Petriix

He's literally doing that every week already.

This is very good news if true, and represents a significant departure from the previous plan.

I can't emphasise enough that there is absolutely zero point in making any managerial change while Webber's grubby little hands are still pulling any strings at the club. A director of football has more than a little say in the 'direction of football' so pinning the blame on the head coach is missing the point. I'm not saying I want Wagner to stay, just that the absolute priority must be getting Webber out of the club before he can do any more damage. It's plain for all to see that the idea of a transition period with a handover is just going to ensure the malaise is perpetuated; which is obviously the opposite of what we need. The club needs a fresh start with a clean break from the negativity. That means getting Webber and Wagner out ASAP as well as all of the first team coaching staff. The roles should be filled in the interim on a week by week basis until the new sporting director is in place and able to appoint a new coaching team.

I don't regard two promotions followed by two relegations as 'failure'. To be perfectly honest, in my 30 years of supporting Norwich City, only the very first season I followed the club in 1992/93 and the European campaign that autumn could be considered more exciting than Farke's titles; I was 10 then. What I do regard as failure is the paradigm shift in the summer of 2021 culminating in sacking Farke just weeks after giving him a four year contract; and everything that's followed.

This is absolute BS of the highest order. Some of the figures are just ludicrously low. We signed Dimi on promotion to the PL, there's no way he's only on 7.5k. I suspect our wage bill is closer to double that total figure.

Too many 'h's. It's confusing and disconcerting so best to leave hhim out.

I've got a horrible feeling that this 'takeover' might not be the panacea people are hoping for. I don't quite see how the club could still hold anything like the value we did when the negotiations began.

I'd be ok if Kenny was competing for his place as a genuine number 8. In the role he's currently playing he is the central cog in a broken midfield. His strength (and instinct) is to operate box-to-box, driving through the midfield and linking play into the attacking players. My reasonably valid complaint is that in doing so, he abandons the most important duty of anyone in his role. Ultimately it's beyond ridicule for the deepest midfield to charge forwards (either with the ball or in the press) when the fullbacks are already ahead of the ball. I'll accept that the other midfielders are also culpable with the following caveat: Sara and Rowe are our only attacking weapons so should be afforded a little less defensive responsibility in order to get them into the positions from which to hurt the opposition. Hernandez, as far as I am concerned, should be nowhere near a Championship first team. If you believe Kenny is an innocent party in this shambles, given an impossible job by the ineptitude of the other players around him and an awful coach, perhaps you might offer some thoughts on how we might fix the problems.

Are you seriously suggesting that any if those events occurred within the last couple of decades? Let's not turn into Ipswich supporters and cling to past glory...

With the obvious irony being that the club was the most successful it's been in the past couple of decades while retaining the self-funding model and has only gone down the pan since pushing the boat out and borrowing millions to fund an attempt to show 'ambition'.

A thousand times this. If you accept the obvious wisdom that the squad is now vastly inferior to that which achieved our record points haul in 2020-21 then you have to accept that the remaining players are the embodiment of that decline. Kenny has never been an adequate replacement for Skipp and the repeated attempts to shoehorn him in there have coincided with the club's meteoric decline. I'm not sure exactly what level of involvement our much maligned sporting director has in shaping the match day team, but he certainly holds responsibility for building the squad and has categorically failed to fill what many of us consider to be the biggest void.

Don't you remember? It actually turned out to be all Gary Kasa with Lambert just the public facing puppet.

I don't want to derail this thread with more Kenny bashing, but I have to respond to this. When Kenny drives forward from deep when we already have six players ahead of the ball, abandoning his essential structural pivot and leaving us with just two centre backs who are far too far apart, that completely describes his fundamental unsuitability to the role he's in. Add in that he frequently picks a high risk, low percentage pass with the resulting turnovers leaving us exposed with only (the defensively weak) Sara as the possible other covering midfielder. Surely you can see the problem?

This is exactly why I think Kenny is central to the problem. "We need do more" as if running about is going to fix the underlying structural problems. "We need to double down on the hard work" so absolutely misses the point: we don't need to carry on doing the same thing but try harder, we need to do something different. We're losing because we are putting the wrong players in the wrong positions at the wrong times. This interview highlights the absolute mess we're in because there isn't the slightest bit of awareness of how wrong our underlying approach is. We can't keep sticking 6 players ahead of the ball and expecting not to concede.

