The Quandary of Farke

Thing about Farke is that I am 90% confident he will have you competing for top 2, even if the football itself isn't great. I'd prefer that to taking a risk on a potentially more exciting manager who doesn't give you that kind of guarantee, especially when they wouldn't have a pre-season to embed their system on these players.

We have been immense defensively since Boro. That's the basis that title winners have to build on. The games we have played have seen us create chances, without them being finished adequately. That's not an issue with the system. It requires the players getting into goalscoring positions to finish better. Always going to be a problem when you consider you've lost the most reliable source of goals we had last season. Allow players like Ramazani to bed into the team, get James back from injury and be a bit patient (not this forum's calling card) with Joseph.

Generally there has been a MASSIVE overreaction to the Cardiff game. We comfortably won the game, controlled the match for 88 minutes of it. Do you know how rare that is? Almost never happens. Even Man City's opponents tend to wrestle at least some portion of the game from them. Was it great to watch? No. On another day we could have scored 4 or 5. Penalty save, Aaronsson missed a sitter, think Ramazani should get a second, too. Is that a system issue? Bear in mind also Cardiff is a place we have a historically bad record. If you'd offered me a comfortable 2-0 win, no injuries, no sending offs, before the game I'd have taken it straight away. Honestly you'd think we'd have lost if you were gauging just off the reactions.

Thought there were positives to take. Bogle's best game for us, and the first I think we looked able to exploit him down the right hand side. Joseph and Aaronson bright in the first half, its a nice goal for Ramazani etc etc. The things we are doing right at the moment are the things you build from if you want to get promoted. 1 goal conceded in last 5 games, 3 wins in 4 etc etc. So building on those things is exactly what we need to be doing, instead of having reactionary weirdos wanting to tear up a winning side for the optimistic prospect of some hypothetical better.

I'd have changed manager after the play-off final defeat, but after giving Farke the summer I think you have to stick with this for now, especially as its clear the way he's getting us playing is working (as much as people might like to pretend it isn't). I also think we have a much more identifiable system this year, now that he can't be reliant on the game changing heroics of Summerville and Rutter. It might not be great now, but I'd like to see that system develop, and think it could be the difference this season.