Superb Alex Neil interview: so many terrific insights

[king canary 7,599]

1 minute ago, yellowrider120 said:

He didn't authorise the spending though did he? That was McNally and the Board.

He was the manager in the 'old school' sense of the word so was much more involved in transfers than Farke. So these were his players and his deals that he wanted.

Also, while I'm not a huge fan of the owners, it seems a bit much to suggest they should have stepped in and stopped deals, as if a large section of our fanbase wouldn't have been entirely up in arms if it turned out Deila & MWJ had blocked the transfer of Naismith because they felt it wasn't good value for money.

[Ward 3 372]

9 hours ago, Ulfotto said:

Throwing it out there Alex Neil to return to replace Farke?

Id take it. He was pretty attack minded. Done well for us.

[interwebme 52]

5 hours ago, king canary said:

Yep, his decisions in the transfer market were at times completely bizarre.

£8m on Pritchard for a club that had spent £8m on Naismith 6 months earlier and already had Hoolahan and had Maddison waiting in the wings was...quite something.

Don't forget Sergio Canos

[king canary 7,599]

14 minutes ago, interwebme said:

Don't forget Sergio Canos

Canos actually made sense as a signing but Neil then refused to use him which was another of his weird traits.

[sonyc 5,508]

5 hours ago, It's Character Forming said:

Alex Neil was just a very young manager who'd not really learned the game at that point and made a lot of mistakes as a result.

 

He seemed to have a thing for signing attacking midfielders, I lost track of how many we signed under him.

 

He was simply out of his depth and it really showed not just in the Premier league, but in the Champs after we went back down.

An incredible number of midfielders (reckon he could have been tempted to have fielded virtually a whole team....and I bet he did in his training routines 🙂)

I liked him a lot and his story is a fascinating one - being approached on the touchline must have felt like winning the lottery.

Will always love him because he gave me a very happy Wembley memory (I had two previous ones but both were the 1-0 defeats at league Cup finals and I missed the third one!).

Yet, when he left I thought his time had come - he looked rather lost with his tactics (post that infamous Newcastle game).

I reckon he will go on to be a decent manager and look forward to tracking his future career.

[Tetteys Jig 830]

On 04/11/2021 at 08:41, king canary said:

Personally found it a bit self serving. The 'self funding' model wasn't as much of a thing under his stewardship and to blame his failures here on a lack of money is just not true. Sure, we cocked up the summer transfer window in the Premier League but the club back him to the hilt when we went down he just wasted all the money on players we didn't need or he didn't know how to manage.

You don't remember "prudence with ambiton" very well then. The targets we missed out on because we couldn't stretch that extra couple of million are sickening. Sure the gulf maybe wasn't quite as pronounced but it was still massive then.

Alex Neil was fantastic for us for a while. That Newcastle 6-2 game was his turning point where he lost his confidence and we stopped playing the swashbuckling, ballsy football that had served him so well to that point.

What we desperately need is someone to squeeze a 17th finish out of us so we can get a full summer on a premiership budget. Only then will we really have half a chance of establishing ourselves without taking the shortcut of significant external investment.

[thebigfeller 200]

2 minutes ago, Tetteys Jig said:

You don't remember "prudence with ambiton" very well then. The targets we missed out on because we couldn't stretch that extra couple of million are sickening. Sure the gulf maybe wasn't quite as pronounced but it was still massive then.

Neither do you, given 'prudence with ambition' was our ludicrous slogan under Neil Doncaster, who left when we went down in 2009.

Neil? Too much too soon, as he himself would admit. And the Naismith signing was a quite horrendous blunder - 50K a week for someone who didn't want to be here, and messed the whole side up when we picked him. 

We needed a real recruitment and financial expert to guide him. Giving Alex all the power over signings led us down a disastrous cul-de-sac, which only selling Maddison took us back out of. And if Farke hadn't improved Maddison so massively, who knows where we'd be now? We might well be in League 1.

[Tetteys Jig 830]

5 minutes ago, thebigfeller said:

Neither do you, given 'prudence with ambition' was our ludicrous slogan under Neil Doncaster, who left when we went down in 2009.

Neil? Too much too soon, as he himself would admit. And the Naismith signing was a quite horrendous blunder - 50K a week for someone who didn't want to be here, and messed the whole side up when we picked him. 

We needed a real recruitment and financial expert to guide him. Giving Alex all the power over signings led us down a disastrous cul-de-sac, which only selling Maddison took us back out of. And if Farke hadn't improved Maddison so massively, who knows where we'd be now? We might well be in League 1.

I presumed we were still running under that mantra when Neil was here.

Naismith was a very much panicked plan C deadline day signing when we couldn't afford our preferred targets and yes, was an absolute disaster. It was specifically so because of the crazy contract we gave him but out of desperation we had no choice or he wouldn't have come. He still took a pay cut from his Everton deal. Its a shame we couldn't have just loaned him.

Sure Neil failed in the market but I still put that down to us being financially outmuscled on our preferred targets. He got hugely unlucky with the timing of that Klose injury as well. If we'd beat Palace that day then perhaps our clubs fortunes would have swapped around...

[Sussexyellow 55]

1 hour ago, Tetteys Jig said:

I presumed we were still running under that mantra when Neil was here.

Naismith was a very much panicked plan C deadline day signing when we couldn't afford our preferred targets and yes, was an absolute disaster. It was specifically so because of the crazy contract we gave him but out of desperation we had no choice or he wouldn't have come. He still took a pay cut from his Everton deal. Its a shame we couldn't have just loaned him.

Sure Neil failed in the market but I still put that down to us being financially outmuscled on our preferred targets. He got hugely unlucky with the timing of that Klose injury as well. If we'd beat Palace that day then perhaps our clubs fortunes would have swapped around...

However Naismith wasn’t a panic deadline day signing. He signed on January 19th. So not actually plan C, but more likely a target, just not a very astute one.

If you want an example of craziness in that window, I would go for giving Matt Jarvis a permanent contract to free up a loan slot and then loaning  in Patrick Bamford on deadline day. Only for Bamford to then be barely used.

[thebigfeller 200]

3 minutes ago, Sussexyellow said:

However Naismith wasn’t a panic deadline day signing. He signed on January 19th. So not actually plan C, but more likely a target, just not a very astute one.

If you want an example of craziness in that window, I would go for giving Matt Jarvis a permanent contract to free up a loan slot and then loaning  in Patrick Bamford on deadline day. Only for Bamford to then be barely used.

Indeed. In other words, AN was confused. Perfectly naturally so: he was so young, had come so far so fast, but was in over his head in the world's toughest, most demanding league. That's why we desperately needed someone above him responsible for recruitment... but I don't think he'd have tolerated that.