Parma Ham's gone mouldy

I’m afraid that there is truth in that. ‘Don’t ignore the (no) noise’ Parma

I just really liked that one and wanted to read it again 🤣…sometimes I don’t know the answer to my own questions….. Parma

Yesterday’s game provides us with an excellent opportunity to descend deeper into the rabbit hole for those willing to go a little further… Look at the bit in bold and italics highlighted above. This equation is also applied by coaches to each and every player under their tutelage. To start at the end: here is the answer to ‘why does he play MacClean every week?’ and quite possibly also ‘Why has it taken so long for Sainz to get a start?’ Aah Sainz. Let’s choose him. He didn’t have his best moment yesterday. He might well be prone to such petulance. We must account for that in our calculations of course. We are not just playing the white pieces, we must play the black also. So here’s another mad hatter’s bit of logic for you: A player can simultaneously increase your chances of winning and your chances of losing. Now we are really getting somewhere. Think again about the plusvalenza net equation. Start with what you gain, subtract what you risk or stand to lose, this net number is your plusvalenza analysis of your player (or team, or squad, or match chances). There is art and science here (hence manager’s ‘favourites’…which can of course become a self-fulfilling prophecy..) Now let’s go back to our boy Borja. He can do brilliant attacking things. Dribble dynamically, take players on, shoot from distance, cut inside repeatedly and pick a spot… .….he can also lose it in bad areas, try too much at the wrong time, fail to identify important defensive transitional moments, dangle a leg rather than commit to a good technical block tackle, be too often positionally out of defensive shape, get a cheap yellow….(ahem)… Can you see how he could simultaneously increase your team chances of winning by 20% whilst concurrently increasing your team chances of losing by 30%? Now fans either don’t see this or don’t want to see it. They only care about what he can do. How he could help us score. How he could help us win. This isn’t good enough. Sorry. It is just not the whole picture. Fans are like poor chess players. They are brilliant with their own pieces, though they do not pay the same effort or attention to the coming moves of the opposition. Managers and coaches are also somewhat guilty for creating and fomenting this. They say things like ‘we just play our own game’ or ‘we are just thinking about ourselves’. This is a lie. Some of you won’t like that or will not not want to accept it. Sorry again. There are lots of lies in football. It isn’t quite a lie of course. It is a message for the players. A statement of qualified truth. The players do need to just think about their own games. The instructions that I have given them. However the lie is that this single instruction that I want them to carry out - and focus on to the exclusion of all else - is actually a small part of a hundred cogs that have already been calculated to include all opposition moves and percentages and tactics and weapons and patterns of play. The skill of the manager is to distill it down into single or simple instructions that comfortably fill the mind of the individual player to the exclusion of all else, despite the fact that it is derived from complex calculations that are anything but simple and fit into the far greater whole. MacClean plays every week - for the last four managers with varying approaches, beliefs and styles - because he has one of the best overall plusvalenza equations. He can do everything quite well. He has a will to win. Leadership qualities. He offers some attacking impetus via vertical passing, drive, heading ability, desire to get involved, whilst also being diligent defensively, having a sense of danger, being physical, a hard runner, someone not injured much, spiky but controlled, a good influence on his teammates, likeable…. Don’t forget you must make a team. A unified cohesive unit. Off the field counts too. Social interactions. Psychology figures large. You don’t lose anything by playing MacClean. He is not Buendia. But he doesn’t really cost you anything either. Every week. And he does have some good qualities. This adds to the pot. For free (in plusvalenza terms). Fans want to win. Today. Here and now. This minute. What increases our chances of scoring a goal right now!…is their internal monologue. It’s not enough. By a long way. And coaches don’t think like that. And can’t. Mustn’t….. (Is this making sense….?… Can we go further…?) …except if you have weapons of course…or if you are not trying to be better…or if you are expecting to lose a lot of games anyway…or if the odds are against you anyway….…(what?)…you can manipulate the odds (how?) and play players that do not help the whole but amortize the worst deficiencies of your weapon…specific ‘qualities’ that are designed exclusively in conjunction with something (someone) else. And possibly quite poor by themselves. Not even useful otherwise even… …deeper? Parma

Bravissimo @GMF …🙏🏽💪🏽 ..and nice Cosmic too 😊 Parma

We’ll have none of that imposter syndrome here young lady!..,.💃🤣 Parma

Thanks @GMF 🙏🏽 Fenerbahce W vs Adana W - Home win 🏡 🏆 … ….though if for some reason that is not available @nutty nigel, switch it again for: Haverfordwest vs The New Saints - Away win 🏆 Parma

