Benitez ain't doing much better
comment by Hulk's little brother Yoda (U1250)
posted 8 minutes ago
Benitez ain't doing much better
----------------------------------------------------------------------
It's all relative..
Comment deleted by Site Moderator
I'm sticking with 10 games although without much hope. If the owners gave him the boot and brought in Benitez I don't think I'd be too disappointed!
I’m gonna day it. I like to give players and managers the benefit of doubt.
My doubt ran out today. I think Puel is taking this team and club backwards and the only thing currently saving us is decent recruitment.
I’m done with him.
Mersey - I agree entirely - he doesn't inspire me as a supporter so I'm left wondering how can he inspire the players??
To say he's drinking in the "last chance saloon" surely sums up how the owners feel and they've proved to be somewhat ruthless in the past. My main worry would be Big Sam
You know we should be riding high and playing high with all the good feel things happening at the club, winning the Prem, playing in europe, sell out gates, new training ground on the horizon, ground extension in planning, players in England squad and playing in world cups and then there is Puel single handedly sucking the live and soul out of everyone. Systems and playing tactics that still half the team can’t play, doesn’t appear to have a plan B, 5 or 6 premier league winners not getting a game or even making the match day squad or in one case not even getting a number.
Would Bournemouth have scored four goals with Simpson and Fuchs in the team, I doubt it.
Where do we go from here - Down to the lake I fear.....
Summed up perfectly MITLBC.
Simpson being ignored or frozen out is a real mystery to me and I agree that with him and Fuchs in the defence we'd have coped better with Bournemouth's attacks.
BTW Dublin, that sounds like the title of a Floyd song!
We will beat Huddersfield, they're rotten. but I agree with the op. Cannot see claude succeeding here with his current style, doesn't work for a mid table club in this league.
comment by nuneaton_fox (U7936)
posted 12 hours, 2 minutes ago
Or maybe Haircut 100?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Well it certainly isn't fantastic day!!
You know we should be riding high and playing high with all the good feel things happening at the club, winning the Prem, playing in europe, sell out gates, new training ground on the horizon, ground extension in planning, players in England squad and playing in world cups and then there is Puel single handedly sucking the live and soul out of everyone. Systems and playing tactics that still half the team can’t play, doesn’t appear to have a plan B, 5 or 6 premier league winners not getting a game or even making the match day squad or in one case not even getting a number.
Would Bournemouth have scored four goals with Simpson and Fuchs in the team, I doubt it.
Where do we go from here - Down to the lake I fear.....
What a load of rubbish imo we have no god given right to any of the above. We are a team in transition without the old frts who have served us so well but have had there day
As for yesterday we went to Bournemouth where we havn't won and think its should be an easy win.
As for plan A B C or what would you have changed at two nil down that would of won us the match?
A new Right back immediately, after watching the fraud pretending to play there yesterday strolling back while Frazer ran away from him to score the first goal was disgraceful.
I might be wrong but he looked like he was doing the same for the second on MOTD.
I honestly don;t care if I never see him play again for Leicester but of course his position is untouchable being a favourite.
You deserved that thrashing.
The thing that makes me feel so down and sad (and I mean exactly that, not angry or with any hidden agenda to remove Puel because he is foreign or not Nigel Pearson) is neither the performance or result.
We were poor yesterday but didn’t deserve to lose 4-2 but that isn’t that much of an issue compared to other things...much much bigger worries.
I wanted us to give Puel at least 10 games as that would be 30 league games since this downward spiral started (and let’s not be naive and claim that that this is a ‘new season’ and last season shouldn’t be taken into account when reflecting on things - we more than any fans in football know the huge impact momentum can have across a closed season from old to new) and I still think we should give him that time.
Yet.....I look back and realise we’ve won just 7 in 25 games and 3 in the last 12. Which is about right for how I feel - we win about 1 in every 4 games and I’d say only 3 were convincing victories. In 25 games, since mid-December, we’ve looked only significantly better than the team we have beat a few times.
