BCFC_Dan

I find this odd too. I've always been in favour of hiring modern, progressive managers and I prefer them to be on the rational side rather than the emotional. I don't want a manager who can do nothing more than run up and down the touchline bellowing and waving his arms. However, I cannot think of a single top manager who would talk about entirely removing emotion from the players. Pep Guardiola plays a highly structured form of football but you only have to watch him communicate inside and outside of the match environment to know he's looking to harness emotion, not eradicate it. Jurgen Klopp clearly uses emotional techniques to motivate his players and to raise the atmosphere. Listen to Ange Postecoglu and you can see that for him the sole purpose of the game is enjoyment. Remove the emotion and it's simply not worth bothering with. Controlling and harnessing emotion is vital, but seeking to remove it from sport? That's going to make things massively more difficult for no obvious reason.

This is an odd thing about Manning's tenure so far. I live away from Bristol, so I generally only see televised games, and, Leeds aside, they've all been good performances. I've seen us beat West Ham comfortably, annihilate Southampton, and put in a good show against Ipswich. From the games I've seen, the football has been the best since 2017/18. It's odd, therefore, to come on hear and read all the discontent. The difference between the TV games and all the others must be staggering.

He looked a bit nervous and inexperienced but far from hopeless. Long shots were handled fairly cleanly but he chose to punch most aerial balls away which, although he did effectively enough, didn't do a lot to relieve the pressure the team was under. His kicking from hands wasn't as accurate as it could have been, but it was more a case of going too long than anything else, and with FGR up against it there were limited options for him to pick a pass. I was impressed by their young defender, Harvey Bunker. He looked physically strong but also seemed to have good intelligence and positioning.

I was at the game last night and it was a real reminder of everything that's good about Steve Cotterill. It was hardly a masterclass in slick, possession football, but that's to be expected. For a team in the relegation zone, going to a side on a good run, and playing on an awful pitch, they did everything that could be expected. Threw themselves in front of everything, gave everything they had, and in Doidge they had an experienced, intelligent forward to help relieve the pressure (and score 2 goals). Based on what I've seen, I'd rather watch Manning's City team play, but again that's not really a fair comparison. I have every confidence that Steve Cotterill will keep FGR up and move them forward next year. There's a real positivity about them now.

Pearson took 9 points from 14 games during his initial short term contact, yet he was rewarded for that with a 3 year deal. I thought that a daft move at the time, and I still do. He then delivered 2.5 years of largely uninspiring football and mediocre results. However, he was operating under restricted circumstances and there was, as he saw it, a lot of work to be done to get the club into a shape where it could succeed. I don't know if that means any manager would have to do that work in order to succeed, or if it was work that Pearson created. Nevertheless, he was getting on with it and making slow but steady progress. He had a number of runs of poor form, and also a few periods of personal ill health, but the club stuck by him and let him continue his work. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, the club hierarchy decided they didn't like the direction of travel that the club had been on for nearly 3 years and decided to impose a complete stylistic change, under a relatively inexperienced coach. Not only that, but they declared the squad, which was largely built for and by Pearson, and of mid table quality at best, to be capable of finishing in the top 6, something that was self-evidently not true, and did nothing but heap pressure on their new manager. Personally, I like Manning, and I like the performances I've seen (I only see televised games and the odd away fixture, so I've been lucky in what I've witnessed). I think he's the right man to take the club forward. However, it's pretty obvious that the manner in which decisions have been made has made things about as difficult as possible to achieve success. I don't hate the Lansdowns, or Brian Tinnion, and both have done plenty of good work, but the decisions taken over the management have been quite ridiculous. It was obvious at every stage what they were going to get from Nigel Pearson. He didn't even deliver particularly good results, and his style of play was well known. If they wanted that style of play, then fine, let him do the job. If they wanted him to steady the ship and build a platform, then fine, sack him in the summer of 2023, or let him run out his contract, then make a change. If they wanted a different style of play or better results, don't appoint the guy with 2 wins in 14 games, who doesn't play how you want to play, in the first place. Whatever the individual merits of Manning and Pearson may be, not one of those decisions really makes any sense.

