bearded_red

This football club is so weird. Why can’t it just be normal?

Still find it impossible to believe we’re actually in any trouble. Too many teams need to make up points, we probably only need 6/7 points to be safe and whether we play well or badly there’s rarely many goals in our games which should see you come out on the right end of the result enough. However, if we don’t get a result this weekend then we could definitely be in trouble after the Leicester game. Utterly ridiculous this is even being thought and spoken about to be honest. What a self sabotage of a season.

This is going to get quite messy isn’t it.

Some absolutely lovely Joel Wilson there. Now at the point where he’s openly being laughed at by the players.

If your only defence of Liam Manning is that we’re not doing as badly as when Pearson took over that complete omnishambles I’d suggest that in itself speaks volumes for what a job he’s doing.

Kuldeep in this series is the most I’ve enjoyed watching a spinner since Warne, absolute genius.

Come on, you must be due a decent post. I believe in you.

Hi Nigel, Steve Lansdown here, just wondered if you'd be interested in the vacancy we currently have? Ok, slight heads up, we have an uninterested, unmotivated and unfit squad which is currently suffering a quite preposterous injury crisis. Eleven players are out of contract and leaving at the end of the season as we desperately need to reduce both the size of our squad and wage bill. We are currently on a run of losing seven straight games (and twelve of the last fifteen). After the game on Saturday one of our caretaker managers basically pleaded for help as soon as possible and made it clear he had no idea how we would get out of this slump. Our captain and record transfer fee was holding back tears while telling the media that he had never played in a team like this and admitted that every game we spend ninety minutes desperately defending and trying to keep the score down. Fortunately we only need a two or three wins to see us safe this season so we would like you to achieve them as quickly as you possibly can. Should we stay up we would be interested in offering you a three year deal. We have to be honest and say that the first two of those years we will be operating under austerity measures due to the threat of points deductions and transfer embargoes for failing FFP, the squad will have to be small and we will have to rely on young unproven players from the academy. It goes without saying that we cannot get relegated as the financial issues we have would be massively exaggerated should we end up playing League 1 football. After these two seasons are up and all contracts from our previous big spending have came to an end you will have an opportunity to start looking forwards and targeting competing for playoff places. Its not all bad though, you will be 'inheriting' a 17 year old that hasn't played a minute of professional football and a 21 year old forward that hasn't scored a goal in 43 Championship appearances. If you could provide the opportunities, coaching and guidance that help turn these two into assets we can sell to the Premier League for around 35 million that would really help our current financial plight. Should you achieve all these things while building a spirited, professional and committed squad, we will thankyou for your efforts by firing you as soon as we (wrongly) believe we have an excuse and someone on our most used fans forum will call you a failure.

Couldn’t agree more.

Absolutely staggering isn’t it.

We were always going to be better against a team like Ipswich than we’ve been in the last three games. Surely everyone knew that? Surely everyone who watches us play knew that? It’s a nonsense to suggest ‘oh if only we’d played like that in the last three games’. We can’t play like that because the opposition let us have the ball. And when the opposition let us have the ball we play crap football at walking pace 70 yards away from the opposition’s goal. This utterly small time reaction that we should be somehow over the moon with last night is stunning. This wasn’t a plucky non league team getting beat at Man City or Liverpool in the third round. We were fine for 70 minutes, we could have got something out the game. We didn’t, we lost, and let’s be honest it could just as easily have been a couple more in the last few minutes. It’s four defeats on the bounce, it’s 9 points in 13. Celebrating because we weren’t atrocious and didn’t get thrashed at Ipswich. Was this the aim when we sacked Nigel Pearson?

Best organised team at Portman Road this season, you’ll never sing that!

The self sabotage from the club this season should be studied for years to come. How to destroy two years of bloody hard work.

Weak club. Top to bottom. Losers.

I also think City will get result. Whether they do or don’t, I’m almost certain the performance will be better than the last three.

Call me mental, but City probably being able to play to their strengths on the counter attack has lead to me being unable to resist 5/1 on the City win. Still think we are decent team when the other team dominate the ball.

I hadn’t heard his interview after the game on Saturday. I miss my life when that was the case. What a load of rubbish. Worse garbage than actually watching his team play football.

“The frustration comes from saying the same messages, and that’s the biggest bit. We can coach, we can tactically set up perfect, but we have to have people stepping up and taking responsibility - we need leaders.” Have felt the Lee Johnson comparisons have been overly simplistic and not necessarily fair, but my god, this is pure Lee Johnson.

If we beat Ipswich it will no doubt be the result of a game in which Ipswich dominate and have the majority of possession, and when we win the ball we counter attack into the space they leave. This will do nothing else than tell us what we already know, this is a decent team when allowed to play to its strengths. However, it is an absolutely desperate team when it has the majority of possession and is instructed to use that possession to do nothing more than pass the ball around the backline at walking pace. In all of Manning’s wins City have had less than 50% possession. This is no coincidence.

Ipswich will dominate the game which makes us more likely to get a result as we’ll have to play counter attack rather than controlling possession by playing absolute dross walking pace garbage along our backline.

The sort of bullshit that professional athletes will stop listening to almost immediately.

Ian accusing people of wanting Manning to fail. What a total dick.

There’s a lot of truth in this of course, Liam Manning isn’t the biggest issue at Bristol City and sacking him won’t change much in regards of what is holding this club back. However, the garbage mind numbing football is on him. The players looking shells of themselves is on him. The complete boredom at Ashton Gate is on him. He’s a mood hoover. The whole thing is just weird. It’s like some sort of experiment on how to make football as sterile as possible. I keep hearing and reading how we ‘struggle to break teams down’. As far as I can see we don’t even try and break them down! He needs to be sacked.

Spot on, I completely agree.

I wouldn’t say he’s ’lost’ them in terms of them hating him, giving up and trying to get him sacked. And I’d imagine that’s actually very rare in professional football. We possibly witnessed this at the tail end of Gary Johnson’s time here, but I can’t think of any other examples. What is surely obvious to everyone watching however is they have clearly had any passion, aggression and imagination sucked out of them. They look like the shells of professional footballers. All sticking to set plan of sterile bullshit football. All scared to do something ambitious in case it doesn’t come off. Nothing happens at pace, it’s as if you’re watching a training routine being jogged through rather than an actual game.