chinapig

Let's face it most press conferences with most managers are bland and full of cliches. Not really worth bothering with much of the time. In contrast in this latest one Nigel gives intelligent, articulate, interesting and insightful answers. An impressive man on top form.

The word accountable as distinct from responsible is important here I think. The manager is ultimately accountable - he is the one who will be sacked after all - but the players are individually and collectively responsible for their performance in any given game. For instance if Nigel and his coaches show the players what they should do, say, when defending corners and they don't do it who is responsible? So criticising them for not meeting their responsibilities is perfectly reasonable and not an attempt at avoiding accountability.

Plus he would be a lot cheaper than Chris Wilder.

Yes, beat me to it. Some of our fans still don't grasp how dire our financial position is. Perhaps they'll get it when the next accounts come out. Probably not though.

He allegedly fell out with Gibson because he wasn't allowed to spend more money. We are skint. Not a perfect fit then.

Leah Williamson is a big loss for this game though I maintain that Keira Walsh is the key player in our side.

Remarkably this game sold out faster than any previous England game, men or women. As Suzanne Wrack wrote in The Guardian the other day the USA are still the standard to aspire to. A good performance in this game will be a good sign for the World Cup.

His mate and ECB Chair Richard Thompson was also against The Hundred. He is now obliged to say how great it is and is well rewarded for it. Cynical, me??

I wouldn't have thought it was possible for you to get more irrational but here you are claiming that managers who won promotion were failures because they were sacked at a later point. By that logic Alan Dicks was a failure. It's never too late to learn critical thinking. This correspondence is now closed.?

I guess I will have to settle for your admission that Wilson was indeed a failure even if it is followed by a hypothetical claim that he would have got promotion next time. Everything else is irrelevant.

And a much smaller budget.

We're talking about the relative merits of 2 successive City managers. What either of them is doing now is neither here nor there. Wilson could be managing in the Premier League now and he would still have been a failure with us. I'm still waiting for a cogent argument from you though, based on evidence rather than your odd obsessions, as to why Wilson was more successful with us than Johnson. I'm not holding my breath.

Conference Manager out performs Proper Manager!

I won't believe the official site is down until I read it on the official site.?

Love the Matchstalk Cats/Matchstalk Dogs half and half scarf!?

Jorge Mendes will have another of his clients lined up. Let's face it he runs that club but the Premier League say it's fine so nothing to see here.

Sure but he was out of favour from the start with Vyner, a player I'm sure would have left if we had been able to bring in at least one of the two further centre backs it seems Nigel wanted, chosen ahead of him.

Remember it was being reported that Nigel wanted 2 more centre backs even after Naismith and Klose had signed. That must say something about his opinion of his current options. Unless and until we sell we are stuck with them.

The risk is now outweighing the reward with Naismith. But with Klose out of favour and Kalas perpetually injured the back 3 will not change. So it remains down to the forwards to score 3 every game.

I won't hold my breath. All Nigel would say this week was that he would let us know if anything changes. The back 3 is likely to remain the same however many goals we give away.

Didn't France get rid of its secondary cup competition? The EFL cup is not at all lucrative for EFL clubs either unless you get far enough and get a game against one of the big PL clubs. The prize money is tiny. It was reported that the reward for beating Wycombe was £7k. If Wycombe had won that would not even cover the cost of putting the game on. The reward for winning the final is £100k. Hard to see it surviving in its current form if at all.

Fit and proper person is not a description that fits Barton is it?

What Klopp says ought to be self evident. The rewards from TAA playing the way he does significantly outweigh the risks. As you imply, the same might be said of Naismith. But it doesn't follow that he should be first choice for England. To make the most of his strengths you would need to set up the way Liverpool do. You only have to look at the centre backs available to England to conclude that you won't get away with playing a very high line with 2 centre backs. So I can understand Southgate's position.

They shouldn't have any problem getting 40,000 pledges then.

Has he got a suite left foot?