This is the key bit for me. It may or may not be a good idea to have a defined playing style throughout the club, but that's not what Bristol City does anyway. If there is a "club philosophy" then it's one of sticking signs on office doors and giving people fancy job titles and assuming that everything else automatically follows. It's a club of talkers, not doers. One that talks about looking for potential added value in signings but actually just buys players at random from a few, known, clubs and actually takes very few risks. It's a club that talks about wanting a consistent playing style but performs a complete stylistic 180 in the middle of a season and expects a coach to implement his ideas with a squad he didn't select and no time to work with them. It's a club that sets itself up to fail. I do think appointing Manning was a step in the right direction, and I'm hopeful that things would come good given time and support, but I'm not particularly confident that he'll get that. Most likely he gets replaced by another bright young thing who is also denied support until the club starts circling the drain again and is forced to appoint an old school manager who ignores the "club ethos". Once that guy has righted the ship he'll be packed off and replaced with someone who says what they're supposed to and we go round and round again.

All managers are judged on results. Playing style usually only comes into it when results aren't satisfactory. I've pointed out before that supporters don't really care about the length or style of passes, just whether or not they hit a team mate and lead to a chance of a goal. If they're doing that then the team will do well and everyone's happy. If they're not doing that then the manager is accused of playing either hoofball or tippy-tappy stats-obsessed nonsense. I don't imagine Liam Manning cares about supporters any more or less than Nigel Pearson or Lee Johnson or Tony Pulis. He is expected to win games and he's going about it in the way he thinks best, as they all did. All have produced some entertaining football (Pulis maybe didn't at City but he definitely did elsewhere) and all have produced some absolute dross.

I suspect that much like Steve Lansdown, he's desperate to give someone their big break in management and to see them succeed. Unfortunately, unless you get very lucky, there's rather more to it than simply giving someone a job and hoping for the best. At least Vince seems to have realised quickly that the job is too much for Deeney right now. He's made it clear that he'll spend what it takes to keep them up, so he'll need to appoint an experienced, proven name now to get them out of bother. Despite the Cheltenham connection, I'd be going all out to get Steve Cotterill if I were him. For their sake I hope it's not Lee Johnson.

The complaint here is about a symptom of the problem, not the cause. If the player on the ball can't see a progressive action that he likes the look of then he'll resort to the preferred fall-back of his manager. If his manager is a modern type, this is likely to be a safe pass to retain possession and hopefully lead to a better position. If his manager is more old school then he might just kick the ball forward anyway in the hope that something will turn up. Either way it's reliant on hope and most of the time it won't work. The crowd sees either boring passing around the back, or a ball forward to nobody, and it doesn't like either of them. It doesn't matter if the manager is Pep Guardiola or Tony Pulis. If a forward pass to a teammate can be made, it will be, and it will lead to "excitement". The difference is largely what happens when it can't. The trick, therefore, is to make more viable forward passes available, and that requires movement, understanding between players, and ingenuity. It also needs the players to have the confidence to take risks when appropriate. If Manning can get that right, then it won't matter what style he wants to play because it'll be successful. If he can't, it won't matter if he just tells the players to lump it forward because the result will still be rubbish.

I think it's more a question of execution than style. When a team isn't quite clicking, then the right passing options won't be there. When players have no obvious option and no confidence to try something, they play safe. The difference in style shows in what "safe" means. These days it means "go backwards and keep possession". Traditionally it meant "get it as far down the field as you can". Either way, the result is unsatisfying. I can remember so many discussions here when games have consisted of endless punts downfield, and supporters complaining about the poor football. I always maintained that it was never the intention to kick the ball to nobody, just a failure in execution. The same is most likely true now, but with a different style of poor football.

There are many more mediocre players than great ones. Statistically it would make sense that more successful managers come from mediocre playing backgrounds than great ones, simply because more managers do full stop. Furthermore, great players attract much more attention when they do become managers, so it's harder for them to learn on the job without being heavily scrutinized.

