Silvio Dante

Max Killman springs to mind.

Does a mean cover of Ziggy Stardust as well.

Strong “Son of the guy who played Huggy Bear” vibes

I’m sure I bring this up every time Escape To Victory is mentioned, but as I understand it John Warks accent was so bad they dubbed him in the final cut, and Stallone was such an arsehole that he genuinely fancied himself as a keeper so bet Pele - Pele! - that he couldn’t score six spot kicks past him. He got near to one and dislocated his finger. And the overhead kick - one take.

Go on Twitter and translate the tweet. It’s a real post match quote!

Well….

Welcome Frank Sidebottom.

Good post and just to pick up on this bit. Earlier on in the thread there was a poster who said they felt LM was “not my coach”, and Fevs mentioned about having a lot of smoke blown that wasn’t warranted and this kind of plays to the same thing. I can see both sides of the communication piece - the fact is that LM isn’t a “known” quantity as if we’d appointed a Lampard, John Eustace etc and there is a need to get him out there a bit. The trouble there is that LM is, as your first point indicated, quite straight bat and textbook in his quotes. After Saturdays game the clip is again about “emotion” - it’s rinse and repeat, and makes people think they’re in a seminar as opposed to being football fans. (NB - nothing wrong with it as a communication style, but one of the tricks of “marketing” - as this is - is if your message is a bit boring mix it up. Get Hogg to speak for example. This isn’t on LM, it’s who he is) Where I don’t think LM is helping himself communication wise is that there is a bit of forcing the connection. The fist pump thing - that’s not him. You can tell immediately he’s not comfortable and is doing it as it’s the done thing - what is him is the phrase of “I’ll ****ing bounce when we win something” (which the club should have kept up as it shows the will to win and was bloody endearing). He's not a man who celebrates a 1-0 win with loads of fist pumping - he’s a man who sees results in an overall process. That pump - like the bounce - comes as part of a natural bond between fans and manager and again, it’s a bit of forcing the issue. And to be clear, none of this would matter if the football was great and results were better. But there is a bit at the club at the moment of there having been a connection across fans and club which has been broken, and they’re trying to “force” a new connection as opposed to going organically. Again, this is a club/comms issue in large part as opposed to LM. And it does appear to be a message - Robins TV payroll Chris Honor being a case in point Saturday - but it’s in a lot of ways better to leave him be to make mistakes, learn and hopefully develop us. All the current comms strategy is doing is putting more pressure on LM.

Hardly the master negotiator are you? Andy : Guys I’d really like to stay Club: Sorry Andy, we won’t be offering terms Andy: What if I got my missus to say she’s sorry to be going? Club: Well in that case have a contract …sake…!

The question with King is a real binary one - I don’t think anyone believes he’s good enough as a player at this level any longer so is he good enough as a coach. Nobody can be definite there but any reports from younger players say how good he is so I’m inclined to say with his experience and that in mind he’s worth keeping around as long as it works financially. However, two things. - We have to assume the person who questioned him as a player is still at the club. That may make for a difficult working relationship - If he’s been told now, then I don’t think it’s end of season. I think he may be released this month, particularly as injuries return. Seems a bit of a shame overall.

Outside of Osman (manager) we had Tinnion, Allison, Pennyfather, Shail and Welch there so five outfield. I think missing were Llewellyn, Scott (was stated to be there IIRC), Rob Edwards (ditto), Stuart Munro, Dave Martin (probably in a fight somewhere), Liam Robinson (probably told where it was but missed the venue and ended up in Wickes) and Junior Bent (probably got there and the Ashton Road gates kept open and kept running) So, outside of the senior man at the club and his son (for some reason), 4 of the remaining 11 turned up. Not exactly resounding.

It’s all about the best team as opposed to the best eleven players in x formation or y formation isn’t it? Formations aren’t overrated - you have to have a “base” formation to understand how you are setting up, and even if you don’t want to say you’re playing 4-4-2 etc then you are setting up with x defenders etc. There can be fluidity - take Birmingham where Mehemti came central and it more became Pring on the wing, but a “formation” (or jobs) is a basic. Yesterday is a great example. We were looking often for a ball to a left midfielder. There wasn’t one. You can be as fluid as you like but if not everyone knows their job, it ain’t gonna work. And what you can’t do, unless a player by himself is a needle mover, is change your formation for his “best” position if it takes 20% from other players…

We’re getting dangerously close to a Tinnion conversation here. What you say makes perfect sense and is fully within his remit. The devil in me says the better people he employs, the more likely it is they’ll disagree. The more practical side says that it takes guts and a very strong philosophy to not have the head coach be the main influencer of an overall club. This is why most coaches bring their own teams at the lower levels (Hogg/Krause here). We do clearly have coaches that have been retained such as Mountain and Cisse, but I think your broader question is why are they retained, and should we recruit better. On the recruitment front totally agree. I’m not sure how effective our setup is - I think for example Dickie was signed following a Sykes conversation rather than anything else. Hopefully Murphy/Stokes are green shoots.

