improved results, and it's come at the expense of any kind of ability to control games.

In every match this season it's felt like watching a pre-season friendly where the team has been sent out with instructions to "just try things" or "we want to work on our attacking movement in this one" - there's this vibe, a certain lack of seriousness, which I can't quite place my finger on, but the results we're seeing feel very much like we're into a death spiral now when it comes to GON's time here. I just don't know how he turns this around without becoming a completely different kind of manager.
 
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pr0sl0 said:
In every match this season it's felt like watching a pre-season friendly where the team has been sent out with instructions to "just try things" or "we want to work on our attacking movement in this one" - there's this vibe, a certain lack of seriousness, which I can't quite place my finger on, but the results we're seeing feel very much like we're into a death spiral now when it comes to GON's time here. I just don't know how he turns this around without becoming a completely different kind of manager.
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Against Arsenal we tried to be in the game but they are a much better side. Chelsea was a shambles. Forest was more solid and against Newcastle I thought there was some more progression. If Dawson was a bit shorter and Doherty/Gomes had been a bit better Newcastle would not have scored. I thought our starting XI were a nice balance of functional and flair and across the 90 minutes we created good opportunities (Strand Larsen and Cunha) and restricted Newcastle in the main.

Ait Nouri has calmed down since Chelsea, Semedo is our best option down the right, Dawson is clearly necessary in the middle...and for significant portions of the game our midfield was on top. Particularly in getting the ball, we could be better (less predictable) when we have the ball.

I like watching us for the most part. It is better than much of what was served up by Lage and Lopetegui...but not as much hope as under Nuno.

Personally, I don't think we will be in a relegation struggle...I think we'll go down fairly comfortably. Winning doesn't come easily and we don't make it any easier.
 
I try really hard (not very successfully sometimes) not to have knee-jerk reactions to things, and have been fairly consistently behind GON since he arrived. However, the evidence is indicative of a terminal decline in results and if it continues it will end only one way. This isn't a knee-jerk reaction, this is a reaction that has been building since March which was the last time we actually looked like we could win games.

I like O'Neil, I think he's a decent man, and I have wanted him to succeed. He won't. He can't get the team to defend which means we are reliant on 1 or 2 quality players to dig us out of the shit, and that is asking too much of them. We will be relegated without something being done. Thanks for your efforts Gary and good luck for the future.

A major problem we have though is what decent, self-respecting manager is going to want to come and work with the clueless cunts who run the club? They will see how Lop & GON were lied to about transfers, and if they are in their right mind they tell Hobbs and Shi to fuck off. Which means we are likely to get another sub-par clown like Lage.
 
I’m wondered for a while if Jeff having worked his way up the Fosun ladder, was found out to not be very good, and they wanted him out the way as far away as possible, bought us to let him run something that wasn’t a Fosun core business and didn’t matter in their grand plan.
I know that’s a mad thing to think and say out loud, but could explain why we appear as a footnote in the accounts, and why owners turn up very rarely
 
The Saturday Boy said:
Against Arsenal we tried to be in the game but they are a much better side. Chelsea was a shambles. Forest was more solid and against Newcastle I thought there was some more progression. If Dawson was a bit shorter and Doherty/Gomes had been a bit better Newcastle would not have scored. I thought our starting XI were a nice balance of functional and flair and across the 90 minutes we created good opportunities (Strand Larsen and Cunha) and restricted Newcastle in the main.

Ait Nouri has calmed down since Chelsea, Semedo is our best option down the right, Dawson is clearly necessary in the middle...and for significant portions of the game our midfield was on top. Particularly in getting the ball, we could be better (less predictable) when we have the ball.

I like watching us for the most part. It is better than much of what was served up by Lage and Lopetegui...but not as much hope as under Nuno.

Personally, I don't think we will be in a relegation struggle...I think we'll go down fairly comfortably. Winning doesn't come easily and we don't make it any easier.
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This is fair - the results so far have hidden how close some of the games have been - but at the same time that is kind of exactly the problem.

You can’t rely on edge-case luck in this league. Teams that succeed at the highest level (it’s a cliche, but it’s true) make their own luck - they don’t let games get to such a state where they need to essentially chain together coin tosses to get anything.
 
Dire Wolf said:
I try really hard (not very successfully sometimes) not to have knee-jerk reactions to things, and have been fairly consistently behind GON since he arrived. However, the evidence is indicative of a terminal decline in results and if it continues it will end only one way. This isn't a knee-jerk reaction, this is a reaction that has been building since March which was the last time we actually looked like we could win games.

I like O'Neil, I think he's a decent man, and I have wanted him to succeed. He won't. He can't get the team to defend which means we are reliant on 1 or 2 quality players to dig us out of the shit, and that is asking too much of them. We will be relegated without something being done. Thanks for your efforts Gary and good luck for the future.

A major problem we have though is what decent, self-respecting manager is going to want to come and work with the clueless cunts who run the club? They will see how Lop & GON were lied to about transfers, and if they are in their right mind they tell Hobbs and Shi to fuck off. Which means we are likely to get another sub-par clown like Lage.
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So , you don't see Sergio Conceicao being a runner so . Marseille wanted him I think and he didn't go for it .

Someone like him I'd like . Potter too I suppose .
 
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