LondonBristolian

15 hours ago, cotswoldred2 said:

Well that's inconvenient, doesn't fit the narrative on here.

No disrespect but I can’t help feeling you have either not read the thread or perhaps read it but not fully understood the point being made.

The point being made with Cotts was that, after he left and once LJ was in charge, there was very little mention or acknowledgement of his role in our promotion season.

However that was almost a decade ago. Managers have been and gone and a lot has happened, not least the outpouring of concern when Cotts was very ill two or three years ago.

In this case, a media company rather than the club have invited Cotts back but, even if the club did - which would not be a surprise at all many years later - it still would not be relevant to the question of whether Cotts’ role was acknowledged during the reign of his successor. Just as the club might very well invite Pearson back as a guest in 5 or 10 years time and it wouldn’t change the lack of acknowledgment now.

2 hours ago, maxjak said:

At 20 and 21, IMHO Cole  Palmer and Scotty are the two best young English Players in the Prem at this time?  PS.  I see little Lee's reputation as a coach/manager continue's to plummet, as he was unable to even hold down a job in League 1?    

This feels slightly premature to me after Scott's played 6 games, especially as Rico Lewis (over year younger than Scott) has featured semi-regularly for Man City, and Levi Colwill (6 months older) is playing consistent for Chelsea, as with Harvey Elliott (4 months older) for Liverpool. Plus, depending on definitions of young player, Saka is still only 22 and probably in contention for best player - young or not.

I'd argue Scott needs to stay fit and keep us his levels for the rest of the season to get to that level. As it stands, he's also (I think) yet to make an England U-21 squad.

He's made an impressive start and, if he keeps it up, he'll certainly be in that "best young English player in the division" discussion but he's yet to have an opportunity to show he can perform consistently in the Premier League over a sustained period. 

I don't have my head fully around FFP and accounting but presumably there's accountancy factors too in terms of when it best suits us for a deal to be factored into our profit and loss? 

Edit: If I'd read the thread properly, I'd have realised @Mr Popodopolous had already covered this!

36 minutes ago, RUSSEL85 said:

Thing is, if he concentrated on the main aspects of football management he would be a fine league 1 coach/manager. Unfortunately, bullshit baffles brains. He worries so much about small details here and there and seems to forget the main bit of the job. Just an observation on my part, but I’m sure he will end up in league 2 job shortly.

I agree. I remember saying this when he was here but a lot of the issue for me was he spent so much time trying to get 5% extra out of players that he frequently forgot how to get the main 95% out of them.

I don’t think he is a bad manager or that he did a terrible job for us but I do think he’d be a much better manager if he stopped trying to prove how good he was and trying to bamboozle the opposition in ways that frequently end up bamboozling his own players and probably himself. 
 

As others have said, his CV looks very poor at the moment. I feel his best hope is probably trying to take a job in the National League, get a club into League Two and build his reputation from there. He needs to choose his next role extremely wisely though or even National League jobs could soon be beyond his reach.

7 hours ago, W-S-M Seagull said:

I think he was signed as a player to develop for the future rather than as back up. 

Whilst he has performed that role I think it's a little dismissive to suggest he was signed as back up. 

He was signed with the intention of being our no 1 rb in the future. 

I have no problems with George. I think he's a decent player. He's probably been a victim of not really having much competition. Hopefully with McCrorie soon to be available, that will help to elevate George's game further. 

With George being a dependable rb, it does give us the option of playing McCrorie in other positions if we desire/require. 

Rb has been a problem position for us for a while so I'm glad that either McCrorie soon to be available. We have that position well covered with good players. 

That’s fair. What I probably should have said was Tanner was not signed with the expectation of being immediate first choice.

The odd thing for me with Tanner is that I probably trust him more against the better - or at least more attack-minded - teams than against teams we’re expected to best. 
 

As I think @Davefevsnoted earlier in the thread, he is developing a habit of  causing some very good left wingers to have some very ineffective games. Where he struggles - which is a combination of his attributes and, I suspect, tactical instruction - is adding an extra attacking dimension against opposition who sit back and challenge us to break them down. And it might be McCrorie’s apparent* comfort and ability on the ball help us in those sorts of games. But I agree he Tanner might show a bit more to his game once he has more pressure for his place.

*I only say apparent as I have never seen him play.

I've had to (mostly) stop running and do other activities instead due to a back issue but I'd strongly recommend doing Parkrun to anyone. I still do it as an occasional treat. 

19 hours ago, Sleepy1968 said:

According to transfer market he's having a purple patch. 10 goal and 5 assists in 19 games so far this season in ligue 2 for Angers.

I’m actually pleased for him if he has recovered his form. He was a disaster here but I felt that was far more to do with him being the wrong signing at the wrong time than any lack of application on his part. I suspect - though of course I don’t know - that Kent was maybe a bit blase about the amount of work needed to succeed in the Championship but I think Diony was simply low on confidence and too far out of his comfort zone to succeed.

1 hour ago, GrahamC said:

Pretty sure Alistair Campbell has told this story before, think it was a part of trying to get the Good Friday Agreement through. In Campbell’s version he tells him very quickly that it is a ridiculous idea, but who knows if that is true?

