The Championship 2020-21

Lower your expectations then. I have.

 

How does he know? He is a Gray hater. We don't know if Gray has regressed as he hasn't played for about 2 seasons. We will only know that if and when he starts playing games. If the new manager wont want to play him then he should leave as he is taking up a squad place, but not before.

 

In fairness I still say a lot of the manager choices were correct. Flores the second time was probably one they got wrong. They choose managers to achieve certain things and if they feel they can't take us to the next level they replace them. Makes sense to me

 

Mazzari certainly didn't work out how they wanted in terms of a longer term appointment.

But mostly they have appointed better than we think when they're announced.

 

Agree mate. Also on top of that, their backline is getting picked a part. Aarons to Bayern, Godfrey to Milan/Atletico Madrid, Lewis to Liverpool. Obviously all those rumours might be false, but there is a high probability that 3 of their back 4 all leave. Then throw in Buendia and Cantwell as well, massive losses for them.

 

Mazarri came very highly thought of but for whatever reason it didn't work.

 

Doesn't help when you can't speak English! That aside, and I'm certainly not rehabilitating him, he was certainly knew what was up wrt Deeney

 

Apart from Silva (who was supposed to be the long-term appointment), and QSF Mk II (a panic appointment if ever there were one), every single appointment was a short-term one who did a job, before unravelling, and getting sacked to only partial consternation among us fans. None of them were helped by interference from the board and Giraldi, but we do need to be careful to appoint someone we can build around, not someone solely brought in as a pashun merchant, or someone to 'steady the ship'

 

I think it was Rory Smith who made a good point about the Pozzo model, it's supposed to be about buying low and selling high, yet not only have we only sold on Richarlison and Lukebakio for significant fees (when we could have got rid of Doucoure and any of our players we've allowed to age with us), we also dug our heels with a manager who had only been with us for a few months, but who clearly didn't want to be here, and let it get to a stage where we were entering crisis territory. We've not really recovered from that few months of madness really, despite the great times with Javi

 

Injuries, recruitment, Giraldi.

 

They say bad luck comes in threes

 

I think they got got good money for Anya, Abdi, Asambalonga - thats just the A’s

 

Beat me to it, I was going to add Igahalo, Vydra maybe even Layun without thinking too hard.

 

I completely forgot Britt was on our books in the Pozzo era! Anyone know how much they all went for? And wasn't half the reason we got Hughes for so cheap was because Derby hadn't paid some of the instalments for Anya?

 

Ighalo's an interesting one, he had one great half season and one poor one, in hindsight given how he struggled in the Mazzarri season, we should have bitten Henan Jianye's hands off for that £38m (easy to say that in hindsight!), although we did well to get £20 odd million for him when we did. In any case, it kind of proves my point, you could make the case that the model was working well initially, but we haven't really sold well over the last two or three seasons

 

We were never supposed to get promoted. The idea was to constantly find cheap gems, give them game time, and sell them on. However promotion meant we couldn't give the cheap gems game-time, couldn't sell on our best players and in fact needed to buy more. Now we are back in the champ we can start buying players for a few £m or loan from Udinese, and then sell them on CP and BHA etc for £15/20m which was always the plan...

 

Really? So we signed a load of young up and comers, some with top-flight experience, some of whom had played international football, just to sell on for a fraction of what you'd get for them as a PL club, with no ambition to go up? Besides, it's not as if Premier League clubs were circling for our players in the first two seasons (anyone other than Vydra and Deeney?). I can't believe the plan was never to get promoted, it's just that once you go up, it's much harder not to just think about the here and now

We're back in the Championship now, but unfortunately it's not as easy as just taking Udinese's reserves as they have declined dramatically, and even the South American youngsters that we had an eye on playing for us might leave

 

Flores ran him into the ground. We had no backup and so played him when he was wildly out of form. He never recovered under Mazzarri.

 

He chose as his wish from the genie of the lamp a year of unbelievable goalscoring exploits.

Then his time ran out.

It did get us promoted and keep us up however.

 

It's called having eyes and a realistic outlook, rather than a mindlessly optimistic one.

 

Yeah, I’d agree that short-term, the choices made sense, but as a collective, the lack of long-term thinking got us relegated. It left us with a squad of misfits, and no identifiable style of play.

In isolation, maybe the choices made sense, but the managerial choices haven’t been in isolation. Sure, you can point to a few of them and say they did a job, but ultimately, we were relegated in shambolic fashion.

Equally, they’ve failed to adequately deal with the Giraldi issue, who has been mentioned following several break-ups as having been too close for comfort when it comes to the training pitches and the dressing room post-games.

I think it’s fair to question whether Gino is capable of appointing the right coach to do anything other than a quick firefighting job.

 

The one manager we've had under the Pozzos who's been an unqualified success was Joka, and God knows what would have happened had we stuck with him in the Premier League. Ultimately, Giraldi needs to eff off, and we do need to be careful about who we appoint next, but still, some stability would be nice. If, and it's a big if, we go up, I'd like to see us stick with whoever it is who got us up. Even a failed promotion challenge, under the rather chaotic circumstances we find ourselves in, could be a perfectly decent platform to build on for the new gaffer too

 

Excellent point. We also so better as underdogs.
From my experience we can add 2000/01 and 2001/02 to that.

 

Not so sure about 2000/01. We had changed division 4 times in the previous 5 seasons, so we didn't know quite how good or bad we were or what to expect. 2001/02 on the other hand was a huge letdown.

 

Maybe. I think it's because we started that season so well iirc. The two Tommy's were on fire.

I remember being really excited before 2001/02. I think we were second favourites for promotion, behind Man Citeh. Then we got battered 4-0 away at their place, I think it was the opening game of the season.

 

Watford ranked 49th best team in the world!!! We’re massive. Don’t see tinpot clubs like Palace, Villa, Derby, Leeds, Forest or Sheff Weds on this list! We’re freakin huge!!!!

https://www.sportbible.com/football...html?source=twitter&__twitter_impression=true

 

We may be 49th best but that doesn't make us huge...it just means we have a good team . We've been constantly saying what a great team we have over the last 12 months haven't we ?

 

Funnily I would put all those teams ahead of us.

 

Their algorithm needs to take recent events more in to account somehow.

There are some very odd placements in there. Firstly, ours. Secondly, how the heck are RB Salzburg at 16th?! Even before they sold Haaland it's clearly a nonsense, now that he's gone it's even more so.

PS for those who want to see all the scores for teams in the major leagues/tournaments you can view them here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/soccer-predictions/

Leeds' score is very near ours. Newcastle's seems confusingly low given recent PL finishes.

 

3-0

 

Sorry as soon as I read Soccer I stopped.

 

Fivethirtyeight said Clinton would win, remain would win and Watford would stay up.

That octopus was a better analyst.

 

Jason Tindall has been appointed Bournemouth Manager.

 

A risk to give the former assistant manager his first managerial role in league football, although with such a short turnaround, it makes sense to stick with what they know