Maybe clapping the few players who do appear to be putting the effort in? There are some eg. Pedro, Louza, Cucho, Kamara, Foster (well he tries but he's not as good as he was....)
Hmm. Quite glad (spoiler alert) that I'm not the real Mooney. It's really hard to lose cult hero status but he's making a valiant attempt.
Shearer and Jeans taking sense here . https://mobile.twitter.com/watfordjustin74/status/1526135787057823745
I think most of us are capable of recognizing the signs of progress, and which direction the team is generally trending. I’d like to think that if there are promising signs of progress, as fans, we’ll be more forgiving of some rocky patches. Personally speaking, if I can see there is a plan, and while results are inconsistent, it looks like there is scope to continue on an upward trajectory, I’ll be satisfied enough to allow time for things to develop. With our coaches this season and others past, the trajectory has clearly been a downward one.
As noted he was our best manager this season. May not of been as good as we wanted, but 1 point a game would of kept us up.
Well thank goodness you're not in charge, as we wouldn't have got promoted, and would be in an even worse financial position without him.
I'd happily take his kind of hopeless. Win games. Lose a few. Take the blame. Create a good vibe with fans all over again quite frankly. Best person we've had in charge since Javi.
I think the Hodgson era has made people forget how bad we were under Munoz. Brighton? Newcastle? Leeds??
Those were poor performances but vastly superior to the farcical performances we’ve had under Hodgson, although mainly at home to be fair.
If I saw: Watford 0-3 Norwich Watford 1-5 Leicester Watford 0-3 Leeds Wolves 4-0 Watford Watford 1-4 Crystal Palace on the horizon, I'd have bitten your hand off for a crap performance and a 1-1 draw against Newcastle.
As ever, for the umpteenth time - DISCLAIMER ALERT - this is not to defend or speak to the merits of either successor in either way. But Xisco had to go when he did, and it's revisionist to pretend that he went for any other reason than it was clear that both performances and results were trending very strongly downwards from a pretty low start. Once again, the mistake was not firing him when we did (which was stupid), it was allowing him to continue in the summer without the confidence of the hierarchy, or enough backing to make up for his clear shortcomings.
Yeah absolutely - my referenced 'mistake' was specifically Xisco-firing-centric. There have been about 72 official ranked mistakes this season overall.
I don't necessarily disagree, and I certainly agree that if we didn't have faith in him, he should have gone in the summer. However, is it a symptom of how our club has been mismanaged that we even think of a run of 4/5 performances that ranged from abysmal to average as a 'downward trend'? Even more so for a newly promoted team with a bottom 5-level (at best) squad?
Personally, whilst I can't disagree at all about the club's mismanagement in general and how much it has the potential to skew the optics of a run of results, it isn't really what happened in Xisco's unique case - I think there is additional context in his particular scenario, and what those poor performances showed told us as much about him as it did the club when taken as evidence in conjunction with his extreme lack of experience and the flaws/weaknesses/areas for development in his coaching that were apparent even in a successful Championship season.
Fair point. Question to discuss is would we have ended up any worse from keeping him and not spending stupid cash hiring and firing two lots of has beens.
Again all fair points. I don't think it's impossible that Xisco would have improved as a coach as the season went on, but can see why the ownership didn't want to risk waiting for that to happen (why not replace in the summer!?!). But I think the damage done by sacking him with us 14th(?) had long-lasting effects on the squad. The squad clearly liked him, and I think the moment he was sacked the power dynamic shifted back to the players. This was a pretty new look squad, introduced to the Pozzo concept of: couple bad performances=new manager. I'd hazard a guess that this mindset ended up with the demise of Ranieri, too. CR makes them work hard with a high press, they throw in a few games and voila, problem solved. Just think now, with the benefit of hindsight, once we'd stuck with him in the summer, we should have backed him properly.
Certainly agree that, having made that decision we had to (and didn't), but for me 'backing' would have required at least a couple of players clearly good enough at this level to sort of do at least some of his job for him, and that was clearly never even considered, let alone attempted. I'm sure you're right that chucking him would have done further damage to a dressing room with a storied history of those exact dynamics problems, but I'm not sure how long he would have been able to avoid that had he stayed given the trajectory of his coaching performances. Of course, we'll never know, but in the same way that we know we have issues with coaches losing any authority here, we know that it doesn't do wonders for their authority over their players if it appears as though they have basically no clue how to either set up for or positively influence the course of a game - with our mutinous bunch of reptiles twice over, I'm sure. One more thing for me is that, again without any defence being made, Xisco does have the benefit of being judged at the high point of the season, with theoretically the most pliable and agreeable dressing room and squad - Hodgson has done about as poor a job as possible, but that poorness has undoubtedly also been contributed to by the situation he found himself parachuted into (thanks to the Stabs). To me, it's by no means a foregone conclusion that Xisco would have avoided reaching a similar nadir had he been allowed to continue.
Bear in mind Xisco had to use Adam Masina. Looking back retrospectively, I should have had more faith in young, bubbly, first games as a manager in Prem, friends with the players Xisco to adapt and be flexible than I should have 74 & 76 year old stubborn Ranieri & Roy Hodgson. Xisco may not have learned but he certainly and unequivocally could not have been worse than what followed, that much for me, is factual.
This thread is in danger of turning into an intelligent and informed debate. Where are the moderators and why are they allowing it???
We should have backed Xisco properly by engaging an experienced retired manager as an assistant, to mentor him. Somebody like .... no, not him.
This is fair, but I do think we seemed to be on a downward spiral, and Xisco hadn’t shown much to give us hope he could turn it around. That said, if he’d have kept us in touch until a few weeks ago, we could have gone after Dyche and finally created the sort of management combo we’ve been crying out for on this forum for years. A “DREAM TEAM”, if you will.
Maybe, just maybe, the issue was the players not the manager though as shown by Ranieri/Hodgson's attempts to get anything out of them ?
I don't think Munoz would have turned it round as I just don't think the players are good enough. Staying up was always going to be a tough challenge . However had we stuck with him, and been relegated, all of us, me included, would have criticised that the Board didn't replace him with an experienced manager who would have perhaps kept us up.
