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Ugly success or beautiful failure?

Would you care if Norwich achieved promotion playing rubbish football?   

52 members have voted

  1. 1. Would you care if Norwich achieved promotion playing rubbish football?

    • No. Winning no matter what makes me happy
      29
    • Yes. Identity matters more than promotion
      23


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Lots on here claiming Smith is a hoof ball specialist with no identity. Whilst I disagree with this it made me think, how much would I care about the identity if we were winning every week? Our wins last season came from mostly non-fluent pretty ugly football, but I cheered my gonads off when we won, so for me the result is king. 
Lack of identity matters in the long term, but that winning feeling covers all sins. 
Interested to see for those that would rather we keep identity over success what they view as the benefits to a small largely overlooked club regardless. 

disclaimer: I’m also not suggesting we can’t have both good identity and wins. 

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I’m just the same when we win by whatever means – delighted, in the moment. How we did it doesn’t matter. However, to win a key match by playing ugly can be argued justified but to win promotion by setting out to play ugly just stinks. Not because I don’t like the idea of a coach doing it to improve his chances of making it beyond January in this or any foreseeable season, that’s life, but because that approach, if allowed, risks damaging, even destroying, another wave of young talent which looks like it might, just might, be about to break on the shores of Carrow Road. Let’s not take the product of years of dedication and development at Colney and risk pi**ing it up the wall. If that means waiting a while longer, well if the wait’s rewarded it’ll be all the sweeter. This is not about liking or disliking Dean Smith or whoever’s next down the line, it’s about the soul of the club and to protect that I'd be ok with giving any boss the benefit of patience if they showed that care, whatever anger I might have shown in this last season. And if anyone derides me for saying so I just don't care. OTBC

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Is the insinuation that Smith plays 'rubbish' football? Are there still people who don't realise that what he tried to do last season with one of the worst squads the PL has ever seen, was simply because we had one of the worst squads the PL has ever seen?! We had NO midfield. With no midfield, the only sensible plan was to bypass it as often as possible and get the attacking players into the game.

I assume some have done some very very simple research into what he brought to his past clubs? It certainly wasn't 'rubbish' football at any of them.

(If this wasn't the insinuation, apologies. Though weird OP is so)

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5 hours ago, Fiery Zac said:

Is the insinuation that Smith plays 'rubbish' football? Are there still people who don't realise that what he tried to do last season with one of the worst squads the PL has ever seen, was simply because we had one of the worst squads the PL has ever seen?! We had NO midfield. With no midfield, the only sensible plan was to bypass it as often as possible and get the attacking players into the game.

I assume some have done some very very simple research into what he brought to his past clubs? It certainly wasn't 'rubbish' football at any of them.

(If this wasn't the insinuation, apologies. Though weird OP is so)

It’s a response to those that do think he plays poor football (not me) to really gauge what they think is the ‘solution’. A lot of posters deriding Smith but I feel the same will not as likely be so negative should we win games, they’ll just go quiet. But it’s also an interesting (imo) debate for a club that are known for playing the ‘right way’, whether the fans truly care how we win. 

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Thanks to Covid I've only seen us win about 3 home games in 2.5 years. I'm sick of it, I really don't care how we play as long as we win!

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It's not the dichotomy I would use. I'd be more concerned that we play a fairly specific brand of football regardless of whether it is the first team, the U23s, or any youth team so that players rising through the ranks are relatively au fait with it. Combine that with a manager who likes promoting young players, and that eases the transition.

So I'm not as bothered about the aesthetics, and more about the consistency.

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I don't care how we play, I've always believed you adapt how you play game to game to get the best results against what's in front of you, if the opposition defense doesn't like dealing with long balls to a target man that's knocked down to a runner, then play Idah/hugill up top with pukki off then and play long balls, if they don't like balls in behind then play pukki up top and find a creative midfielder who can play it in behind. 

 

The best teams are the best at adapting their style.

Edited by GodlyOtsemobor

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The complaint before Farke was that there was no Norwich "way" of playing and Farke, whatever you think of him, definitely instituted a "way" we could all identify with - and it was at times very successful and at times fantastic to watch.  Smith's football will plainly be more pragmatic, more physical and more like other clubs, so that uniqueness which we enjoyed in being so good under Farke, particularly in the championship, will be gone. What Smith has to do is get the players to play that more conventional football better than the rest of the league. If he can do that, fair dos, but it won't be a Norwich "way". 

