It's Character Forming

Or perhaps...

What I'm puzzled about is that when we beat them 4-2 in January we looked a class above them.

Anyone know if the CL final will be free to watch anywhere, I don't have BT Sport.

I wouldn't say I hate Smith, but I do find his time as manager very annoying/frustrating. I think there are a mix of reasons : 1. We got rid of the guy who gave us the 18/19 season for this ? 2. Smith tried to blame the fans for being the problem. Just nonsense. 3. Smith would always find some excuse or point to xG stats when they suited him to justify that things were ok when it was obvious to us fans who actually paid attention to the games that they weren't. Many of us were expressing concerns about the way the team was playing even when the results were good, and those concerns were fully borne out by the subsequent collapse of form aka chickens coming home to roost. 4. Smith always talked a good game but it was just hot air, e.g. saying we'd come back different after the WC break, which turned out to be true only in the sense that things were worse. 5. Look at the very ordinary teams in the playoffs. Do I feel glee that he's not (so far) doing well at Leicester ? No, more a wry sense of amusement that he can't manage to avoid the drop with a much better squad and a much smaller gap than he had to deal with here. Too early to write them off, just look at some of the recent results, but it would now be surprising if they survive, which is appalling given the squad they have.

Very interesting, and that one makes sense, but all about whether they'll share this when the outcome is wrong. Still rankles to me that disallowed goal for Pukki vs Spurs.

Never mind replacing Pukki, we still need to replace Buendia and Skipp !

Interesting article here about the relegation contenders. If Leicester lose their next game at Newcastle and Everton beat Wolves, then Leicester are down, so yeah, they're in big trouble. Premier League relegation run-in: Which teams will drop into Championship? - BBC Sport

I think that Leicester squad is better than a relegation side, so when they appointed Smith I thought he'd probably be able to keep them up, given I think they were just a point below safety at that point. Even now they're only 2 points below safety. Any of Leicester, Leeds and Everton can still escape, it's all about who pulls out the results in the last 2 games.

Great post - this deserves a thread of its own.

I get this, but when we were promoted as champions, we then lost two absolutely key players in Buendia and Skipp - basically with Pukki they were the spine of the team. And we then kicked off the new season without replacements for either of them. I can understand the decision to sell Buendia, I know some disagree, but the risk if we'd kept him is that it would have turned into a Cantwell-type situation and we'd have got nothing. Also we had no choice about Skipp's loan ending, but replacing him should have been our absolutely top priority. Surely having sold Buendia pretty early in the window, the priorities should have been a DM and someone who could provide the service to Pukki. Neither of those happened. Was Normann intended as the DM, but he didn't arrive until September and I have a feeling he was injured when he arrived. I still think it was crazy to sack Farke just 10 games in, especially with no one else lined up, and to end up signing Dean Smith in a panic. Meh.

Yep, definitely unwelcome !

Why would we pronounce the initials of Italian clubs in a French way ? Also doesn't the whole issue stem from both clubs being founded by English people living in Italy at the time, hence why the Anglicised "Milan" was used rather than the proper "Milano". Apparently AC Milan was founded by a textile worker from Nottingham, this is a fictionalised story about it if anyone is interested (I used to know the author if anyone is interested ). The Lord of Milan - English: Amazon.co.uk: Nieri, Robert: 9781367101517: Books

If only we'd taken those chances against Inter....

Looking at it, it's been 20 years since they had any sort of success at all. I remember a while back someone mentioning there were 2 clubs in the EFL who'd not won anything (such as a title, promotion, or any sort of trophy) for an incredibly long time, the binners and another team I forget. Now that they've finally managed a promotion (although they still didn't manage to win the title) you can understand them getting over excited about it. We know from first hand experience (some time ago now) that L1 is not an easy league to get out of, but the standard is still pretty poor. As one of the big teams, most teams were trying to keep games tight against us and hope to get a fortunate point or 3. It felt a bit like it must be for Man City fans in the premiership. Given it took the binners 4 years before they even got in the top 6, that's probably not the experience they had.

3 games to go and 3 points separating 4 teams, it's definitely any 2 from 4 and expect some more weird results. To early to write off anyone except Soton are down all but mathematically.

Thanks, so are we talking a bit over £1m pa for a Champs club ? If so it's nice, but not a game changer. I don't have an issue with game times being moved generally, ok it's a bit of a pain but we should all be used to it by now especially with seasons when we've been in the Prem. Friday night games are the really irritating ones because you're caught up in Friday night traffic. Although is that less bad now, post-Covid ? My experience is plenty of people WFH on Fridays now.