Brown & John Major are clearly the only PMs since Harold Wilson who were also real football fans, Brown wrote a brilliant article on Raith Rovers (he’s a shareholder, was a programme seller as a kid) recently & although much more of a cricket fan, Major is a Chelsea supporter of longstanding who doesn’t feel the need to keep mentioning it.

Major keeps it so low key that I had forgotten he was a Chelsea fan!

I think the main thing this tells you is that Blair - just like countless other senior politicians  - fundamentally did not understand football or have an instinct for what people loved about the biggest sport in the country.

In fairness to him, he at least largely stayed out of it rather than vilifying fans in the way his predecessors did or feigning support in the way his successors (bar Gordon Brown) have. 

Really glad it is clicking for Manning and the team at the moment. Long may it continue.

Massively in favour of this.

I really hope the Leeds players show their commitment to this initiative by walking to Ashton Gate from Leeds, arriving just in time for kick off.

I've got mixed views on this. Back when it originally started I was massively opposed to a Super League - and I still am. 

At the same time, I'm increasingly of the view that FIFA and and UEFA are utterly unfit to govern global sport and - whilst maybe this is a case of being careful or what I wish for - I don't think it the worst thing in the world if their monopoly is broken up.

There is part of me that thinks, whilst the Super League would also be undoubtedly run by the wrong people for the wrong reasons, an outright corporation running tournaments would at least be more honest and less corrupt than governing bodies that pretend to be about the good of the game and moral values whilst trying to hoover up the profits...

11 minutes ago, Top Robin said:

Just until we get a decent one - is that too much of an ask

If you honestly believe Tanner isn’t a decent BACK-UP right back then I think you’ve probably got a misguided idea of the quality of player that will come here to act as a squad player.

There is a far more critical issue to me in that, of the first choice right backs we have signed over the past few years, most haven’t worked and the latest (and most expensive) is yet to start a game for us due to injury. We need McCrorie to come back, hit the ground running and make the right back position his own.

But - whilst McCrorie’s injury appears to have been one of these freak circumstances that would have been hard to foresee - it puzzles me why you’re directing your ire at the reserve player who has stepped in and done pretty much as well as you’d expect a Championship reserve player to do.

For me, the issue with Cornick is that he strikes me as someone who operates best as a nuisance who puts himself about and draws the defence’s attention away from more composed attackers enabling them to get into more dangerous spaces. But the way we play doesn’t really lend itself to that.

We don’t get the forwards close enough to each other so, when Cornick distracts the defence, there is nobody to take advantage.

Not his fault and he works hard but I just don’t see him as a fit with how we’ve played under either manager.

1 hour ago, Top Robin said:

I do understand that and yes, Tanner is a trier but I do think he is very average and we do need to upgrade.

 

We upgraded on Tanner in the summer of 2022. The highly tipped upgrade was injured at the start of the season, never found his rhythm for us and then was moved on in the summer.

We upgraded again in the summer with a substantial outlay. The upgrade has had a freak injury so Tanner has been playing. How many right backs do you want us to sign exactly?

Tanner is a low cost budget punt at right back who has never started a season for us as first choice but who has performed solidly when called on. 

Is he a world beater? No. Is he better than many of the first choice right backs we’ve had at Championship level? Probably, yes.

Realistically he has played a lot more than he likely would have done it not been for Kane Wilson not working out and subsequently McCrorie getting injured. And, whilst he probably wouldn’t be starting if everyone was fit, he’s proved one of our better value for money acquisitions of recent seasons. 

I hope McCrorie soon gets fit and demonstrates why Pearson invested a large % of our budget to have him at right back but I fail to understand the obsession with, and scapegoating of, a low cost understudy who is doing better than you’d expect a low cost understudy to do.

Poor guy. Thoughts with him and his family and I hope he is okay.

I can’t help feeling it would be more appropriate to hold off on speculating on his long term career prospects at this moment in time. No doubt he will get appropriate medical advice at the appropriate moment.

It is still early days and Manning would be far from the first Bristol City manager to start badly but gradually turn things round - Gary Johnson and Nigel Pearson both come to mind. However both joined when the club were at a particular low point so the run of defeats was much easier to understand.

Similarly there is a perfectly valid argument that, when a new manager comes in and tries to change things, it will inevitably lead to a spell where the club will struggle as players learn. But there has to be a valid question of exactly why so much is being changed in a team that were - broadly speaking - winning the games they were expected to win and losing the games they were expected to lose.

I do think luck is a factor - I'm not saying we've been brilliant but we could very easily have drawn at Southampton and won against Norwich and, had we done that, we'd have gone into the Huddersfield and Blackburn games with a lot more confidence and those results might have looked different too. But ultimately luck matters, as do results, and we've now got the psychological aspect of a winless run which has to start to affect the players. And - as others have said - we've gone from solid and hard to beat to conceding soft goals.