 

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As someone who has probably been the most vocal of the 'anti-Smith' posters, I feel like I should say something here. I don't see how anyone can deny that the 27 games he had in charge last season were anything other than little patches of hoofball surrounded by a blancmange of random formations and shapeless, structureless football. Of course there were huge mitigating factors for this - he inherited a side low on confidence and used to losing, the recruitment had been totally unsuitable, we had one of the weakest midfields to ever grace the PL, etc.

So I accept that most people do not agree with me about Smith and I think the general feeling is that he should be given a chance to show what he can do. Fair enough. But if we are 12 or 15 games into next season and there is no sign of any improvement or of any vision of the way forward, I am worried that we will do the usual Norwich thing of hanging onto a failing manager too long. I understand that he may have had a different style at Brentford, but he should be judged on his style here. You don't judge a player by how he played five years ago, and I don't think you should judge a manager in that way either. By then he will have had the equivalent of a whole season and if there is no sign of a Dean Smith identity, there probably never will be.

I'm not arguing we need to be top of the league, but we must have some sign that the clueless, shapeless football of last season is going to become a thing of the past.

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Style matters more for me. Pulis, Allardyce, Warnock, McCarthy all are fantastic Championship managers but I'd be livid if any of them came near my club regardless of results. It doesn't have to be Farke-esque (although that is my preference) but it can't be dour even with results. Smith thus far has been just that (but without results!), so it's pretty tough to watch but, as others have said, that could have well been coz of the dross he had to work with. We'll see this year what he's all about and we all owe him a clean slate to prove himself.

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Results matter more (there is nothing fun about losing repeatedly) but style determines how much rope you get when you aren't winning- hence why Neil & Farke got the chance to take us back up but Hughton was binned off before we were even officially down.

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Beautiful failure can improve into beautiful success, whereas ugly success can deteriorate into ugly failure (the worst of both worlds). I would rather we focus on an aesthetically pleasing style of football that resonates throughout the age groups, as we did with Farke.

I think people are doing Smith a bit of a disservice; he's a clever coach who is more than happy to adapt his style according to what he has available to him, and has learnt from his mistakes over 10+ years of management and adapted accordingly. This is a good read: https://www.coachesvoice.com/cv/dean-smith-norwich-aston-villa-brentford/

I remain optimistic that we'll see a style of football more commensurate with a front-foot squad that's one of the best in the division. I think the brief dalliance with partnering Pukki and Idah in a traditional two-up-top will prove to be just a throw of the dice to try and get some kind of results out of a squad seriously lacking in weapons at PL level.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Smith revert to the proactive, attacking 4-2-3-1 or 4-3-3 that was successful for him at Brentford. I'd be very surprised (and disappointed) if he tried to bludgeon his way back to the PL by using direct and over-physical tactics. Another attacking midfield 'spark' might be necessary to make that formation tick (unless we can keep hold of Rashica, who I'm confident would be one of the stand-out players in the Championship, or if we can somehow cajole Cantwell back into form).

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I just wonder how much of an impact Shakey has on Smith's decisions; could we see a Leicester a la 2015-16 system develops where Pukki is used a la Vardy and we defend deep and hit on the break?  

Probably not, as agree more likely to be a more traditional 4-3-3 as we should have more guile than 90% of the teams in this league to not have to defend deep, but just a thought as to where Shakey's influence begins and ends.

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Context matters.

For example, if you're a small fish in a big pond, as we are in the Premier League, you can except agricultural football if it is helping us punch above our weight. Though as @king canary said, when it starts to go wrong you won't get much leeway before the fans turn and the P45 comes. So I could accept garbage football if it was getting us sufficient wins to survive in the Premier League.

However, in the Championship, we're the big fish. And there is no excuse not to attempt to play attractive football in line with what Norwich are generally associated with and still get results. I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy winning the league with 25 1-0 wins and 15 0-0 draws.

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If it hasn’t been said already ……… Under Daniel Farke we had both attractive  (Championship) football and a winning formula  - So no reason for not trying to attain both 

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We haven't played in the EFL under Deano so we haven't a clue how we will perform. Hopefully with style and panache which is what I look for ultimately. Yes the EPL means you have done well but at the end of the day its still a game of football by the team we love no matter what league we are in.

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6 hours ago, keelansgrandad said:

We haven't played in the EFL under Deano so we haven't a clue how we will perform. Hopefully with style and panache which is what I look for ultimately. Yes the EPL means you have done well but at the end of the day its still a game of football by the team we love no matter what league we are in.