But then I stopped myself and thought ‘hold on, it’s a competitive league’...how many times will we look significantly better. But I started thinking about other results where we didn’t win and thought how many did we deserve to win? ...not really any. What I was left reflecting was that we did just about enough in lots of games to earn a draw.
And that has been a constant pattern.
But that isn’t even my main concern. After all, Puel has been trying to embed something new so if we hover around mid table whilst that is happening, with less exciting football - I can accept that.
No it’s not that. In fact, it’s not even the fact that if our results pattern for the majority of Puel’s tenure continues its only a matter of time before we are battling relegation.
It’s NOT EVEN the worrying problems that are apparent each match - this ideology to have full backs playing so high which is bizarre when not playing wingers to drop back or without reverting to 3 CBs (if this need to have our width from FBs is so desperately his wish)....or when we are on the attack it can be a 2-2-5-1 at times which leaves us desperately vulnerable down the flanks and far too cluttered around Vardy to make any really use of one of the best strikers in the league.
It isn’t even that, for someone who talks about slow building and consistency, he is constantly, constantly, constantly appearing erratic with changes to our team....it’s clear he is stubbornly prioritising his vision and preferred formation/tactics over getting the best out of what we have/what we could be.
No....none of that was the most worrying or depressing thing for me. It was a realisation yesterday that actually....despite reminders to focus on the future and shards of optimism....I actually don’t think we will be a better team even if things suddenly clicked.
IMO, if everyone played really well in that formation, I still think we would have been a better team if the most suitable players we had were playing very well in a 442. In fact, it made me realise that I had the same feeling thinking back to all the games this season and many last.
This isn’t me saying we should just look to revert to 442 as it was, but it did make me very concerned that what we were looking to create wouldn’t be any better!
Not necessarily less successful as a formation full stop, but for us currently as a team and possibly ever for our size of club.
Puel has this vision of, not overlapping full backs, but naturally attacking ones who can also get back proficiently. I don’t see his tactics or formation being that of someone who is expecting particular players to cover these full backs (who actually are wing backs, in a formation that doesn’t suit wing backs) and I don’t see them being covered naturally in our formation - a deep CM having to pull across or part of an attacking 3 pulling across and back. He is also completely sacrificing one of the most lethal finishers in this league for this 3 behind him and I just don’t see why. Even if they all click I don’t see it as being more beneficial to getting 3 points than what Vardy can provide as a goal scorer.
For this to even work he needs world class full backs and world class attacking midfielders and for Vardy to be near perfect with his finishing from the few chances he gets. All possible....but a high expectation from a ‘top’ club with world class players already there, let alone a mid table club with a young left back still learning his trade, a new right back who is really a right winger, a young attacking midfielder who has potential but constantly disappoints and a new completely unproven foreign midfielder who will have to live up to the constant pressure of being compared to Mahrez.
I look at what we needed to ‘build’ on (a vitally important verb) rather than ‘change’ and it was this - more cover in midfield and someone to take on the Okazaki role with more creativity - we have hopefully seen both become a possibility with an Ndidi/Mendy combination and the purchase of Maddison.
If you think back - did even the most ardent Puel fan or critic of previous managers ever think or say the following:
We need to play the ball around more at the back
We need to get rid of wingers and have the full backs attacking more
We need to have more players sharing the space further up the field in and around Vardy
We need to play slower football
...Puel, the owners, maybe the players, us as fans even, I think have lost track of what it is we are trying to build here.
He is changing things now that didn’t need changing, rather than just concentrating on bedding in the two new things that did.
If we had played in a 442 with Maddison in the hole behind Vardy we wouldn’t have lost that game. In fact I think we would have won. More importantly, I think we would win more games that way. Yet everything that reaped success for us is being broken down.
I feel like there has become this skewed view on what we, as fans, wanted to develop in order for our success to continue and one which we are hanging on to in order to remain optimistic under Puel :
Nobody was saying that by just having more possession and passing it around more in our own half and midfield we would be more successful in more games - yet for some reason it became accepted that this IS what we needed to progress towards - WHY!?!?
Nobody was saying that fast, direct football was proving to not work anymore yet for some reason it became accepted that this IS what we needed to progress towards - WHY!?!