He's been around long enough to know how things work. He knows the financial situation at the club. He's endured the toughest bit of the job already, when the squad was weaker and he was unwell. He's out of contract at the end of this season anyway. He's not going to throw his toys out of the pram over a sale he expected to happen anyway. If he's unhappy, he won't renew his contract. If he can't meet expectations without Alex Scott then he may not be offered one. If it goes really badly then he'll be sacked and paid off. I can't see any reason why he'd walk now if he didn't walk all the other times over the last 3 years.

I always liked him from that sort of interview. He's clearly an interesting, thoughtful and intelligent man. I've never enjoyed his spiky press conferences, though. I understand his frustration at some of the stupid questions, but I've felt he was a bit disrespectful towards journalists sometimes. It's good to know which people to have time for and which not, but everyone deserves to be treated with a certain level of respect. I also felt there was a long period of time where there was little or no progress on show. Right up until this calendar year it was pretty hard to see anything concrete. Some would argue that there was a lot being sorted out behind the scenes, and I was prepared to believe that, but equally there was nothing to show it, which is often the way with these things. Fortunately, it does look like those who believed him and believed in him are being proved right. Things are genuinely moving forward now, and Pearson seems much happier for it. Perhaps it won't last, but right now it looks like, despite a few rough moments, a good man is doing a good job. I can probably admit I was wrong in my previous judgement of him.

SO'D's time is essentially Pearson's but with worse luck. He came in to save a decaying squad from relegation to league one. It was actually all going really well until Jon Stead got injured, then it fell apart. He started the rebuild the next season but seemed to lack the personality to re-energise the club. Technically he was spot on, but he couldn't enthuse players like Cotterill could, and we simply didn't have the time for the players we had to develop themselves. I see a lot of similarities between SO'D and Pearson. Both can come across as abrasive, and both expect players to work things out for themselves. Cotterill got results by telling the players exactly what to do at every moment and making things simple for them. SO'D and Pearson expect them to learn to figure it out for themselves, which takes time. Pearson nearly took us down at the start of his tenure. He relied heavily on the points that Dean Holden had already picked up. SO'D didn't have that luxury, and lost an absolutely key player in Jon Stead. Look at the record before and after the Middlesbrough game when Stead was injured. It's striking. it's impossible to say whether SO'D would have kept the team up and improved it if Stead hadn't been injured, but he'd have had more time and less pressure undertaking the rebuild in the Championship. Battling relegation obviously isn't easy, but nor is being expected to win every game.

I think some of it depends on the age of the player. Massengo is still a young player and his performances were very inconsistent. If he's going to be around for a while then you accept that as part of his development, play him, and hope he has a good game. If he's not sticking around, why take that risk when you won't reap the reward? Experienced players like King, Kalas and DaSilva are going to do what they do every game, so there's no reason not to play them.

I thought what we really missed last night was someone in midfield to receive the ball from the back 4 and move it forward. I'd imagine it could have been Naismith had he been fit. Most of our possession last night consisted of passing the ball across the back, looking for an outlet. Huddersfield did press, but nobody seemed to get themselves free in the middle to receive a short pass, and instead it tended to stay at the back until a long pass was on, or to progress down the flanks via winning throw ins. James was outstanding as a combative midfielder, but he seldom took the ball from defence and moved it forward. This seemed to really limit our effectiveness as an attacking force.

We weren't in control in the sense of dominating possession, but City players won most of their battles and Preston didn't have enough to find a way through. Sure, we'd prefer it if Max had nothing to do at all, but barring one mistake, he was equal to every test, as were the others. I didn't much enjoy the way City played most of the game, but Preston don't give teams much choice in how they play. It was always going to be a battle and the only question was whether we won or lost that battle.