Most people remember Lambert for his dynamic, attacking football but he initially got us back to basics and made us hard to beat by doing the hard graft off the ball. We need to stop the rot by stemming the flow of goals we're conceding before we even start to think about how to start creating and scoring goals. The irony is that, if we set up more defensively, we'd have far more space to work with in front of us and have greater opportunities to get in behind teams. Playing so high means teams can stay deep and compact before hitting us on the break. Any manager should be able to see and address the problems we're facing. I strongly suspect, however, that nothing can change until we get rid of our toxic sporting director.

Well I'm fairly sure they overvalue the attacking parts of the game and don't put any emphasis on the glaring positional errors both McLean and Sara continue to make every week. Sara is undoubtedly our best attacking player, but he's absolutely pants when we don't have possession hence many of us being aghast at him being played so deep. Kenny clearly doesn't have the skills for the job he's being asked to do. The statistics don't reflect the reality.

I don't believe they record statistics for poor positioning, failing to track a runner and aimlessly running around with a bit of pointing. Stats tend to only measure tangible actions when in possession. Making a high number of safe passes from a deep position will give a midfielder reasonable numbers in the things they measure while ignoring the fundamental flaws which lead to conceding more goals than any other team in the league.

Overlapping fullbacks is a widely accepted system in the modern game, but its success is largely contingent on playing the wide midfielders narrower and deeper as done so successfully by Farke, at Championship level at least. Johnny Rowe puts in a reasonable shift of getting up and down the wing in both attack and defence, but Hernandez plays like he's a wide attacker in a 4-3-3 which is totally flawed. As far as I'm concerned McLean is an 8, Sara and Nunez are 10s (only one of them should ever be on the pitch at a time) and we have had a massive number 6 shaped hole in the team since Skipp returned to Spurs. Hernandez shouldn't be anywhere near our starting 11.

I don't really have a problem with McLean competing for a place at number 8, but the role he's being asked to perform and his absolute inability to perform the basics when out of possession make him the problem right now. A new manager won't have an actual CDM to call on so it's hard to see anything changing until we can get to a transfer window and plug the gaping holes in the squad.

It's only really Webber (and a few fans) that he's conned. Webber has assembled this squad and continues to believe in it despite growing evidence that it simply doesn't compete at this level. McLean epitomises the low skill/high endeavour emphasis of our squad's 'development' and represents exactly where we've gone wrong.

This is just such a ludicrous statement given the absolute shambles our midfield is with him at the heart. McLean's role in this current setup is absolutely central to our current plight.

This is all compounded by the de-skilling that's gone on throughout the squad. The lack of technical ability, creativity, movement and vision means we keep losing the ball and fail to create the openings when we do have possession. We keep overcommitting players forward in the folly of the 'high press' means we're both toothless in attack, and wide open whenever we lose the ball. All teams have to do against us is form a low block, give us the ball and wait for us to go out of position and give away the ball before cutting through us. With every departure from our previous Championship winning midfield we've got progressively worse. How Cantwell was deemed surplus to requirements when we're now playing Hernandez every week just highlights how far we've regressed.

The biggest deficiency is when out of possession. Tracking runs, knowing when to press the ball and when to back off or how to force a player wide and slow an attack down. Kenny is poor at all of these things.

It's basic stuff. There are simple tactical structures fundamental to a coherent midfield at every level of the game which even non-league clubs do, but we are not. Tracking runners, covering crucial areas, blocking passing angles. Out of possession there is a reason why we are used to seeing teams fall into two banks of four or five so as to be as difficult as possible to break down. Our midfield is a shambolic mess with huge holes which even the lesser teams in the league are able to exploit. The players we have simply don't have the positional awareness and don't do the basics. We leave players completely unmarked to stroll through the huge gaps we afford them. We look like a bunch of amateurs. It's hard to fathom how our wage bill has been so ridiculously high. We're still paying Premier League wages for League One players. It's a mess which is going to take a total restructure to recover from. I know it will be unpopular but players like McLean and Hernandez are absolutely central to the problem. They lack the instincts and awareness to do the basics to anything close to the required standard. Changing the manager will not fix it. We need to get the new sporting director in ASAP and overhaul the squad before it can possibly improve. Stuart Webber needs to be gone in the morning.

I see this argument a lot, but I think it's nonsense. Just because *some* people were saying it and now *some* people are saying that opposite, doesn't mean it's the same people. For the record I always advocated keeping wages low, signing and developing 'rough diamonds' and only 'investing' in a few key areas (CDM anyone?) on promotion. I never wanted Farke to be sacked.