Can I just ask why Tinnions son is front and centre here? Did he have a penalty shoot out with Junior Bent to attend, and what is the rationale (not denying it’s nice for him and Brian, but just looks exceptionally odd and a touch egotistical)

There is. They need to stop their messing around and better think of the future.

I’m not sure there will be a marked difference, and for avoidance of skewing things you probably need to take the injury crisis Cardiff game out. It’s pretty much the same squad - maybe Bell getting less minutes but to counter that Cornick getting less. You’d also have to remember that Tommy was injured under Nige and Wells playing so there’s a 10+ year swing there already. The big differences are clearly Yeboah dropping out of the squad and not filling the bench with academy players, and going with 8 subs instead. Average age though I’d guess will be pretty similar in terms of the starting lineup. (NB - One of my lower concerns with LM is youth usage. He made the same comments at Oxford “look to the academy” as he did on appointment here but didn’t bring any through. If the average age does go up as your instinct it’d crystallise that)

As we always get so close to agreeing on everything, have a “like”. I think our diagnosis is identical here but we may disagree on the medicine - so that’s something!

It’s a point I’ve made a few times - if everybody (or a large percentage) of teams want to play the same way, then you either need better players in that system than anyone else, or a better coach (including most key in game adaptability) than anyone else in order to finish near the top. In the first point, we aren’t going to be buying the best players - we simply don’t have that muscle - and we certainly don’t have it within this squad who aren’t set up to play that way. Our reliance then seems to be that LM is a markedly better coach than the other teams who want to play this way have. And whether people like/don’t like rate/don’t rate him that's undoubtedly a gamble.

I think these two posts collectively sum up where we are nicely - it is a project, and we are starting again - as @ray savinos post excellently articulates in terms of timeline. The issue there is broadly twofold: - The time managers have broadly won’t allow them to have that timeline - as I stated last week, Ryan Lowe is second longest serving manager at this level and LM himself has only had max 18 months at a club. Odds are that he’ll be sacked or poached before the end of the contract - And then that brings us to @LondonBristolians points - I don’t think anyone thought LM, despite the board statements, was taking us to the playoffs this season. But equally, it was a solid mid table championship squad that didn’t need ripping up and starting again - it needed tweaking and additions, not surgery. So if we are looking at a 3.5 year time line as Rays post articulates, I don’t think anyone is massively up for that considering the starting position (which is better relative to Pearson) - and on that basis I err with LBs thinking. There is no way Manning should be sacked or it be considered despite the points return. But there is also no way he should need a 3.5 year project and the question probably is at what point (hopefully never as it will work) is it acceptable to say “it’s not working” Essentially if LM delivers Status Quo (and I think he will next year, just in a different style as the level of investment to reshape the squad as opposed to tweak it will be too much), I wonder if that will end up being less accepted than otherwise because of the way things were handled.

My answer to this is always the same - I, and I don’t think anyone, has ever questioned Max in respect of shot stopping or keeping of the nature of the save yesterday. On the match thread it was immediately held up as “can’t believe people don’t rate Max” - but they do, in this particular regard. The question mark over him always has been, and remains, decisions/distribution. Hes got a lot better there recently but yesterday there were a few ricks. If he can get that side of his game better consistently, I don’t think anyone will be questioning, and he will be seen as a potential top six keeper. As it stands, he’s a perfectly competent mid table championship keeper for a mid table championship side.

To answer my own question here’s the confirmation from the Evening Post

For quality street wrapping at Christmas?

I think what it does do is confirm what many of us thought at the time - we’ve started another project, and one that (as any project) has no guarantees of success. The squad isn’t set up to play fully the way LM wants and what’s probably happened is he’s imposed his style on players who aren’t fits for it. Nothing essentially wrong in that if you’re writing the season off as it gives you more time to adapt/see who can manage, but it is fundamentally a mixed message from what was said at appointment. One of the things I’ve been consistent on is the need to evolve as opposed to change things too soon. And the reason there is if your changes don’t work you end up with a bloated squad or a mixture of players who don’t fit with each other stylistically. It’s clear money will need to be spent to get players in to play how LM wants in full, which should in turn improve the ppg. However, I’m unsure that we’ll have the quality to be the best at that style as it will need more investment than I think we’ll put in (Fevs has mentioned if you look at Martin it works better at Soton than Swansea because he has better players), and my gut is that we’ll see a mid table team next year, just with a bit of a different style.

H - watching with naked eye (and again I think/hope it’s a wavelength thing), I do struggle to remember what from open play could be classed as a key pass (and my determination of that is that it’s either an assist to a chance or an “assist to an assist”) - therefore the number here does surprise me. Im not doubting its providence, but is it a case that it includes key passes from set pieces and is therefore a bit of the same angle on what’s being said (ie as a minimum McCrorie should have scored from a corner - key pass - from Twine and Dickie nearly did). If it’s fully open play, I didn’t see that volume of key passes.

I’m guessing Bridgwater had a game? Either that or Andy knows the danger of letting people know when you’ll be somewhere else and your house will be empty….