Well, quite. This is where we are, and until there is some planning, this is where we will always be. The people who run the club saw a man who had achieved little in his last few jobs, managed 2 wins in 10 games whilst in temporary charge, and had already started showing his abrasiveness and decided he should get a 3 year contract as manager. This is a mess of their own making and each time they make a change without giving it sufficient thought they make it worse and worse. I'm not exactly "Pearson out" because I was never "Pearson in". It was a stupid move from the start, but to get rid of him without a plan might well be even stupider.

How about somebody we've not heard of? The British big names are expensive, the internal appointments too inexperienced but when did we last look abroad for a manager? More than 20 years ago and it didn't quite work, so the whole idea has been given up on. Just as with players, there's value there but you have to look for it. You have to know what you want and do your homework but the likes of Huddersfield and Barnsley have been able to bring in very good managers from abroad (and some bad ones, I admit). We can have a better manager than Nigel Pearson, but if the money isn't there then the club will need to be smart and it will need to put the work in. Spending a bit of money on a strategy and some research could save a lot in wages and compensation but the club has never seemed prepared to do that.

I don't say they're playing worse, it just seems to me that general view of the fault has shifted from manager (Johnson, Holden) to players, now that Pearson is in charge. I do think a defence with two full international centre halves should be rather more solid than it is, but I accept that there is more to defending than having two individually good players. Which players would you say are playing considerably better under Pearson? Weimann seems to be doing well but he was injured for Holden and never let Lee Johnson down. Massengo has performed well, but I'm not sure he'd have played so much if Pearson had had his senior midfielders available all season. I think Pearson can be credited for playing many of the young players when he hasn't always had to (he could have insisted on bringing in more experience from outside but he hasn't), but his approach to them seems quite "sink or swim". Hopefully it's more subtle than that behind the scenes.

I'm on the fence about Pearson overall. I'm not sure I would sack him right now, but I wouldn't have hired him in the first place. I'm not going to argue that it's not a big job he's got, but it seems to me that players who were previously quite adequate (including ones he chose to sign) are suddenly nowhere near good enough in the eyes of some, because the alternative would be admitting that Pearson simply isn't doing a very good job. Nothing is going to turn the current squad into one that any manager could get into the top six, but I think there are managers who could achieve rather more with them than Pearson is. That said, I accept that he may be trading success now for development of players for the future, which is entirely right. At the end of the day, it's a tough job, he's the man tasked with doing it and I wouldn't expect to see much success in the short term. However, I've also seen nothing that gives me any confidence that he will have success in the long term. All I see is a very abrasive man delivering mostly poor performances and blaming the players for everything that goes wrong. The board at City are always castigated for choosing the "cheap option". I'm more than a little concerned that all they've done this time is pay a lot more money* for their cheap option. * No, I don't know what he's paid. I'm prepared to be surprised but I bet it's more than Dean Holden was getting.

That's not the question. It's not about the size of the hole, it's about the ability of the man in charge to fix it, and I can't see what it is in Nigel Pearson's record that suggests he's any more capable of doing the job than anyone else. I don't deny it's a big job, but he's had 12 months and got no further than Dean Holden did, and shown nothing to suggest he will. That said, somebody needs to be given the time and the backing to do the job. I wouldn't have picked Nigel Pearson, but he's got the job and it's not been a complete disaster. I don't think it's any more harmful to give him another transfer window or two to see what happens, rather than starting over with another new man in charge.

Proven to do what? He won League One with Leicester, and eventually the Championship, once he'd been given a squad that was too strong to fail. He then nearly relegated that team again and it turned out to be good enough to win the Premier League without him. Since then he's failed at Derby, failed in Belgium and ultimately failed at Watford (though I would accept that he was very unlucky, looked like succeeding when he was sacked and was also unwell). He's experienced, yes, and not many achieve league titles, but he's not a serial winner. He's got as many promotions from this division as Danny Wilson has, and fewer than Ian Holloway.

It could be that there aren't actually any specific players he's referring to and he's said it to get a reaction out of all of them.

By northern standards today is a pretty nice day. However if you're at a service station just south of Leeds then I imagine you're probably near Barnsley and hence subject to the freezing waves of bitterness that emanate from Oakwell.