What we DID say was that we needed to win the ball back more in midfield without Kante and have two midfielders anyway to make sure we weren’t overran in midfield at times.
What we DID say was that we needed a more craTivity player in the Okazaki to compliment Vardy.
We DID say that we perhaps needed a ball player at CB without compromising the traditiIonal qualities of a CB.
What makes me feel most depressed is that we have the potential in our squad now to make these changes, not just the correct type of players but a couple of potentially brilliant ones : Maguire, Maddison....yet... are completely steering in different direction where we fixed problems that didn’t need fixing...
Take a minute to really think back to the end of the 16/17 season, or a little before and consider what it was that we wanted.
A genie appears and offers you:
A new CB, playing for England and sought after by Man U
A young CM, who would win more tackles than Kante the following season
The return of a CM from injury who had potential but didn’t show it but now seemed to be, on the whole, showing what he could offer
A young, creative potential England player to take on the Okazaki role
....would any of us have said we needed to change our formation, push full backs higher, play without wingers, saturate and limit Vardy’s space?
We had something that worked, needed building on and have bought in the players to build on that. Yet...we are moving in a completely different direction and one which isn’t bringing more success but rather than less than what we had before.
I’m sorry, this started off as one comment and I have produced a long, probably mistake-ridden and repetitive rambling...as usual.
Didn't spot many mistakes KTF. Absolutely spot on
It’s a brilliant brilliant post KTF. A long one but excellent.
It’s genuinely refreshing to see someone articulate points in a well reasoned and balanced manner (which I never do), it’s what this forum should be for I guess.
I have the same sinking feeling. I’ll be honest with you - I’ve had it since I went to Wembley and watched us in the community shield - that very first game after the title win. I just felt something was very wrong at the club - in truth I think something still is
“As for plan A B C or what would you have changed at two nil down that would of won us the match”?
I would have gone 3 at the back which we should be playing with two attacking full backs, took both of the wingers off who constantly lost the ball, replaced them with Fuchs cos Evans isn’t up to it and Ian up front with Vardy. Simples......
comment by Man in the Long Black Coat (U2592)
posted 2 minutes ago
“As for plan A B C or what would you have changed at two nil down that would of won us the match”?
I would have gone 3 at the back which we should be playing with two attacking full backs, took both of the wingers off who constantly lost the ball, replaced them with Fuchs cos Evans isn’t up to it and Ian up front with Vardy. Simples......
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Completely agree.
I think everyone can see where the problems are.
Why is Morgan still starting games?
Why is Ricardo being played at right back when he’s clearly better as a winger? He offers no defensive protection whatsoever
Why is Gray being deployed as a striker? He isn’t one
Why are we so bad defensively after a summer of recruiting defensive positons?!
Re: Defensive problems
I think CBs are being dragged out of position/left exposed because we are trying to play a formation which requires full backs with players who are being pretty much being asked to play full back. If we are converting Ricardo into a full back he needs to play full back to learn or be utilised as a winger/wing back. At the minute, he is asked to play high up but still in a full back role, near impossible at PL level to be successful at this if you aren’t even an experienced/accomplished right back yet. Feel a bit sorry for him because he has bags of potential
Re: Gray
Surely for his progression you want him player as a winger. Or if you want him centrally he needs to be competing for the Maddison role. We are playing him in neither role in neither applicable formation.
“
Re: Defensive problems
I think CBs are being dragged out of position/left exposed because we are trying to play a formation which requires full backs with players who are being pretty much being asked to play full back”
I’ll try again -
“
Re: Defensive problems
I think CBs are being dragged out of position/left exposed because we are trying to play a formation which requires full backs with players who are pretty much being asked to play as wing backs ”
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Where do we go from here
Page 1 of 2
posted on 15/9/18
GET RAFA IN!!
posted on 15/9/18
Benitez ain't doing much better
posted on 15/9/18
comment by Hulk's little brother Yoda (U1250)
posted 8 minutes ago
Benitez ain't doing much better
----------------------------------------------------------------------
It's all relative..
posted on 15/9/18
Comment deleted by Site Moderator
posted on 15/9/18
I'm sticking with 10 games although without much hope. If the owners gave him the boot and brought in Benitez I don't think I'd be too disappointed!
posted on 15/9/18
I’m gonna day it. I like to give players and managers the benefit of doubt.
