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Petriix

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Posts posted by Petriix


  1. 8 minutes ago, cornish sam said:

    This obsession with getting sara further forward is a bit odd to me, he arrived with a reputation for being a box to box midfielder, he does best when playmaking from deep and arriving late to attacks and on the few occasions he was played as an AM hasn't really shone... If anything it's Nunez that needs to be a bit more forward

    It's simply that Sara is one of the two (currently fit) players we have who is consistently capable of kicking the ball into the goal. Playing him in more of a goalscoring position is pretty obvious. Remember how Pukki was originally playing on the wing before being moved to the central position when his strengths became clear?

    Nunez, on the other hand, has been playing really well in that deeper role. If we sign that elusive CDM then keeping McLean in defence and Nunez in midfield. Moving Sara to 10 is pretty obvious. I'd be disappointed if we didn't try it. 

    • Like 1

  2. I've been very happy with McLean at centre back. I agree that the midfield is better without him, but think he brings some missing ingredients to the defensive line and works especially well in possession. It definitely solves some of our structural issues and gives us better balance. 

    Wagner is also starting Sainz over Hernandez which is probably the number one change people were asking for. Generally the team is looking more capable and more coherent.

    It's fair to say, though, that it's taken the manager quite a while to plug the obvious holes and it was reasonable for fans to lose patience seeing the same mistakes being made repeatedly. It's great to see a novel solution but it's ok to question why things had to get so bad in the first place.

    I think most of us have been happy with how things are going post Webber. Even the most vociferous Wagner-outers have been silenced by the upturn in performances.

    The crazy thing is that we've never been a million miles away from getting it right. We're just lacking a bit of quality in key areas and have had some tactical flaws when out of possession that undermined much of the good work.

    I wonder how our season would have gone with some better recruitment and wait with intrigue for what happens in January. 

    • Like 1

  3. I find the vitriol embarrassing. Of course their fans are excited: it's the first time they've played us for a long time and doubly as long since they've gone into a derby as favourites. The truth is that they're up there on merit, playing very good football and showing cohesiveness and confidence that we could only dream of at this point.

    There's no need to be bitter. If we lose then let's take it gracefully and accept the natural cycle of things. We've had our period of local dominance. In general it has to be a good thing for the game if small clubs like Ipswich can mix it with the big boys. If we do snatch an unlikely win then it would be funny but wouldn't really prove anything. The main thing is about retaining as much dignity as possible, regardless of the outcome.

    • Like 7

  4. 11 minutes ago, duke63 said:

    And that has not changed since. And probably never will now unless Attanasio digs very very deep into his pockets.

    So why would any club carry on trying the same thing over and over and be surprised when the result is still the same?

    That's my point: the result is not a surprise, nor is it a failure. The failure is to not understand the reality and to expect to be able to sack your best manager this century and somehow find a better replacement.

    Trading Buendia for Rashica, Sargent and Tzolis was the real failure. 

    • Like 3
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  5. 4 minutes ago, duke63 said:

    49 EPL games, 6 wins, conceded over 100 goals and only scored 30ish? That would take a massive change in direction to turn it around. And a completely different playing style. 

    Great manager in the Championship, not a clue at the highest level. 

    It will be interesting to see what happens if he gets Leeds promoted.

    Farke's Premier League record is irrelevant because he never had a Premier League squad to work with. 

    • Like 1
    • Haha 1

  6. It's a ridiculous question because no manager in the world could have got that rabble to stay up. People love to convince themselves that Farke deserved to be sacked due to his poor Premier League record but I think it's a ridiculous stance to take. As far as I'm concerned, the squad which won the Championship twice was really only an upper mid-table team which massively over performed thanks in no small part to Farke's coaching. 

    Farke was never the problem. The real issue was that the players (collectively) weren't ever up to Premier League survival. Unfortunately they were rewarded for promotion with excessive contracts and supplemented by journeymen. Our (Webber's) squad management in the Premier League seasons was awful.

