Slade and Venus 'achieved' something at city. You learn something new every day.
Cant be bothered to trawl for stats but I am pretty confident that Slade had a win record in the teens not 45%
Over a 46 game season we finished 6th, one place inside the play off positions. How, after 46 games, could that be lucky? Surely luck would have evened itself out over that many games? I saw all but two games last season and I never came away from any game feeling we were lucky to get the result we did. Indeed the opposite was true on a few occasions as I felt we didn’t get the result our performances deserved. I would consider it unlucky to lose possibly your best two players through season ending injuries within weeks of each other.
Considering Biamou scored 9 goals in his debut season including two in the game that got us to Wembley and was a key player during those run in games I am sure you would agree, particularly as you posted after his first goal for us last season “how pleased you were for the lad”, that a team half full of Biamou talent should be pretty good.
Managers from 1958 to 2003 in order are; Frith, Hill, Cantwell, Milne, Sexton, Gould, McKay, Sillett, Butcher, Howe, Gould, Neal, Atkinson and Strachan.That’s 14 managers in 45 years.If you divide the number of managers into that time span it gives each manager an average of between 3 and 4 years. (apologies not 4 to 5 as I said above). You can’t take Milne out of the stats to help your argument! Hill, Cantwell, and Strachan all had five years or more while Frith and Sillett were also in post for a substantial time.
That average is probably true post top flight relegation but not before. If you look at the managers during that stable period from 1958 to 2003 lots of managers were given the chance to overcome dodgy spells. Noel Cantwell’s team survived on the last day of his first season in charge before going into another season where they were in danger of going down even after their season had finished (Leicester who eventually went down had 5 or 6 games to play when our season was finished). The board at the time stood by him and in his third season he got us to 6th in the first division and into Europe. Gordon Milne, my favourite City manager (and possibly yours?) often had to endure, as you will remember, the whole ground ringing with “Milne Out” chants during frequent relegation battles. Jimmy Hill stood by him and he went on to produce possibly our best ever team (the Fergie, Wallace team), and later the team that got to the League Cup semi final. You can make stats fit whatever argument you want but it is pretty hard to argue against the fact that in our most successful era as a club we had far less managerial turmoil.
Depends what you mean by the modern era. Since top flight relegation we have had a manager a year in probably what you would say is the modern era and that left us in the fourth division. Sacking managers doesn’t work.
Agreed, but sometimes, new systems etc need a bit of time (hopefully)
As shown above, we didn’t get relegated on many occasions when we did stick by managers who then went on to achieve things this club had never achieved before. Last season your “ Taxi for Robins” thread was to all intents and purposes a call for him to be sacked. He went on to get us promoted. If he is given the chance, I believe we will do well this season too, with another challenge for the play offs not out of the question.
Apologies if that is the case. I will still disagree with you about the plan however as I think everything worked like clockwork in the first half on Saturday until we came to putting the ball in the net. We dominated the game and the possession playing, in my opinion, good exciting attacking football. I think it is hard to blame the manager for the amount of shots and headers that were put just wide of the posts. Robin’s plan as far as I could see worked. It is surely up to the players to put the finishing touch to the excellent moves the team created.
I just think that the fact we conceded in the first minute of the second half changed things completely. We looked shell shocked for ten minutes when they created another couple of chances. It also allowed them to sit back, frustrate, time waste etc.We never had the fluency second half that we did in the first but the fact that we still made three or four good chances still gives me hope. It is true that even last season, once we went behind we found it hard to come back, often because other teams would sit back and frustrate. It is something that needs to improve.
The referee was giving strange decisions, mainly against Allasani, but he was not the reason we were beaten.
I agree but it certainly did not help.
