Champions League.

Lukaku should stay at West Brom imo, if he goes back to Chelsea he will likely not get games, no matter how good he has been.

Agree with City/Chelsea's lack of talent nuturing, though I think City will get better in that regard in the not too distant future. See Scott Sinclair as a prime example!

You're most likely right about that Terminator

Dr Seven, that is very true.

In terms of net spend , Brendan has already spent more of FSG's money in transfers than Kenny did. Although one of his remits has been to reduce the wage bill, which he has done,

In terms of performance there is little to compare between Kenny and Rodgers. Under KD we finished 8th, won a cup and lost in final of another. Under BR we are one position higher in the league, but were disappointing in the cup competitions. Dalglish qualified for Europe, where BR looks unlikely to.

BR's team has played an attractive style of football and the team are scoring more goals which is important. However, until the season is over, it's a bit premature to make any final judgement on it's merits or failures. There's 18 points to play for and amount we can get could quite easily change my perception of how well BR has done. Currently I'm happy enough and believe he should be given time he needs to turn our fortunes around. Changing manager would again would be ridiculous. BR needs three seasons minimum to see where he can take us.

Paisley, a lot of the difference between KD and BR, is down to KD was only supposed to be a temporary fix. He had no real long term plan in place, which is something BR appears to have.

There is very little difference in terms of your league position, and the fact that you wont a cup last season, while not totally irrelevant, doesn't support KD being a better manager. Cups sometimes require a fair amount of luck, KD had that last season, BR hasn't.

I completely agree that it is too early to judge BR a success, or a failure. I think even the end of this season is still too early. As you say, 2 or 3 years and you'll start to see more, it is a long time, but if he can get you in and around the Europe spots until then, he'll have done a good job, from my perspective.

As Fergie shows, sometimes it takes a few years before you can get on to something special. I'm not saying BR can, or can't emulate that, but surely that is what any manager should be striving for?

we created more chances and had a tighter defence under Kenny

The players finishing let him down

KT

Agreed

In the first half of the season under Kenny, we created a lot of chances and our finishing was abysmal.

In the second half, our creativity was awful. We'd work the ball around at a stodgy pace and eventually someone would swing a cross in on top of the opposition's settled defence. There was barely any creative movement or passing - it was generally either a cross or a safe pass.

IMO we try to create a far better quality of chance under Rodgers than we did under Kenny. A lot of our goals are from quick breaks because the players are willing and confident enough to carry the ball or play a progressive pass, whereas under Kenny (especially in the second half of the season) we tended to slow the game down when we got the ball. The passing was really risk-averse and tentative, allowing the opposition to get behind the ball, and because we were bereft of creative confidence, someone would inevitably just toss a cross onto the settled defence.

Even in the first half of the season, there was too much emphasis on crossing for my liking, even if it was creating chances as the players were initially confident enough to pass at a decent tempo. Once the confidence ran out, Kenny couldn't turn things round and we became pretty dire in truth.

There's still a lot of work for Brendan to do (as has been mentioned, our defence needs sorting), but IMO some of the heavy defeats we've inflicted on lesser teams as well as the variety of goals we score show that we've vastly improved in attack.

what worries me is we attacked pretty much all match every match under Kenny and the defence was excellent.

So it's not the quality of the defenders, they're proven.

But for some reason our defenders have looked clueless this season.

Yeah, Kenny and Clarke got Skrtel in particular playing to his potential, his positioning was great and when his aggressive play was intelligently used he was an absolutely brilliant partner for Agger.

Now he looks lost again though and his aggression is a liability when he's attacking the ball from the poor positions he takes up. Agger has cost us some big goals at set pieces, too.

I think we're going to be more open anyway because of the way the defenders split when we have the ball, but individually they've been poor too and it's something we really have to improve on.

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