My doubt ran out today. I think Puel is taking this team and club backwards and the only thing currently saving us is decent recruitment.
I’m done with him.
posted on 15/9/18
Mersey - I agree entirely - he doesn't inspire me as a supporter so I'm left wondering how can he inspire the players??
To say he's drinking in the "last chance saloon" surely sums up how the owners feel and they've proved to be somewhat ruthless in the past. My main worry would be Big Sam
posted on 15/9/18
You know we should be riding high and playing high with all the good feel things happening at the club, winning the Prem, playing in europe, sell out gates, new training ground on the horizon, ground extension in planning, players in England squad and playing in world cups and then there is Puel single handedly sucking the live and soul out of everyone. Systems and playing tactics that still half the team can’t play, doesn’t appear to have a plan B, 5 or 6 premier league winners not getting a game or even making the match day squad or in one case not even getting a number.
Would Bournemouth have scored four goals with Simpson and Fuchs in the team, I doubt it.
Where do we go from here - Down to the lake I fear.....
posted on 15/9/18
Summed up perfectly MITLBC.
posted on 15/9/18
Simpson being ignored or frozen out is a real mystery to me and I agree that with him and Fuchs in the defence we'd have coped better with Bournemouth's attacks.
posted on 15/9/18
BTW Dublin, that sounds like the title of a Floyd song!
posted on 15/9/18
Or maybe Haircut 100?
posted on 15/9/18
We will beat Huddersfield, they're rotten. but I agree with the op. Cannot see claude succeeding here with his current style, doesn't work for a mid table club in this league.
posted on 16/9/18
comment by nuneaton_fox (U7936)
posted 12 hours, 2 minutes ago
Or maybe Haircut 100?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Well it certainly isn't fantastic day!!
posted on 16/9/18
You know we should be riding high and playing high with all the good feel things happening at the club, winning the Prem, playing in europe, sell out gates, new training ground on the horizon, ground extension in planning, players in England squad and playing in world cups and then there is Puel single handedly sucking the live and soul out of everyone. Systems and playing tactics that still half the team can’t play, doesn’t appear to have a plan B, 5 or 6 premier league winners not getting a game or even making the match day squad or in one case not even getting a number.
Would Bournemouth have scored four goals with Simpson and Fuchs in the team, I doubt it.
Where do we go from here - Down to the lake I fear.....
What a load of rubbish imo we have no god given right to any of the above. We are a team in transition without the old frts who have served us so well but have had there day
As for yesterday we went to Bournemouth where we havn't won and think its should be an easy win.
As for plan A B C or what would you have changed at two nil down that would of won us the match?
posted on 16/9/18
A new Right back immediately, after watching the fraud pretending to play there yesterday strolling back while Frazer ran away from him to score the first goal was disgraceful.
I might be wrong but he looked like he was doing the same for the second on MOTD.
I honestly don;t care if I never see him play again for Leicester but of course his position is untouchable being a favourite.
posted on 16/9/18
You deserved that thrashing.
posted on 16/9/18
The thing that makes me feel so down and sad (and I mean exactly that, not angry or with any hidden agenda to remove Puel because he is foreign or not Nigel Pearson) is neither the performance or result.
We were poor yesterday but didn’t deserve to lose 4-2 but that isn’t that much of an issue compared to other things...much much bigger worries.
I wanted us to give Puel at least 10 games as that would be 30 league games since this downward spiral started (and let’s not be naive and claim that that this is a ‘new season’ and last season shouldn’t be taken into account when reflecting on things - we more than any fans in football know the huge impact momentum can have across a closed season from old to new) and I still think we should give him that time.
Yet.....I look back and realise we’ve won just 7 in 25 games and 3 in the last 12. Which is about right for how I feel - we win about 1 in every 4 games and I’d say only 3 were convincing victories. In 25 games, since mid-December, we’ve looked only significantly better than the team we have beat a few times.