    So, in an alternative reality where Webber resigned after that Brentford win and Farke remained in place, we wouldn't be looking at survival but we would have returned to the joys of Farkeball and be in a far better place at this point in time.

    I imagine we'd have at least made the playoffs last season and generally been in a more positive mindset. We wouldn't have seen those awful winless runs and we'd not be seeing the weird team selections.

    I'm hoping that we've now turned a corner so it could be irrelevant anyway, but I'd massively prefer to have retained Farke for the long term. We gained nothing from sacking him other than to satisfy the whims of those with too little intelligence to value what we had. It's only a false sense of entitlement that makes people think that a new manager could have improved us. 

    • Like 3
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  7. I think it's fair enough for him to get a bit of stick for missing those chances and the lacklustre performances in general. Fans need something to get behind and players have to do something a bit special before they can be afforded any kind of elevated status. It's fair to say that Barnes doesn't yet have much credit in the bank.

    Maybe his goal finally came as a result of him realising that he had something to prove? It's a two way thing. People will love him if he creates a bit of a spark. We've seen a few flashes but not a lot else, at least until he actually found the net last night.

    • Like 2

  8. That was a fairly decent starting 11 except Fisher who was simply out of his depth. The trouble is that the bench was incredibly weak so there was nothing to call on when the players tired. We created plenty of chances and defended pretty well, but then the substitutions made us so much worse all over the pitch. 


  9. No mention of our defending then?

    We have clearly decided to (correctly) focus on having a coherent underlying defensive structure when out of possession. The brainless pressing has been binned with our wide players in particular starting far deeper. We were happy to allow Preston the ball in their half and were far more compact than usual.

    It worked. Mostly. We only had one moment that I recall where we were left exposed on our right with both winger and fullback ahead of the ball. Otherwise Preston had one decent chance from a free kick and hit the bar following Gun's error.

    Ok, we failed to score, but we had a number of good chances and really should have taken one of them. Aside from having recruited so badly that we're relying on Hernandez and Gibbs to take those chances when it's pretty apparent that they simply aren't good enough for this level, we did a decent enough job yesterday. 

    Things on the pitch are far better than they were six weeks ago. People need to appreciate the improvement rather then getting hung up on the result. Stopping the rot was the all-important first step. 

    • Like 4

  10. Well I thought he was excellent at center back today, aside from one mental run where he ended up by the left corner flag at the wrong end of the pitch. And our midfield was far more coherent too. Nunez did really well in the deep lying playmaker role; it's a shame the movement in front of him was so poor.

    With a little bit more quality than Hernandez and Gibbs I'm sure we'd be winning games like that in style. Let's see what January brings. 


  11. A pretty fair reflection of the game: a lack of quality in the final third but an otherwise pretty dominant performance. The main thing is that we suddenly don't have any massive holes in our midfield; far more positives than negatives. A clean sheet! 

    • Like 4

  12. The thing that I think you actually missed was the wonder of Kenny McLean as a central defender. It gives us a competent ball carrier who can (sometimes) pick a decent pass. Crucially it gives him the clear message that he should be fulfilling his defensive duties primarily and only marauding forwards with discretion.

    I think people forget just how many of those lovely goals that Pukki and Buendia finished off stemmed from a well hit pass from the back. Kenny gives us something we've been missing from the defensive line.

    The biggest bonus is that it means we don't have those positional errors in the midfield area. 

    Will Wagner stick with this winning move? 

    • Like 2

  13. 3 hours ago, BigFish said:

    This is received wisdom amongst a section of the fanbase. The game has moved on and this simplistic view really doesn't reflect how it is played anymore. Read Ben Mee's match analysis to learn about what is going on. We have tactical issues when OOP but that is nor necessarily manpower related.

