We only owed Farke a shot at this league...

[Indy 3,297]

5 minutes ago, littleyellowbirdie said:

That sounds to me an awful lot like how we approached it Farke's first Premier League season, and we all know the outcome. Lambert's survival season was 10 years ago; the chasm between Championship and Premier League has grown enormously since then.

Still, you never know I guess.

Indeed it was to a certain degree that first season we did stay to our style and we got some good results, had we had a little more money to spend on the squad quality who knows where we could have finished. But Brentford, Fulham & Bournemouth have stuck to the main squad and system and they look more competitive than we did trying to change it up last time we got promoted.

It’s a massive ask for us to stay up full stop, but we need that money or we would need a lot of our youth products to make the transition in order to build on the future without promotion.

 

[king canary 7,604]

16 minutes ago, littleyellowbirdie said:

That sounds to me an awful lot like how we approached it Farke's first Premier League season, and we all know the outcome. Lambert's survival season was 10 years ago; the chasm between Championship and Premier League has grown enormously since then.

Still, you never know I guess.

In part but we also tried to do it massively on the cheap.

Another total hypothetical but I do think combine that squad with the budget we had last season and we'd have been much more competitive. 

[It's Character Forming 1,160]

Looking back, the paradox of our first promotion under Farke was that we all knew our defence was weak in the Championship and that it would be a problem if we didn't do anything about it.  And that's exactly what happened.  But paradoxically the back 4 had 3 of our most valuable players, two of whom were sold to Prem clubs.

 

The 2nd time we were promoted, the problem was that we lost two of the most key players in the team, Buendia and Skipp.  Yes we had a big budget but we failed to get in players who could replace them.  We had to rebuild as a result of losing them and the Prem is a really hard league to rebuild a team in unless you have money to burn.  I know there's the debate about selling Buendia, but starting from the position that he'd gone, then that was the bind we were in.

[repman 635]

18 minutes ago, littleyellowbirdie said:

We'll see, but the first half last game there were gaps all over the place, and the second half when we got better shape there was only one more goal, so the basic problem, regardless of who's manager, is still there and attacking prowess will have to suffer in any attempts to tackle it if every previous attampt by anyone is an indicator to go by.

We had more shots in the 2nd half on Saturday. At this level attacking prowess and defensive solidity go hand in hand. Most of the teams with the best defensive records in world football today don't do it by being good at defending, they simply don't do it. Obviously if we were to get promoted we wouldn't be able to dominate as much against better teams, but the defensive ideas should stay the same. When Smith came in he initially got us pressing high up the pitch in a much more organised manner. This change was intended to happen upon promotion with Farke at the helm, but when he failed to produce he got sacked. 

Come this season and the talk going into it was all about pressing and organisation. That was evident early on in the season but it started to unravel, especially when we didn't score the first goal and the onus was then on us to get back into the game. I still find it interesting how Webber in an interview after sacking Smith mentioned about managers reverting to type. As results went against us we seemed to be moving away from the ideas of high pressing, into dropping deep and hoping for something magical up front.