But then I stopped myself and thought ‘hold on, it’s a competitive league’...how many times will we look significantly better. But I started thinking about other results where we didn’t win and thought how many did we deserve to win? ...not really any. What I was left reflecting was that we did just about enough in lots of games to earn a draw.
And that has been a constant pattern.
But that isn’t even my main concern. After all, Puel has been trying to embed something new so if we hover around mid table whilst that is happening, with less exciting football - I can accept that.
No it’s not that. In fact, it’s not even the fact that if our results pattern for the majority of Puel’s tenure continues its only a matter of time before we are battling relegation.
It’s NOT EVEN the worrying problems that are apparent each match - this ideology to have full backs playing so high which is bizarre when not playing wingers to drop back or without reverting to 3 CBs (if this need to have our width from FBs is so desperately his wish)....or when we are on the attack it can be a 2-2-5-1 at times which leaves us desperately vulnerable down the flanks and far too cluttered around Vardy to make any really use of one of the best strikers in the league.
It isn’t even that, for someone who talks about slow building and consistency, he is constantly, constantly, constantly appearing erratic with changes to our team....it’s clear he is stubbornly prioritising his vision and preferred formation/tactics over getting the best out of what we have/what we could be.
No....none of that was the most worrying or depressing thing for me. It was a realisation yesterday that actually....despite reminders to focus on the future and shards of optimism....I actually don’t think we will be a better team even if things suddenly clicked.
IMO, if everyone played really well in that formation, I still think we would have been a better team if the most suitable players we had were playing very well in a 442. In fact, it made me realise that I had the same feeling thinking back to all the games this season and many last.
This isn’t me saying we should just look to revert to 442 as it was, but it did make me very concerned that what we were looking to create wouldn’t be any better!
Not necessarily less successful as a formation full stop, but for us currently as a team and possibly ever for our size of club.
Puel has this vision of, not overlapping full backs, but naturally attacking ones who can also get back proficiently. I don’t see his tactics or formation being that of someone who is expecting particular players to cover these full backs (who actually are wing backs, in a formation that doesn’t suit wing backs) and I don’t see them being covered naturally in our formation - a deep CM having to pull across or part of an attacking 3 pulling across and back. He is also completely sacrificing one of the most lethal finishers in this league for this 3 behind him and I just don’t see why. Even if they all click I don’t see it as being more beneficial to getting 3 points than what Vardy can provide as a goal scorer.
For this to even work he needs world class full backs and world class attacking midfielders and for Vardy to be near perfect with his finishing from the few chances he gets. All possible....but a high expectation from a ‘top’ club with world class players already there, let alone a mid table club with a young left back still learning his trade, a new right back who is really a right winger, a young attacking midfielder who has potential but constantly disappoints and a new completely unproven foreign midfielder who will have to live up to the constant pressure of being compared to Mahrez.
I look at what we needed to ‘build’ on (a vitally important verb) rather than ‘change’ and it was this - more cover in midfield and someone to take on the Okazaki role with more creativity - we have hopefully seen both become a possibility with an Ndidi/Mendy combination and the purchase of Maddison.
If you think back - did even the most ardent Puel fan or critic of previous managers ever think or say the following:
We need to play the ball around more at the back
We need to get rid of wingers and have the full backs attacking more
We need to have more players sharing the space further up the field in and around Vardy
We need to play slower football
...Puel, the owners, maybe the players, us as fans even, I think have lost track of what it is we are trying to build here.
He is changing things now that didn’t need changing, rather than just concentrating on bedding in the two new things that did.
If we had played in a 442 with Maddison in the hole behind Vardy we wouldn’t have lost that game. In fact I think we would have won. More importantly, I think we would win more games that way. Yet everything that reaped success for us is being broken down.
I feel like there has become this skewed view on what we, as fans, wanted to develop in order for our success to continue and one which we are hanging on to in order to remain optimistic under Puel :
Nobody was saying that by just having more possession and passing it around more in our own half and midfield we would be more successful in more games - yet for some reason it became accepted that this IS what we needed to progress towards - WHY!?!?