In bocca al lupo 🦮@GMF ed ai tutti i voi belli PUPetti!…couple of power hitters this week, looks good!….🤩✨🦮 Think a trip to Wales looks beautiful for: The New Saints vs Caernarfon - Home win 🏡🏆 As for the awesome @Cosmic Twin’s Norwich bet, good to see Norwich as favourites and plenty of positive expectation..quite right too…👍💪🏽💪🏽✨🦮..so: Norwich to win, BTTS no, more than 1.5 goals, less than 5 yellow cards, more than 5 corners.. 🕺💃🙌🤩✨ Parma

Come to think of it @shefcanary…you can even fail at the same job afterwards….🤣 Parma

My sister used to work for a major global recruitment company in London. People would swap companies every five minutes and take their client roster with them. Might there have been some logic to the Ferris wheel of appointments for the likes of Harry Redkapp back in the day? Might the modern equivalent be a Sporting Director with a good contact book? You only need a Pukki and a Buendia and your career is made. You can fail at a couple of name jobs afterwards and be set for life… …what about a self-sustaining club with limited resources? How about an exec linked to the Arsenal Academy with an analytical knowledge of up-and-coming (who said cheap?!) Arsenal and London U21s? Plus ça change… Parma

How lucky was Lambert at Villa and Ipswich? Parma

@PurpleCanary @king canary Honestly it’s a bit surprising isn’t it? At the moment I honestly don’t know what to make of it. There are a number of thoughts that come to mind (and in no particular order of importance or possible relevance): 1. Knapper said at the AGM we had to get our assets on the pitch and playing 2. Knapper said at the AGM we had to bring down the average age of the team squad 3. Knapper said at the AGM we needed to play players who would-could appreciate in value 4. Wagner is literally a school teacher. He likes to teach new things and skills to people. Put them in different, unfamiliar roles. There is good and bad in this. 5. Wagner will understand weapons. Nunez’s throw, set pieces, quarterback passes are all nice micro-weapons. So another bit of shoe-horning required. 6. The value of the assets of Sara and Nunez will likely be derived from a higher Prem level. Analysts have already seen their flaws. They are defensive positioning and spacing. Into the lion’s den then! Sink or swim! Learn! (Quietly: ‘make us some money that we need to change things around’) 7. Number 6 has been made possible because of our relatively poor form, (previously) weak momentum, hollowed out squad and lowered expectations. It is easier to try things when you are gambling against the odds anyway. It might work. You might appreciate an asset. Even Jonny Rowe had little exposure before now. 8. Look at our current squad. Who did we pay money for? Which of our assets ‘owe us’? What do we have to try to make work or write off? As we noted above, you probably wouldn’t do any of it if you were better…. Parma

Attanasio has just become part of the SGA consortium. Parallels? Parma

This - coupled with what I wrote above - is exactly why Farke and Hughton did not have Plan B. The odds are against it. Change feels good, but if it’s worse mathematically it is counter-productive* Fans will pour out powerful memories and hundreds of examples where this is wrong. But of course it isn’t. But then again Lambert kept throwing sixes. And gambling. And winning….so? But then he didn’t. And he had Holt. And Wes. Together. Weapons. Goals and assists. Perfect. And the rest ran hard. More than good enough. Farke of course was massively against the odds at the top level. We were worse in every sense. He chose 4 out of 10 instead of 2 out of 10. He was right. And neither worked. So what was being judged? Farke, the club, the finances or the odds? Ironically at the top level you keep occasional weapons and play against the odds to achieve the 10 wins as you won’t win 28 games anyway. That goes against processes and means you MUST keep Buendia and Pukki (Holt and Wes). The rest don’t have to be good. Just make them run and stay in position. You’ll mostly lose anyway. Confused? I haven’t even started yet….red pill or the blue pill? 💊 Parma

