Next manager

Sensible and right from WOTP
https://widthofapost.com/2023/09/18/familiar-problems-at-bradford-city-dont-need-to-have-familiar-answers/

 

Bang on bud and folk on here can bang in about getting us in the playoffs but a better manager would have had us straight up ........ I simply cannot believe that he will turn it around and how many weeks are the injured players gonna be up to full fitness ???? We may be looking nearly into December for that to happen ........... so in the mean time we have to put up with this negative shite because it keeps us stable when in reality we look like a team that will leave the division but not in the way we want to ........... I mean we have mustered up 9 shots on target in 360 minutes of league football and tbh apart from the 3 goals I cannot recall the other 6 being worthwhile.................just get someone in to sort this crap out now and get someone in who can actually set this team to actually go out and look like they can win a game unlike this crap ..........

 

Its utter tosh, and misses the point entirely.

 

I read it yesterday. They highlighted our dilemma brilliantly but then opted for stability because we had failed to find a manager over several seasons who could get us out of this league. Every single fan would love to have stability, but I don’t want to be stable at this level! I want us to be promoted. It is not good having to keep changing managers. Part of me just wants to leave him until the end of his contract, then we will start again next season….but what happens if the rot really sets in and we end up scrambling about at the bottom of the league and it will be too late then. I just can’t see how MH can turn this around, plus he never managed it last season. We ended up in the playoffs, his mentality was don’t loose, when it should have been go all out to slaughter Carlisle. That timid approach cost us.
Now here we are no better and some how we are told our saviours are Oliver, Cook and Chapman.

 

Too right.

Even tiny teams sack their managers when they are doing crap...how many promotion chasing sides would not have sacked any of the managers that we have?? And they're much smaller clubs than ours, but our expectations are unrealistic because...?

We should simply be happy we've gone from the brink of promotion to the Championship to doing shit every year in League 2. Gone from a proper club to an absolute joke footballing wise. It's the same tripe we've heard every season where fans knew things were going bad, then told "just get behind the lads ffs!/be happy you have a club", and then shockingly the seasons a failure.

12th biggest UK city, big fanbase, sat 85th out of 92 teams. First thing people usually say is how the hell are we in League 2, of course I tell them it's because we don't clap hard enough for shit football.

Fans have been more than patient. Could you imagine ANY other club our size putting up with this? For this many seasons? We're taken for an absolute fecking ride.

If people don't want to be proud of their club and what it can achieve then I'm sure there's plenty of local non-professional clubs where simply existing and playing football will satisfy them.

 

But they are clapping very hard

 

Well judging by the poll the majority agree with them. Nobody thinks Hughes is doing a great job most like me hate the style of play and negativity. But the best chance of not wasting another season is to give him time with his own players and staff to turn things round.

 

Steve Evans can see that, however odious he may be.

 

This notion of 'you can't just keep changing the manager', or 'changing the manager doesn't work'. Well, it worked for each of the 4 clubs promoted last season, 3 of which had managers in their first year and the 4th was in his 2nd (having missed auto promotion on the final day in ridiculously unfortunate circumstances).

Where it doesn't work, and where the constant churn of managers is a symptom of the REAL problem, is when those responsible for setting the vision for the club and hiring in the key roles to deliver that vision, don't have a scooby what they're doing. And why would they? Rupp by his own admission isn't a football man. He was the money man in the partnership with Rahic, duped into buying us in the first place. And there's nothing about Sparks CV or record here that suggests he's qualified to run a football club. He's got some media and commercial expertise and admittedly both areas have improved under him, but he's done nothing in the football world and his record of managerial hires, and hiring, sacking, then rehiring of a recruitment lead, speaks for itself.

 

The WOTP alluded to fans discontentment. If they become more angry due to poor results then they may well start dumping their anger on the Board/Sparks/Rupp.

 

Its a select audience from a part of the customer base that I'd see as generally having a rosier outlook on things. The atmosphere on Saturday and reaction with Hughes at the end speaks volumes for the fanbase as a whole.

Even those against a managerial change - in my opinion - are taking a view that's based less on backing Hughes or a principled view of 'stability', its more a case of 'what's the point, we'll make a hash of the next appointment and probably just give it to McCall'.