You need so rousing music playing behind that KGD. 👍 

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Lots will be dissatisfied with both. I remember prior to the 10-game unbeaten run in 2012 under Chris Hughton there had been noisy criticism of Hughton and calls to get rid of him for the boring style, that weren't entirely silenced even during the 10-game unbeaten run, but reappeared immediately with a vengeance upon the loss to West Brom.

Still have a sneaking suspicion there was a fair bit of racism behind a proportion of the hostility to Hughton though. 

Edited by littleyellowbirdie

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7 hours ago, Feedthewolf said:

Beautiful failure can improve into beautiful success, whereas ugly success can deteriorate into ugly failure (the worst of both worlds).

I'm not sure I can really picture what beautiful failure looks like. For instance I didn’t see any beauty in the 11 straight defeats in the first Premier League season under Farke, no matter how much passing around the back we did.

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Odd how we have got to know unredeemably bleak failure these last few years. Of course I’m referring purely to a football results type of failure (not overall institutional failure of which we have had none). Previously I’ve known relegations and very bad periods, but I’ve no memory of anything even resembling those 11 defeats, or, much worse, the poor run last season. If I was on the Psychologist’s Couch, I think in football terms the damage amounts to something akin to a diagnosis of trauma; one shrugs it off, but deep down the wounds are there. 

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Not really relivent this year. because we have a better team than most we should be trying to dominate possession and pin teams in because it will increase our chances of winning. The dilemma will rear it's head again though if we get promoted, as a weaker team in the PL you have to get the ball forward quickly, defend in numbers for long periods of the game and exploit set pieces. Passing the ball about around the back and knowing it backwards and sideways will do us no favors as we inevitably lose it and get countered. Next year we'll have to make better use of counter attacks if we go up again and get a few more players in who like running at pace with the ball at their feet, that and set pieces are how most weaker teams get their goals and throwing less players forward to hit teams on the counter leaves us less vulnerable on the break.  

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48 minutes ago, king canary said:

I'm not sure I can really picture what beautiful failure looks like. For instance I didn’t see any beauty in the 11 straight defeats in the first Premier League season under Farke, no matter how much passing around the back we did.

19/20 did feel like a beautiful failure to me.

Despite the poor results, I was still super proud of the team, manager, club and play style.

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53 minutes ago, Google Bot said:

19/20 did feel like a beautiful failure to me.

Despite the poor results, I was still super proud of the team, manager, club and play style.

19/20 felt much better for me, too. At least we had a few games where we played very well and we only looked awful in the final run of games. Last season even the games we won were dour contests where we just got the better of teams who were almost as bad as we were. 

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In my personal life and more importantly work, success / victory is the important bit. Football on the other hand is entertainment; I want to be entertained. I would not be entertained if we played Hughton style football even if we won the league. I want style and entertainment.

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Dull, unattractive football is fine when you're winning, but as soon as the club even starts levelling out with it, never mind falling backwards, it's the worst of both worlds. 

That said, if your aim is to win promotion or avoid relegation, I'd be happy to tolerate a season (or two, if both are achieved) of 'rubbish football'. The problem is that it doesn't guarantee results any more than 'pretty football', so I wouldn't advocate it as the standard, base philosophy.

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3 hours ago, king canary said:

I'm not sure I can really picture what beautiful failure looks like. For instance I didn’t see any beauty in the 11 straight defeats in the first Premier League season under Farke, no matter how much passing around the back we did.

The term itself is something of an oxymoron, obviously. I would rather that we stuck to consistent principles of playing 'nice' football and try to get that to work, than playing 'pragmatic' football and trying to get that to work. 

I guess the best parallel I could draw is that I'd rather have the (nearly) five years we've just had under Farke than scrape our way to 16th or 17th in the PL playing football like Burnley (which would certainly constitute 'success' with our current financial model).

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10 minutes ago, Feedthewolf said:

The term itself is something of an oxymoron, obviously. I would rather that we stuck to consistent principles of playing 'nice' football and try to get that to work, than playing 'pragmatic' football and trying to get that to work. 

I guess the best parallel I could draw is that I'd rather have the (nearly) five years we've just had under Farke than scrape our way to 16th or 17th in the PL playing football like Burnley (which would certainly constitute 'success' with our current financial model).

I would agree if we'd have been competitive in either of the Premier League seasons under Farke. That doesn't mean staying up necessarily, but it does mean not being bottom most of the season and not even part of the relegation battle.

I'd take a few scrappy 1-0 wins over being humped week in week out. 

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