Nobody was saying that fast, direct football was proving to not work anymore yet for some reason it became accepted that this IS what we needed to progress towards - WHY!?!
What we DID say was that we needed to win the ball back more in midfield without Kante and have two midfielders anyway to make sure we weren’t overran in midfield at times.
What we DID say was that we needed a more craTivity player in the Okazaki to compliment Vardy.
We DID say that we perhaps needed a ball player at CB without compromising the traditiIonal qualities of a CB.
What makes me feel most depressed is that we have the potential in our squad now to make these changes, not just the correct type of players but a couple of potentially brilliant ones : Maguire, Maddison....yet... are completely steering in different direction where we fixed problems that didn’t need fixing...
Take a minute to really think back to the end of the 16/17 season, or a little before and consider what it was that we wanted.
A genie appears and offers you:
A new CB, playing for England and sought after by Man U
A young CM, who would win more tackles than Kante the following season
The return of a CM from injury who had potential but didn’t show it but now seemed to be, on the whole, showing what he could offer
A young, creative potential England player to take on the Okazaki role
....would any of us have said we needed to change our formation, push full backs higher, play without wingers, saturate and limit Vardy’s space?
We had something that worked, needed building on and have bought in the players to build on that. Yet...we are moving in a completely different direction and one which isn’t bringing more success but rather than less than what we had before.
I’m sorry, this started off as one comment and I have produced a long, probably mistake-ridden and repetitive rambling...as usual.
posted on 16/9/18
Didn't spot many mistakes KTF. Absolutely spot on
posted on 16/9/18
It’s a brilliant brilliant post KTF. A long one but excellent.
It’s genuinely refreshing to see someone articulate points in a well reasoned and balanced manner (which I never do), it’s what this forum should be for I guess.
I have the same sinking feeling. I’ll be honest with you - I’ve had it since I went to Wembley and watched us in the community shield - that very first game after the title win. I just felt something was very wrong at the club - in truth I think something still is
posted on 16/9/18
“As for plan A B C or what would you have changed at two nil down that would of won us the match”?
I would have gone 3 at the back which we should be playing with two attacking full backs, took both of the wingers off who constantly lost the ball, replaced them with Fuchs cos Evans isn’t up to it and Ian up front with Vardy. Simples......
posted on 16/9/18
comment by Man in the Long Black Coat (U2592)
posted 2 minutes ago
“As for plan A B C or what would you have changed at two nil down that would of won us the match”?
I would have gone 3 at the back which we should be playing with two attacking full backs, took both of the wingers off who constantly lost the ball, replaced them with Fuchs cos Evans isn’t up to it and Ian up front with Vardy. Simples......
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Completely agree.
I think everyone can see where the problems are.
Why is Morgan still starting games?
Why is Ricardo being played at right back when he’s clearly better as a winger? He offers no defensive protection whatsoever
Why is Gray being deployed as a striker? He isn’t one
Why are we so bad defensively after a summer of recruiting defensive positons?!
posted on 16/9/18
Re: Defensive problems
I think CBs are being dragged out of position/left exposed because we are trying to play a formation which requires full backs with players who are being pretty much being asked to play full back. If we are converting Ricardo into a full back he needs to play full back to learn or be utilised as a winger/wing back. At the minute, he is asked to play high up but still in a full back role, near impossible at PL level to be successful at this if you aren’t even an experienced/accomplished right back yet. Feel a bit sorry for him because he has bags of potential
posted on 16/9/18
Re: Gray
Surely for his progression you want him player as a winger. Or if you want him centrally he needs to be competing for the Maddison role. We are playing him in neither role in neither applicable formation.
posted on 16/9/18
“
Re: Defensive problems
I think CBs are being dragged out of position/left exposed because we are trying to play a formation which requires full backs with players who are being pretty much being asked to play full back”
I’ll try again -
“
Re: Defensive problems
I think CBs are being dragged out of position/left exposed because we are trying to play a formation which requires full backs with players who are pretty much being asked to play as wing backs ”
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