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Liam Manning League Stats - updated 16/03/24


Ziderarmy

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After todays “performance” the stats now read -

Played = 23

Won = 7

Drew = 5

Lost = 11

Points per game = 1.13

Over a 46 game seasons that’s 52 points and bottom six. 

Win percentage = 30%

Summary

Top 6 squad (so were told) playing bottom 6 (possible relegation) football 

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Wouldn’t it be great, if, just for once, a football coach / manager went “you know what lads, hands up, I’m not going to make it work here, I resign”

It’s a complete joke that we’re so bad. It’s relegation performance. In fact, if he’s still here when the new season kicks off, I’m putting money on us going down, and I never bet on anything ever.  Let me clarify that I DO NOT want that to happen. It’s just my reality. Although, I reckon the bookies will have us nailed on so the odds will be shit.

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Came into a Lansdown inspired shit-show, as they waxed lyrical about our top 6 squad and results here and now. The most poisonous poisoned chalice. My first real assessment of him will come around November time after he’s had a summer and a few months of 24/25. If we’re looking rubbish, change it then.

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1 minute ago, BCFCGav said:

Came into a Lansdown inspired shit-show, as they waxed lyrical about our top 6 squad and results here and now. The most poisonous poisoned chalice. My first real assessment of him will come around November time after he’s had a summer and a few months of 24/25. If we’re looking rubbish, change it then.

I wouldn’t trust him with a penny. He hasn’t improved one player since he has been here - every player has regressed 

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14 minutes ago, Out of his pie crust said:

Expect to lose the Leicester game, but lose that plus the 2 after they will surely have to pull the trigger

If the results for the teams below go against us then maybe but no chance otherwise . This is LJ mark two. They’ll double down with financial backing in the summer

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4 minutes ago, BCFCGav said:

Came into a Lansdown inspired shit-show, as they waxed lyrical about our top 6 squad and results here and now. The most poisonous poisoned chalice. My first real assessment of him will come around November time after he’s had a summer and a few months of 24/25. If we’re looking rubbish, change it then.

Wait what…???

You’d seriously let him spend some few millions or so on players and wait until November to make an opinion.

I’m also looking forward to about 4 of the first team leaving in the summer too. I’ll be amazed if, Conway, Sykes, Pring and Dickie are still here after the window closes. Plus King, James and Williams all OOC.

This isn’t going to end well.

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We'll still have people who will say "he needs to bring his players in" or "He's shown we can play great football under him in some games", personally, I think those people don't understand football tactics and why we're getting results against some teams and struggling against others.

What's frustrating me is a few things:

1) "He needs his own players" - Manning was not brought in with a rebuild in mind, the very declaration from the board who brought him in was that he was brought in to get results from a squad that they deemed to be "top 6". Now I understand that any level-headed fan understands that this was a stupid statement as this squad is simply not one of the top 6 squads in the Championship, however, that is what Manning was brought in for, to get the results to get us in the top 6 positions and the board said the squad were capable of that.
With that in mind, Manning is failing at the very job he was brought in to do. Our fans can say "he needs a summer and to bring in some of his players" but that's not what he was hired to do, he was hired to take an already existing squad and make them get into the top 6 and had we had a decent run of results and been even remotely close to that then I could cut him some slack, but that's not the case.
Manning can have a summer, he can change the squad, the issue then will be that we've rebuilt around a man who is tactically out of his depth. This leads me to:

2) "How do we beat Southampton and lose to QPR and Sheffield Wednesday?!" - Tactics and gameplan, Manning is as generic a manager as they come. Even under Pearson we struggled to break teams down who sat back and counter-attacked us, the reason being is that we played that very football under Pearson, so when that situation arose we almost cancelled each other out. The difference between under Pearson and manning is that under Pearson we played a very direct attacking pattern with the intention to either create a chance or to lose the ball, keep behind the ball and win it back and hit on the counter instantly. Manning has come in and when we come up against a team who play that same style he's decided to play the possession and work the opportunity game, the issue with that is we do not have the players for that football, that requires players like we saw today in Johnston, creative players who can run at players and cause panic. Our players are far more suited to using pace and space to create opportunities so when this situation arises under Manning we're simply toothless in creating opportunities unless the opposition play to our advantage.
Southampton opened up and tried to outplay us and we countered them effectively, not using Mannings style, but instead using the things Pearson taught the players. Our very best results have come from playing the way we played under Pearson and the opposition playing into that, hence we competed with Premier league teams, they are the types of teams who come at us allowing that quick, counter opportunity creations.

3) "Manning is here to stay, we should get behind him!" - This boggles my mind, why should we support a man who has been so quick to blame players but when his tactics let us down he doesn't see that it's his own doing? He's either passing the blame onto the players or he simply doesn't realise that he's the problem, not the players. You only need to look at our players best periods of performance at the club and then look at the style of football we were playing at the time to pick out things such as Bell is a pacey player who likes to get in behind and either bring the ball across the area with a low driven cross or likes to get on an angle to shoot. When Manning came in he was using him like he was a deep winger who cuts inside which is not where Bell was at his best. Conway is another example, he's a menace when you give him a ball to run onto alongside a defender and instead we keep going wide looking for crosses, he's just not that fox in the box style player so again, not playing to his strengths at all. 
Manning has already shown that his clear intention is to play the one style he likes to play and rather than take the assets he has in players and create a system that gets the best from them he's trying to mould them into the type of player he needs to suit his system and that clearly isn't working.
What further frustrates is when he was asked if he'd change his set up/coaching ideals he flat out said no, so essentially he's not capable of adapting as someone like Pearson is. When Pearson was struggling with us he looked at what he had, he looked at where we were weak and where he could get more from our players and built his gameplan and style around that, he found round holes and used his round pegs, Manning has round pegs and he's trying to hit them with a hammer through triangular shaped holes and seems confused as to why he's getting no where and still won't look to try a different peg or hole.

I'm convinced that Summer, new players, a pre-season... none of it will help unless we somehow have the transfer window of a lifetime and bring in insanely quality players that are able to play to Mannings style of football but even then it would require not mid-level championship players to pull it off but top end level Championship players and simply put we don't have the finances to make those kinds of luxury transfers. Instead, we'll shop where Manning has managed, in League One and then we'll wonder why the system he employs just doesn't work. 

I've always been in the mindset of a manager will always need time at a club, but in all my time of supporting Bristol City I've never seen such a gulf in managerial ability as I've seen with replacing Pearson with Manning. Pearson may not have taken us up, but he did improve our league position whilst selling some of the best talent we've had in my lifetime, he also had the fans for the most part on the same page which is the biggest achievement in my personal opinion. I've been supporting City all my life and I think I've only seen our fans all in agreement for the most part on 3 occasions and Pearson was one.
Manning has been here for 23 games and has completely polarized the fans, the home games are barely on par with a library at times, the players look frustrated and restricted and the board are not going to sack him because then they'll have to admit their mistake. 
Next season we're going to go into the season having had a pre-season with new players learning Manning-ball which will more than likely fail as he's so one-dimensional and we'll end up struggling until all of the fans finally turn on him and the board are forced to let him go, at which point we'll probably have lost good talent in Conway, Pring etc and will have a squad who have been trained to play a type of football that we can't live up to in this division and a new manager needed to do a proper rebuild job over multiple years.

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