‘Some people are right and everyone else isn’t’….….is one of my wise Father’s sayings. As with many things in life - and tessellating neatly with the analysis of coaching plusvalenza - it is not what it appears to be on paper. It is understood as one thing, though means something else. ‘Coaching is a series of imperfect trade-offs. What you gain with one move, you lose somewhere else’ is an increasingly understood concept and some of you are starting to point out and understand that no decision exists in isolation. I am conscious that I am going to descend into Alice’s rabbit hole here, so definitely stop reading now if you don’t want a bit of the coaching mad hatter… Fans focus very strongly on results. Coaches focus very strongly on processes. Fans win a game and go home happy. Coaches can win a game and go home unhappy. Fans lose a game and go home unhappy. Coaches can lose a game and go home happy. It is not just an ego-driven desire to see your coaching ‘fingerprints’ all over the pitch, in the patterns of play, the movements, the fixed point structures, the in-game tendencies, the questions you pose to the opposition coach, the on-the-fly solutions you find to the tactical questions you get asked. Who wins the chess match of likelihood? Who does best with the resources, advantages and limitations they have? And this where we are going somewhere. Maybe somewhere new for some of you. Some of you won’t like it. Some of you won’t get it. Some will, but can’t handle it on a losing Saturday night. Others maybe can, or will… It also highlights many of the - sometimes cryptic or elliptical - questions that have been posed of the board, manager, sporting director, head coach, players on this thread. The question of why Farke was sacked, why Buendia was sold, why we failed at the top level, how we set up tactically now, whether Wagner should be kept on, why he might be, why he won’t be, why MacClean plays Centre back, why Nunez is being trained into a different role, why our strikers play in a way that makes it harder for them to score as often as one might expect… As a coach you must make the best of what you have. You must identify what your weapons are. What does or could hurt the opposition. This does not necessarily mean scoring goals, or even creating chances. It means creating repeating patterns of play on the field that the opposition coach is forced to address and adjust his or her own preferred methodology for. Barnes coming down into the midfield area and linking play with his back to goal, feeding inverted wingers coming off the line repeatedly is hard to deal with. Barnes is good at it (pace Ipswich’s second goal). He’s awkward. He’s a ‘structural player’. He’s creating a particular repeatable pattern on the field that can be built around. It can be built around because as a coach we can be sure 8 or 9 times out of ten that he can and will do it. This is also why managers often take certain players to new clubs with them. It is not that they are necessarily brilliant, but that they are structural (in some way). We are very limited within our squad at the moment where weapons are concerned. The ones we have - like Barnes above - are worthy, though not game changing. They are small factors in our favour in a huge menu of two-directional examples - from both teams never forget!! - in every game. If we have 3 mini-weapons and the other team has 6, we are already likely to lose more than we win if we play 100 times. This is what sporting directors should be fixated on and report upwards to Board. Has your head coach set up in such a way as to maximize the outcome? Now careful here. This is absolutely not what fans often mistake this for: it does NOT mean ‘has he set us up in the best way to win?’ I’m going to repeat that. It does not mean setting us up in the best way to win. Confused? You shouldn’t be. Why did Lambert do so incredibly well at Norwich and then never come close to repeating it anywhere else? Why do bookmakers fear me creating an algorithm for PUPs picks that returns a small amount year-after-year and not someone who makes a huge return one season? (nota bene: it is a long way from merely choosing the shortest odds). Why did I get thrown out of an American casino playing multiple tables of a kind of 3 card brag for relatively low stakes, repeatedly turning minimum stakes into $500 returns? (I’m not a gambler by the way, it was for demonstration purposes to clients) Why did sacking Farke because he failed to get results in the 2021 Premier League prove almost absolutely nothing about his suitability for the Norwich job? Think of results as a spectrum. Think of a binary graph with 0 at one end and 100 at the other. Easy. I want to win! I’ll choose 100! Ok, but 51 is still a win isn’t it? And 49 is a loss! There is 2% difference between those and yet one makes everything perfect and the other is a disaster. Now what if your tactical on field plusvalenza - your lack of weapons and rather hollowed out, much-of-a-muchness squad - can only be configured to achieve 40%? You are going to lose 60% of the time. Though you have actually optimized everything that you have. 4 out of 10 is pretty poor the fans bay!…we are losing! ….….yes but 4 out of 10 is markedly better than 2 out of 10…that was the choice in front of you. Perfection was not on offer. Now we are getting somewhere. This is what coaches are constantly evaluating, monitoring and judging each other on. What did you do with what you had? What cute ideas did you come up with to hide your deficiencies and maximize your odds? Winning one year - as Lambert did for a while - because you go on a Glasgow gambler’s hot streak, is loved, enjoyed and patted-on-the- back, but it is not respected in the way that constantly beating the bookmakers odds through calculation, analysis, marshalling, planning and algorithmic deviousness is viewed as professional alchemist’s gold and hugely admired and respected. Though of course it can also lead to a rather mad scientist’s tinkering and a fool’s gold cauldron of coaching trying-too-hard. Is this Wagner? Football is a maddeningly incoherent, fluid game of small margins. ‘Both boxes’ the old boys say. Control the middle bit, have brilliant processes, beautifully-constructed patterns……then Michael Owen - who has done nothing much all game and not troubled anyone - just gambles that a defender might lose concentration and misjudge a fairly nothing ball (and he does it 109 times, for the 1 time it actually happens), and he does. And he scores. And you lose. So. Weapons. Things you can’t ignore. Someone who just loves scoring and is prepared to waste 98% of their effort for one moment. Someone who can score direct from free kicks. Win penalties. Confidently score penalties . Win free kicks. Take good corners. Long awkward throws (Nunez?). Wagner had no real weapons so he had to make patterns that were mini strategic pattern-of-play weapons. Barnes and Sargent coming into midfield as a double-false-9-box-lay-off team that couldn’t be ignored, but had to involve complicated handing on of players into certain unusual areas. I deliberately left that unpunctuated as it is breathless, though not in itself very damaging to the opposition yet. You need to get Sara into places he can shoot from. Nunez into places he can shoot from. Use their set pieces, free kicks, long throws. Though they don’t know how to defend. Where to position themselves defensively in a fluid game. The opposition has excellent teams of analaysts too of course. They spent all week finding out our plans and countering them. Setting up problems for us too. Counter-punching. So now think differently. Completely differently. Think how you’d set up against Norwich. Think what you’d do to undermine Sara, to exploit Nunez, to calculate that Norwich might play 2 strikers plus a midfield with Rowe, Sainz, Sara and Nunez in???? Spend an hour calculating how you’d cut holes in the way we operate, then come back to me and tell me how good we are again… ..then tell me how important it is to get Sara, Nunez, Rowe, Sainz on the pitch together …all focused on scoring more goals!!…..or?……. Almost nobody plays with 2 strikers anymore. It exposes the midfield too much. You might do it with 352 of course, though most Italian sides would think of 4411 with a Holt and a Wes and then a pretty prosaic 8 block behind. So next time you draw a team on paper, draw another team to play against it and beat it. Then go back and re-draw your first team. Parma