Maybe we can turn it round over time but I think what we're seeing at the moment is a direct consequence of replacing an experienced manager who knew how to get results out of the team with a promising but inexperienced manager who has tried to change too much too quickly without spending enough time analysing why Pearson had set us up a particular way and what was working about that. And we've now slipped into the kind of run which saps morale and which you arguably need knowledge and experience to quickly turn around.

I feel for Manning in that I think he may well be the right manager in the wrong circumstances and it may well be that a little bit more luck in a couple of those early games would have set his time in charge up the right way so things looked totally different. But - even if he could be doing well in slightly different circumstances - these are the circumstances he has and he is under increasing pressure to show that he can respond to them. 

1 minute ago, Lew-T said:

Just highlights what a good job Nige was doing, under the circumstances.

Absolutely. I think Manning is probably a good manager and I think we will probably start getting results eventually if we stick with him.

But Pearson was an experienced pragmatist who knew how to get the best out of the players we had. Manning has joined with ideas of how he wants to play he may well get us there but right now it is very obvious we have moved away from a manager with the skills and know how to get the best out of the resources he has.

I've got mixed views on Manning from the first few games. I like what he's trying to do but, whilst part of me is impressed that we're controlling games and getting a lot more possession - which we did at times under Pearson last season too - there's another part of me thinking the fact we're not able to convert that possession into goals and that we keep making unforced errors that allow the opposition to score despite our domination of the ball justifies Pearson's decision to play a much more pragmatic brand of football this season.

Ultimately Manning needs to demonstrate that we can both control the game AND win matches. And both Manning and the club need to be honest that that will take some time to implement and mistakes will be made along the way. I think it's inaccurate to compare Pearson and Manning because it feels like Pearson was pretty much told he had to be in the top six to keep his job whereas Manning seems to be being given time to develop a more attractive playing style without being pressured to get the results to stay in touch with the top six. That's fine - as long as we don't drop into a relegation struggle AND as long as it ultimately ends up with a better side - but the board need to be honest with the fans about what they expect from Manning and want him to achieve or else he's going to get flack from the fans for not getting results.

14 hours ago, Numero Uno said:

Need to be a bit careful talking about "deadwood". Some short memories I think. The real "deadwood" consisted of a bloated bunch of absolute tossers not even putting effort in at the training ground (one in particular caught hiding up there) let alone on the pitch. The deadwood you refer to now is an honest bunch of hard working but very average/limited Championship level players recruited or fast tracked from the youth system when we didn't have a pot to piss on on relatively low wages and designed to allow the club to tread water IN THE CHAMPIONSHIP rather than resetting in League 1. We have to be careful when shipping out our low Q squad members that what we replace them with not only has the increased quality we need but also buys in to a very solid and hard working team ethic. We still need to be able to grind out a result like we did yesterday. That must not be compromised otherwise things will unravel very quickly.

Exactly. The other thing to say is we've spent the last three years recruiting to a strategy and the board and Tinnion have clearly stated they see Manning as a continuation of the strategy. Williams is the only existing player who predates that strategy.

If the new manager sees players as "deadwood" then we've recruited the wrong manager and are failing on our own terms. To be clear, I don't have any reason to believe that Manning does hold that view. 

2 hours ago, W-S-M Seagull said:

Mehmeti has proven why NP wasn't willing to give him game time. 

Are we back to the days of waiting until a player turns 23/24 before they are deemed ready? 

That’s a massive leap of an assumption from someone not bringing a 17 year old off the bench. By my count, Manning has started 5 under 23s more than once so I think we can immediately discount that as a theory.

1 minute ago, BCFC31 said:

I have never seen a worst full back in possession of the football then George tanner. Its baffling he is petrified to pass the ball forward and when ever he does it goes either to an opposition player of aimlessly back to there keeper or down a blind allay. He definitely doesn't suit the way manning wants to play in possession I can see him being move to the bench once manning is able to bring his own playing staff in.

 I think last week he retained possession well, even if people wanted him to be more ambitious. But we don’t know what instructions Manning gave him last week and it may have been that he was told to keep possession rather than playing speculative balls forward. In any case, I don’t think it even about Manning bringing players in - McCrorie was brought in to be first choice right back and I suspect he will be once fit.

24 minutes ago, bexhill reds said:

Tanner is a RB and Pring is a LB, Manning decided to play Bell at LWB and play with a back 3, Dickie is left footed, Vyner is better in the middle so the obvious option was to play Tanner on the right side of the 3.

Tanner made an error for the goal, but that's what happens when you make a mistake as the last man against a counter attacking team, that's not the first goal we've conceded from our own corner this season.

I think the last para is really important. If we’re going to play a possession based game with a high line then we are going to get punished when we lose the ball. The reality is all players - certainly at Championship level - will make the odd mistake and we will concede when they do.

In the long run, Manning may be proven right in how we wants to play. In the short term, there will be moments where players get the flak from fans for the errors they make. Last week was Vyner and this week Tanner. Next time we concede it may be someone else or may be one of them again. 

I get why fans are annoyed but I really hope Manning is taking responsibility for the way we are playing and reassuring the players that he understands mistakes will happen as they adapt.