 

When the WOAP turn, you're done. They're the last to go, generally speaking.

 

I heard a muted blast from the past on Saturday “attack, attack, attack, attack, attack”. Maybe we need the whole ground to join in to really ram home our point that negative, possession football isn’t something that should be witnessed without end product. I stopped watching premier league football because I find it so boring and slow most of the time. Hughes needs to get them fit enough to get on the front foot. It’s a sad indictment that they aren’t fit enough to get through 100 minutes of football midway through September.

 

And the board/Sparks and Rupp are the main problem.

WOTP write about us changing managers often but how is hiring them?

The board, Sparks and Rupp keep making the wrong decisions for this club and we are going backwards!

Until they is change at the top this club will fail! That simple Bradford City fans!

 

No I think there is a noisy minority who think they speak for others. Of course there is a lot of dissatisfaction and even anger but I still think most people think eight matches in and still well in touch with the pack is to early for yet another managerial change

 

Hang on, you don't think Hughes is doing a good job and you hate his style of play but keeping him is the best chance of not wasting another season? You do realise that is totally contradictory don't you?

 

That poll is as close as the Brexit poll was and if that was re-run now it would be 63/37 in the opposite direction (according to Radio four today) our poll is changing daily and will very soon be a majority in favour "leave" just like the original Brexit one was.

Hughes has had 18 months in charge, three full transfer windows and brought in 35 players, and shifted on a similar number.

I think Cook & Ridehalgh are the only ones still here who he inherited (could be wrong on that) and he refuses to play Ridehalgh, to the extent he brough in Tom Bola to replace him and then realised how gash he was (the only thing he seems to have woken up to so far).

in 18 months he's shifted out three players that he spunked away transfer fees on.

Hughes has all his own team except Trueman and I'm damn sure if he wanted to replace him he could very easily.

He picked up 1.38 points per match in his first season, 1.65 in his second and is currently back on 1.38 again in his third giving him an average of 1.56 (72 for a season). He has a win ratio of 40%, and last season that was the joint lowest in the top 8.

He's been backed with more money in real terms than any manager since Stuart was in his first season as manager.

Most damningly, his goal difference over 67 league matches is plus 14 (0.20 per game) and that means we score one goal more than our opponents for every FIVE full league matches we play.

As fans we want promotion, any sort of promotion, we aren't expecting to smash the league, we will settle for 3rd place or at worst winning the play offs. We don't expect a Parky style cup run, but we still shift 15,000 season tickets (albeit cheaply, but they are no longer the cheapest in league two as Salford have cheaper ones at £180) and on numerous occasions have as many "walk up" home fans in the ground than half this league get in an average attendance.

Mark Hughes is probably a lovely bloke to have a pint with, but is incredibly arrogant (what other word could be used to describe someone who wrote not one, but two autobiographies by the age of 26) and his experiment is currently a failure, with the only person who can shoulder any blame for that is the man himself and his ridiculous attempts to have league two journeymen play a slow premier league style of play.

Mark Hughes current philosophy on tactics is an exact match for Einstein's theory of madness in that he constantly plays slow, negative, sideways, patient football in a league that is the fastest and most frenetic of all our professional leagues, irrespective of if that's using a 352/ 433/ 4231 formations, but he refuses to accept that league two is a different animal to the PL.

He's signed players who can't play in many of his formations and expects players who have never played above L2 to adapt, all the changes in formation achieves is put even more square pegs in even more round holes.

By all means wait until his contract expires in June, but don't then expect a new manager to come in and hit the ground running. I'll give him until the end of October, but if he hasn't turned it around by then he simply has to go so that we don't waste another season "getting up to speed".

If that meets your definition of unacceptable/ overrated expectations then so be it. Fact is width of a post are wrong, and it's not the first time.

 

As an addendum, I have a friend who is the biggest "happy clapper" you will ever meet, to the point where although it was blindingly obvious to everyone that the players had downed tools for Deluded Derek, he refused to accept that any footballer would ever give less than 100%, and last season said during a match that the players were doing a great job, despite at the time only being the 8th best team in the league. Even he accepts that Hughes is on borrowed time.