david yearsley wrote:brite blu sky wrote:the_georgian_genius wrote:colonel_muck wrote:i've not seen enough to convince me that he is right for the job, but i will be clinging to the fulham performance until another all out defensive display because i hate myself for the fact that this is the first manager i've ever wanted us to sack. we don't have to play like we did against fulham every week, but i'll be happy if we try, like we did yesterday against stoke.
Big respect for that!!
Mancini is treading a fine line imo. He has certain basic demands, like a disciplined formation that aids defensive stability and offers some level of security. Fair enough.. build from the back and all that. On top of that he obviously has ideas of what he wants and the players he has brought in show that, but he has to balance what he wants with learning how to deal with the prem himself and getting the players to do what he wants. The fine line imo is between the basics and the push for the ideal while getting results. You could argue that playing Balotelli with his experience of the prem was a real gamble and probably stacked against paying off. But Mancini knows that he has to get such players up to speed and suffer the ineffectiveness in the short term. He is, and has done that all season and has admitted that the aim is to stay in touch until we are a better unit.
We are difficult to beat as the first half at Stoke showed, we are also getting there as the second half showed.
It is clear that he is making some marginal decisions, that dont pay off and can be questioned, but the vast majority are just waiting to see and giving some leeway. My own opinion is that we have been pretty sh*te and sort of got away with it, but i dont think we have been crap because of Bobby Manc, or at least not just bcos of him, i take the facts that a lot of new players had to get used to the prem and each other, a lot were out and not least key attackers like Adebayor have been a bit of a disgrace.
We are still far from being there.. i would say in player understanding, but the only answer to that is to play competitive games and build on that through the training. I see Mancini's beligerent side, so he will push the team he wants even if it costs us in the shorter term. I might be wrong but i think he wants to show the players in action his vision of what they should be doing at best, he then has a tangible example of what they can achieve and will demand that all the squad live up to that standard. As we haven't yet achieved that it is still in the air somewhere.
At some point we will utterly annihilate a decent team, i think that will be this season, possibly not that far off, and it will set the tone for the squad as a whole and every game we play.
Good call BBS - the window could also have a bearing on all this - if we get lucky and make a Cuntanhalf type of signing things could get very exciting in a short space of time. Lets see where we are New year
Also a agree with a lot of that post.
I said before that I don't think Mancini's got the nouse required to go further than challenging Spurs for 4th. To qualify that just a little, the real contenders are the ones who can go and play against teams who 'park the bus' and still cut them open, play expansive football, and come away with 3 points. There will be the occasional blip, and there will of course be dropped points, but the overall level of performances won't drop.
It seems under Mancini that we swing from the sublime to the ridiculous a little too often. Yesterday is a case in point where you'd think coming off the back of our best performance this year, we'd come with enough tempo and guile to not give Stoke a chance to get into the game, as top teams often do. Rather we just reverted to 'tortoise in shell' type, happy to keep the ball in our own half, not testing the opposition, and encouraging them to come on to us.
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