Xisco was great at team spirit, so if we could have got somebody good at coaching to work alongside him we could have done moderately OK.
I guess this is the problem with Watford in 2022, a downward spiral = a 3-1 away win over Norwich, a 1-1 draw with Newcastle and 1-0 loss to Leeds. In two of those reverse fixtures we got 3-0 spankings and same result with Newcastle. Could it be we thought the squad was better than it was and a lot of their deficiencies only became clearer as the season went on?
Maybe so. That’s a fair take. I suppose it would be fair to point out that Xisco had the squad when morale was at it’s highest spot, though there’s also the role he played in that being so to take into account. I think you’re touching on a symptom of the hire and fire culture that’s been developed once the last few years. As a fan base, we expect coaches to be fired immediately when things aren’t going well, and we’ve lost patience ourselves when things aren’t looking quite right. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Edwards hits a rough patch, although a lot will depend on how much support he’s perceived to have had from Pozzbury this summer, and what scope he’s given to determine the squad he works with. I hope if there are signs of progress towards achieving a certain style of play that can be successful, as a fan base, we’ll be willing to ride out the storm just as the board will be expected to do the same.
This is just reductive, at this point, though, isn't it? The players were an issue, as was Xisco's ability - as were each of the other myriad issues that we as a club are mired in. I can't imagine anyone (else, apparently) arguing that he was in fact a perfectly capable Premier League level coach, and that he was purely betrayed by his dressing room.
I don't think anyone was arguing that he was a perfectly capable PL level coach. More that 2 experienced managers, who had proven themsleves to be just that, got less out of the squad than he did, and therefore perhaps he wasn't that bad, and wasn't the main problem.
I do feel like I addressed that idea in my recent posts on that in this thread, but either way, my response to that would be that for me, visually, based on my totally amateur reading of the game, Xisco never managed to display a coherent tactical plan or style of play, and equally he was utterly unable to influence a game positively - it's not that he put intelligent players on and switched roles/formations at the correct time, only to be rewarded with sheer utter failure from said players. It was that those changes he did make, when he managed to, were terrible, and didn't make any real sense, and so contributed to the failure. That is something that I would be surprised if the few experts/pros we have around here didn't largely corroborate using their various methods of actual analysis, and it's something that also seems fairly well borne out by his subsequent performance at Huesca.
You are so right, his timing and use of substitutions was nowhere near the level Roy shows. Roy uses all of his years of experience to show young upstarts the art to making the right changes at the right time. Or even when not to make any changes to get the right result.
The only post I can remember seeing in full caps was BOOBS! We all know player recruitment is the main issue we have, any manger would of struggled to get consistent good performances out of what they had to work with. Leeds away (under Xisco) is one of the worst performances I have seen for years. Xisco was not good enough for the PL, would he of learnt with time who knows. The two failures who followed him gave us the odd good game but mainly seemed to be trying to find a level below the Leeds away performance. They managed to get even less out of the squad they were given. So in summary BOOBS is a good word to use. (yes I know it wasn't you)
