Niall Quinns Discopants wrote:Ted Hughes wrote: In other words he sometimes lacked the bottle to make the kind of changes neccessary to change the game, preferring to play safe first each time & when he did decide on a plan, it was sometimes the wrong one, which is prettty much what we've just said.
I didn't think lacked the bottle to make changes. Not at all. It's just that you are not going to end up winning every game where you are 0-1 down and have 20 minutes to go. That simply doesn't always happen. You take certain chances at that stage and sometimes they pay off and other times they don't. It's the same with EVERY manager. Difference between good and bad manager is how OFTEN he is able to turn the games around and Mancini did that often enough to warrant him being called good manager.
In fact, I think Mancini's problem was little bit the opposite you are claiming. I think he had numerous different tactical base ideas and variants. One of his main problems was that he needed to be constantly tinkering with his tactics never to be fully satisfied. After league winning season we were (clearly) moving to right direction. Instead of just taking where we left off following season he started to make changes like the Wingback system and experimenting with different variations of three man midfield (both narrow and wide) and different variations of three up front ( two CF's with one guy playing off them, three man wide with one CF and two guys very wide etc). In lot of times he seemed to overthink the whole gameplan. There was also the massive mistake of thinking that he has room to operate and make these expirements after winning the title.
So all in all, I strongly disagree that he didn't have "plan B". His faults were elsewhere.
You are forgtting the mid season spell where the rags overtook us as the best team & we struggled against rubbish. That was when attacking variation was needed & it almost cost us the title. The rags bottling it & the boost of Tevez gave us something new at the death. But the fact remained; we had been sussed, & it showed last season.
I didn't say Bob was a bad manager, he was an excellent manager he won the league, but his so called plan B was tactical shite & overcomplicated rather than just getting the job done in the best way, when all of us could see the rags battering teams with simple football. If we had tried something like it & failed, then it would be fair enough to say Bob had done his best with a plan B & the pklayers couldn't do it, but we never did. Fucking around with midfield formations & back fives is only of some use if the team you are playing against has an interest in playing football & most of those who did ate his back 5 for breakfast anyway.
It was the bus parkers who caused us most problems though. If they are just stood there in two banks of five, it is unlikely to make a difference if you play 3 or 4 in midfield. It makes a difference if the ball is bouncing around in their box for 45 mins though.
Width, or mistakes caused by it, is the usual way of solving the problem; even Spain are realising that. It won't work 100% of the time, but I recon the rags have proved it works 85%, at Prem level anyway.
When you go for years with no wide players, & when others do go wide, they are mostly playing mainly on their wrong foot, so can't cross the ball (but aren't supposed to anyway), but you have signed 2 big strikers like Dzeko & Balotelli (who never play together for that reason), & then when you do sign a wide player you don't play him at all, you are not getting the best from the players available.
It appears as if the count is going to do something about that, but of course he may stick Navas on the wrong side & pass the ball sideways for all I know.
