chinapig

There is something of a parallel with recruitment for the men's team. But in the case of the women it seems more of a moneyball approach i.e. identifying players whose stats suggest they are undervalued. It will be interesting to see how it pans out.

And he seems to be a good fit for the type of football Manning apparently wants to play. Certainly a better fit than Williams.

The man with two no brains.

Which is the point of analytics in any business. Quite why people think football should be an exception is a bit of a puzzle, especially since lots of other sports do the same.

The Peter Principle says that in organisational hierarchies people will tend to be promoted until they reach their maximum level of incompetence. Fortunately it doesn't apply to anyone at Bristol City.

Somebody could tweet Tinnion to ask what it means. Though they'll have to wait until the end of the season when our top end squad has clinched promotion and he returns to TwiXter in triumph.

Because the ball came back to the player who hit the first shot without being touched by another player so he's offside?

Sunderland were the most enjoyable team to watch last season for me. Exciting attacking football played at a high tempo with lots of youthful enthusiasm. I'm a fan of Mowbray and would have cut him some slack this season given the loss of Diallo and to a lesser extent Stewart (only due to him being out injured for so long). I wonder if your club is looking to replace a respected experienced manager with a compliant young coach who will do what he is told. What am I saying, no sensible club would do that.

And Gary Collier didn't give him a look in.

Dylan you say? Positively North Street.

Alexander's days were also numbered as soon as he described Nigel as football royalty. Steve is the only royalty around these parts.

A nice takedown of Barton by Jonathan Liew today. I've highlighted some nice little digs at Barton's ego that made me smile. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/dec/12/joey-bartons-far-right-rebrand-points-to-sad-malaise-among-footballs-lost-boys First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. Then, several years after you’ve won, a former Queens Park Rangers midfielder inexplicably tries to fight you again in an attempt to promote his podcast. Like a catchy maxim ripped from the pages of the philosophy books that he has almost certainly only skim-read, the tale of Joey Barton can be interpreted pretty much however you want. Perhaps the first reaction to the former Rangers substitute’s latest wave of attention-seeking is also the most natural: ignore, starve of oxygen, move on. Partly this is because his motivations for railing against female pundits in men’s football are so cynically transparent. Why engage on the merest rational level with someone operating entirely outside the bounds of reason? This is, in many ways, the rhetorical equivalent of Barton’s dismissal for QPR against Manchester City on the final day of the 2011-12 season: a blur of unfocused, indiscriminate anger, a last desperate attempt to drag someone else down into the filth with him before he disappears down the tunnel and into oblivion. Of course, this goes far deeper than one 41‑year‑old former Bristol Rovers manager (win ratio 37.1%) and his crumpled onanistic desire to feel something again. Not least because of the way he has broadened out his generic criticism to specific broadcasters, who have then had to face the wrath of his 2.7 million social media followers. And not least because of the additional emotional labour that many women in football have felt obliged to perform in the days since: defending their positions, defending their colleagues, defending their right simply to earn a living against a loud lunatic fringe with seemingly inexhaustible reserves of time, self-hatred and burner accounts. Enough now. This is a male problem, and to be quite honest men have been shirking the hard work on this for far too long. And it is very specifically a football problem, even if, in his shameless grift, the 11-minute one-cap wonder is clearly channelling the same far-right talking points as more seasoned online contrarians such as Andrew Tate and Russell Brand and that Tory MP with the Rick Parfitt wig whosen name I always forget. Since its earliest days football has always been a Petri dish of bruised and broken masculinity, conceived from first principles as a place where men gather to perform and prove themselves. Where the constraints and compromises of wider society did not apply. Where – from the terrace ruck to the Premier League sex party – overt masculinity has always been rewarded rather than reined in. And though the sport is more diverse than it has ever been, a safer space for women than it has ever been, that culture persists; perhaps not so much in the glass-flecked alleyway but in the fan forum, the newspaper comments section, the sternly worded legal injunction protecting the identity of the latest footballer accused of sexual violence. For the ex-footballer, flung unceremoniously from the carousel, now on the outside looking in, the values and certainties that helped them to thrive in this world now offer precious little protection. Perhaps this is why so many former footballers find themselves vulnerable to financial scams or conspiracy theories, convinced that the same special essence that slipped them free of the chains of society can help them do so again. How does Matt Le Tissier end up sharing bizarre and antisemitic 9/11 conspiracies? Why does Iker Casillas think the moon landings were faked? How does Rickie Lambert end up going on marches against the “15-minute city” and sharing something called the “Great Awakening Theory”? How does Barton become a champion of the disgraced “alt-right” fantasist Alex Jones? Very little of the actual content is worth addressing in any kind of detail, but there is a common worldview at work here: not coherent by any stretch but devastatingly clear in its emotional impetus, its determination to see darkened enemies everywhere. The world is not what we were told it was. We were all lied to. And I – the disaffected middle-aged man, society’s last permissible victim – am the last hope against the total collapse of humanity.

Interviewing is a skill that can be learned but some of the key points are: *Don't ask closed questions. *Don't ask multiple questions. *Don't ask leading questions. *Listen to the reply and ask a follow up question. Many if not most interviews break those rules. Interviewers tend to have a written list of questions that they plough through regardless of what the interviewee has to say. I wonder how many interviewers have had any training at all?

If that was a heat of the moment thing all I can say is it was a very long moment. A premeditated stamp like that deserves a long suspension.

As an aside, the attendance at the Arsenal vs Chelsea game was 59,042, a WSL record.

Yep, the Lansdowns like having their egos stroked. Nigel was never going to follow his predecessors and say how wonderful they are on a weekly basis.

I took some time to parse that first sentence with its double negative and I think it means he was reinforcing what they already know! I don't have a problem with jargon as most jobs have that but I do have a problem with lack of clarity. But let's face it most football managers aren't very articulate public communicators so I'll ignore the word salad in the hope that he communicates more clearly with the players.

Yes, his first season there, when he was constantly bigging himself up, was a failure. My sense is that the owners reined him in so he was less involved in football matters and certainly doing less of the self love. In our case Steve let him run riot with dire consequences. Though Steve will never admit that of course.

Furthermore you have to have a plan to deal with counterattacks. Coaches who prioritise control e.g. Guardiola do this. Manning is no doubt familiar with the jargon "rest defence" where the first priority is to set yourself up to handle any counterattack. It's not enough to say we are vulnerable to counterattacks and leave it at that. Though as you say you need to have players who can implement the plan.

I'm certainly not going to judge Manning so early in his tenure. But I do have a nagging concern that he is one of those modern coaches who does what he thinks are funky things that show how sophisticated he is. It might help if he explained his rationale for some apparently odd decisions. Time will tell no doubt.

Perhaps but that doesn't apply to Gardner-Hickman today. If nothing else it doesn't give a player an incentive to play well if he is likely to be dropped anyway.

Nigel was clear that if you play well you keep your place. That no longer seems to apply.

More than 2 days and @Monkehwould have been de-conditioned though.

I see Will Still is on their shortlist. There again so is Kieran McKenna, hardly a realistic target. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/dec/05/reims-will-still-on-sunderlands-shortlist-to-replace-tony-mowbray-as-manager

'When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty Jon Lansdown said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’