    This is flawed logic amongst a few 'experts' (apparently including Wagner). If you play midfielders who don't have the right defensive instincts and positional awareness then they will be prone to leaving gaping holes for the opposition to exploit. Our 'tactical issues' ultimately amount to players not recognising and reacting to the danger. 

    While some of the more simplistic arguments simply call for 'a CDM', what people like me are asking for is someone to play the exact role that McLean has been playing but with better defensive skills. Then Kenny can play the role Sara has been doing and Sara can play at 10, thus utilising their natural instincts rather than continuing the 'square pegs in round holes' that most of us can see. 

    • Like 3

  14. 5 minutes ago, S_81 said:

    Yep the latter is still a glaring omission. So much so I’ve even mulled whether Ben Gibson could do a job there for now. He’s a decent passer of the ball and can clearly tackle, but he lacks pace and poise nowadays and that could be less consequential if he sat as a CDM. 

    Imagine if simply swapping Gibson and McLean solved our midfield problems... 

    • Haha 2

  15. On 06/12/2023 at 18:02, S_81 said:

                            Gunn

    Stacey.     Batth.   Warner.     Giannoulis.
     

                      McClean. Gibbs. 
     
    Rowe.                                           Sainz.

                             Sara. 

                              Barnes. 

    That's about the best I could come up with. I'd be tempted to put Rowe up front and Fassnacht on the right but Wagner's not ever going to do that (nor is Sara playing at 10, even though it seems like an obvious thing to try). 

    What I found though was we don't have a decent defensive midfielder in the squad. I want to keep McLean at centre back and pair Nunez with an enforcer type in the middle, but that's not possible. 

    • Like 1

  16. 1 hour ago, Parma Ham's gone mouldy said:

    The land grab precursor?

    Exactly. We all witnessed Farke trying to get a song out of that choir, growing increasingly desperate before ultimately reverting to the closest he could achieve to the previous season's first choice team. It wasn't possible and he was doomed to fail.

    I'm not sure I totally agree with the 'opportunity missed' idea. I regard the two promotions under Farke as a huge success in terms of style and enjoyment; an opportunity taken as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure Premier League survival was actually within our grasp at either attempt. In hindsight, I'd prefer to have not bothered spending any money at all, or just signed some promising youngsters and tried to continue the yo-yo for as long as possible.

    The disappointment for me comes from letting the positives we did have slip away while chasing something that might not have existed.

    On the other hand I don't think we're a million miles away from turning things around again. McLean the centre back excites me. 

    • Thanks 1

  17. The trouble is that the failure stems from the summer before Farke was sacked, hence the inability of either manage since to turn it around. Keeping Farke wouldn't necessarily have been a great deal better given how the squad was mismanaged. Farke needed better, more technical players than he was given; more Vrancic than Hernandez. With that squad I'm not sure it was really possible to go back. The bridges were already burned. 

    • Like 5

  18. 1 hour ago, Robert N. LiM said:

    Agree with this. Sometimes wonder whether people at the club (not necessarily MWJ specifically) say this because they think it's what the fans want to hear. But I'd far rather hear that we have a longer-term plan to get to the PL but be more successful when we get there. Not going to die on the hill of defending Dean Smith, but think he would have got a fairer crack of the whip if Webber had said that we were building again after relegation, in a more pragmatic, PL-ready way, rather than giving the impression that bouncing back immediately was the goal.

    But I'm fairly certain that Webber and his disciples within the club genuinely believed that the players and manager were good enough to bounce back straight away. They still seem to think it was just bad luck with injuries etc that have put us in this artificially low position. While there's such a disparity between the reality we can see on the pitch and the rhetoric coming from the club, that can only lead to resentment and a sense of 'disconnect'. 

    The noises from Attanasio and Knapper are far more realistic and therefore easier to connect with. The weird regard for Webber and the failure to acknowledge his failures of the last three years is the biggest issue for me. It's hard to move on while people are still singing his praises. 

    • Like 1
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