Exactly that. There is a tendency for binarism and polarity on this forum. Tactics are also a spectrum. Nothing is what it seems on paper. What you gain in one area, costs you in another. ’Don’t start where you finish, don’t finish where you start’ is a classic striker’s instruction for example. Parma

Many football fans see the good things players do. Coaches must focus on the things that could happen if scenarios are repeated multiple times. Good moments burn memories much deeper for fans or invested stakeholders. This is great, though not empirical. Sara makes huge amounts of technical positional errors in any single game. We need him, we must find a place for him, though ‘shielding’ him in the CDM area is a flawed and unnecessary tactic in my view. One must calculate the ‘plusvalenza’ of course. What you gain versus what you lose (or could gain, or could lose). You want that equation to be a positive number. Costing a goal or a good chance is a pretty easy technical mistake to make. Creating or scoring one significantly harder (and rarer). There is just no need to do this with Sara. Parma

I like overloads. They are the essence of the game. Then you need weapons to do something with it. ’Both boxes’ remains pretty good. Parma

…you were taking journalistic notes…🤣 Parma

…you didn’t get the chance…😂😂.….wasn’t wrong though was I? Parma

So Ben Knapper has his feet under the table now… Wagner has done well enough to avoid an uncomfortable early bath - much to the benefit of our overall future vision - which has bought time to look, smell, feel and ponder… So what questions has our sporting due diligence thrown up? What little nuggets of gold has Ben texted Mark with? Here are some questions that I think any empirically-minded Norwich fan who pays a bit of attention might be asking: 1. Has the increase in experience smoothed out the tendency for erratic performance levels and poor game management? 2. Is it a longer term recipe for asset appreciation? 3. Is the current preferred 442 with two false 9s the best use of Ashley Barnes’ or Adam Idah’s (or Hwang’s for that matter) attributes? Does Barnes look comfortable in deep midfield areas (vid second goal given away in the derby)? Does Idah need simple instruction to run off the back of defenders, sometimes into channels and knock people about a bit to warrant a place in the side? Do we use his attributes or are we shoe-horning him into a role and a pattern he isn’t really suited to? Why? 4. Are we repeatedly too open in the central defensive midfield areas? Is Sara (or Nunez) a CDM? Have we got any CDMs? If we include Sorenson and Gibbs are they suitable? Why has Gibbs gone quiet (he looks a good player to me)? Why do we employ a defined tactic that actively exposes our weakest area? Is this logical strategic coaching with the resources available? Do flying full backs exacerbate the CDM issue? Are our particular personnel in the full back areas worth this tactical trade off? 5. If Kenny MacClean has puppy-dog ball-chasing tendencies is his partnership with the defensively and tactically flaky Sara a good combination or an obvious recipe for trouble? Is his move to Centre back actually quite a cute solution (running about less, being forced to stay in areas, using his desire to put out fires of others constructively)? 6. Are we over-rating the impact and importance of Sargent? Whilst a decent enough championship player, isn’t it true that we just lack a bit of cohesion, quality and weapons having hollowed out our previous young assets and occasional weapons? Do we need to buy a lot of players to add ballast or just one or two to help ‘both boxes’ (for unrealistic flavor say Skipp and Nketiah in a perfect world)? 7. I quite like the phrase from Ben Lee that ‘processes create moments, moments decide matches’. Are our processes - the coaching patterns that were very clear from McKenna and less clear from Wagner - a product of the players we have or do we continue to follow a blueprint regardless of available personnel? The ‘inverted 442’ dropping strikers deep to bounce off and inverted wingers going beyond, is sort of interesting and novel when you have 2 awkward, structural players like Barnes and Sargent. Playing any 2 strikers exposes the midfield somewhere, we don’t have a natural CDM and so we drop our strikers into that area as sort of double protection? Is that the idea? Defending from the middle front? Isn’t it just that Sara isn’t and shouldn’t be played in a deep midfield position? We have stumbled on a good idea in MacClean at Centre back, giving him more time to make good progressive, vertical passes with his left foot and stopping him mindlessly running about shouting ‘Mr Mannering! Mr Mannering!’. So shall we just spend our limited money there, fill that structural gap now and be done with it? 8. Jonny Rowe’s agent has us over a barrel. 9. Gibson wouldn’t be bad if he’d take a 50% pay cut. We could do with a change, though left-footed ball-playing Centre half’s are every FM15’s wet dream on Wyscout. Letting him go looks obvious, though replacing him expensive, tricky or…wait…MacClean you say? 10. What do we want to be? Farke? Wagner-Klopp with a bit of Farke? Klopp with a bit of Dyche? Dyche with a bit of Allardyce? Well….anyone? Arteta with a bit of Arteta for me please….and you Ben? Did you WhatsApp Mertesacker like you said you would? Parma …have a rest about half way through @king canary…🤣💪🏽

Well I suppose the 37 screenshots on your phone that you’ve already sent to @Kathy would be something of a comforting memento… Parma

I really don’t see why you would cut me off so abruptly mid-flow…. Parma

Well I’ll send you a pony anyway @nutty nigel…🦮…Merry Christmas Pups!..🎄 …I thought we did quite well, though Idah jogged about without tuning in again, Barnes was weak for the second, Sainz can be careless, Sara is out of position, MacClean is out of position but perhaps in his best position, Batth is out of the picture, Onel can’t see a picture….Wagner sees a picture that I don’t like, no one sees a central defensive midfielder….but…apart from that… Gunn’s good 🤩🦮👍 Good point you boys. Well done. Sort of. Parma

Edoardo, I’ve been summoned by Mx Parma for steak duty…and they’ve got that look in their eye …so … .….….i’ve been through all the excellent suggestions and ….well… …I just can’t get away from the fact that this looks like the most wonderful opportunity to turn around a season, an atmosphere, a mentality, a career, a changing room and a feeling….… …absolutely everybody on this board wants us to win tomorrow..wills it… …so throw everything on a PUPs win and a Norwich win..🏆.. I’ll double the pot and add another pony if we do it….let’s all get after it and create a bit of American will wave positivity…!.. what says you @lake district canary ? At the end of the day I’m just a boy, standing in front of a girl asking her team to win a derby …🙌🙌🏆🥰🦮🦮🦮 Come on you yellows! Parma

Where your PUPs money big boy?… I’ll match any pledge you make for the PUPs @essex canary…!!! Parma