Is that Wagner's "ideal" ? Or was it the way he got that Huddersfield team promoted (and kept them up) ?

I'd point to injuries as the reason have things gone so wrong. I think the idea defending is just "about the system" and to think you can lose both your first choice CBs at the same time as losing your only DM (or the nearest to that role we have) without your defence suddenly looking extremely porous is, to be honest, a bit bonkers. There you go. Also I'd be interested in the breakdown here, last 5 games have been 2 very bad results and 2 narrow defeats plus a draw, it would be interesting to see what xG says about those 3 results and how far the average xGA is skewed down by the 2 bad results. Based on his historic successful period with Huddersfield, is there any actual reason to say Wagner's ideal is probably low scoring? If you can point to anything at all that actually supports that I'd be interested, but if it's just your opinion based on our results in Feb, then you're entitled to your opinion (but don't expect me to agree). For me the last part of the season the big issue, aside from the defence (see above) is that we've been creating plenty of chances (mostly) but failing to score, and we're very fragile and tend to crumple when we concede a goal. Is that down to Wagner ?

This is why I see Webber as the one who should go right now rather than Wagner. The SD is meant to make sure that changes in coaches work with the squad that the SD has assembled to minimise disruption. But, it's clear to me now that Dean Smith was a completely different style of coach than Farke - Farke wanted to drill them very precisely in how to play (especially in possession) but Smith wanted to talk to them about how to approach games and to expect the players to take the lead (it seems from his comments plus the way the team played) which was a 180 change from the Farke style. It seems now Wagner is a lot more full on in his approach than Smith although I'm not yet sure exactly how he does approach it with the players. You can understand the players struggling with this sort of zig-zag approach to coaching. Another massive problem for the last few months is how mentally fragile this team is, which has for obvious reasons got worse since we lost Hanley etc. It seems every game for ages the reports talk about us playing brightly and creating chances, and then conceding the first goal and losing.

I think anyone who objects to the concept of a single majority owner/couple is simply being unrealistic, the only real alternative would be some sort of fan ownership model which is incredibly rare and basically doesn't happen in top flight clubs. For MA to come in with more money, IMO is going to involve him taking a majority stake, and as you say, given D&M currently have a majority stake, that can only happen with their agreement. Personally I think that is the logical conclusion of the discussions they've been having, and I cannot see that the discussions would have gone on this long without that concept being understood between the parties (although not yet a formal agreement between them, which would trigger a wider offer by MA to other shareholders I believe?). Time will tell.

My feeling is that now is the time to get this sorted and the next few weeks are key. Next season is our last year of parachute payments and it makes sense to use new money from MA to leverage that, we have a lot of changes enforced to the squat anyway and it's clear to everyone that a major clearout/rebuild/restructuring is needed. The perfect time for a change of ownership. If it doesn't happen in time for the summer transfers and pre-season, we'll end up with that process being dragged out and losing a lot of the benefit. I realise MA doesn't have to become majority owner to put in more money and we don't know what's going on already behind the scenes, but it would be naive for him to put in more money as a minority shareholder.

Really hard to assess from the outside, given how long we gave Dean smith it would be incredibly harsh to get rid of Wagner now. Part of our style at City is that we give managers a proper time to prove themselves which must be a selling point when we recruit a manager and must give them more authority with the players , compared say with a Watford manager where a player can just wait for the next one in a few months. IMO if anyone goes at this point it should be Webber.

It's an interesting one. An actual assassination attempt on Puti is a daft idea, what are the chances a drone this small could navigate somewhere that he was visible, never mind get close enough to do any harm. The false flag idea also is problematic, because why would the Russians do something that essentially means saying they can't defend the very heart of their empire properly ? Also in terms of them attacking Ukraine in retaliation, well, they've been doing that all along with no need for an excuse. So I actually wonder if it's some sort of Ukrainian group doing it off their own back to bring the war home to the Russians. We've seen various attacks on Russia recently with trains derailed and oil refineries targeted (although the others have all been close to Ukraine). Not easy to understand.

Yep shame about Byram, he never got a solid injury-free run. The only one I'm surprised about is Dowell, he looked really useful in the early games under Wagner and his absence coincided with us struggling to score, seems an odd one that.