Emotion

[Bristol Oil Services]

2 hours ago, BarnzFM said:

This is far worse than LJ, LJ had a personality and a bit of bite in him - this guy is devoid of anything 

He never beat Southampton though, did LJ

[RUSSEL85]

2 minutes ago, Bristol Oil Services said:

He never beat Southampton though, did LJ

Just Man Utd, they have nothing on Saints 

[2015]

2 hours ago, handsofclay said:

I feel like I am a bully picking on Liam Manning as I inevitably do. If you are reading this boss, it's nothing against you personally. I just simply think, in fact I know, you are not up to the job. 

I am not blaming you. You were put into this situation by the Lansdowns and BT. Don't trust them to ever run a crèche, they'd be getting the kids to play in water dangerously way out of their depth.

I have been going to Ashton Gate since 1970. The Pearson sacking was the worst dismissal and most unwarranted of a Bristol City boss in all those 54 years. Prior to that I would say the John Ward departure was the highest own goal in terms of how that was handled and then subsequently panned out, but the Pearson sacking usurps that. (Although the kind of constructive dismissal of Cotts is up there too.)

Having lived quite a few years now I am no longer surprised that certain members of the elite just don't have their fingers on the pulse. They live detached, privileged lives. They didn't like a mainly popular Bristol City manager and believed they were all powerful and could dismiss him as it is their club. Not that of the thousands upon thousands who pay good money and invest their money and HEARTS in the club and its fortunes.

So they sacked a popular manager and mentioned top six squad and the need for front foot football as a means, they thought, to win the backing of these strange fans who liked the bloke they despised.

In his place they have installed someone who just isn't up to the job. Once again, I call upon my experience of following Bristol City and from the outset LM was a totally uninspired appointment and it is evident that not enough effort was put into checking him, his suitability for the job as manager of the highest profile club in the West Country or his achievements and ethos. He had a few months of relative success at MK Dons followed by a terrible slump and a few months of success at Oxford. That is it. As others have said it made LJ's record when he was given the post look greatly experienced by comparison.

Two of the trio in charge have no nous in football. They are like you and I, except they have money. Indeed, we have something they clearly don't, a grounding in following a football club and knowing what the masses think without feeling entitled. 

Is it any wonder it has gone so wrong. The sooner they acknowledge they made a massive balls up of the dismissal of Pearson and foisting this emotionless novice upon our club the sooner Bristol City can get back on track. Until that happens I am afraid the Express to the Promised Land has been derailed for some considerable time to come.

 

Post of the season this. It was a shambles the sacking, but the replacement made it even worse. 

Not renewing ST, not returning for the remainder of this season. Never felt so disillusioned with City.

[rednotblue]

You need emotion but controlled emotion.

Emotions can give you the last few percent

 

[Bristol Oil Services]

That Diego Simeone and his Atlètico Madrid could use a bit of this emotion-free football, they might get somewhere if they did. In fact, the entirety of Argentina and Argentinian football could do worse than make their way up Failand and form an orderly queue at our High Performance Centre so's they could discover from Liam Manning what ridding theirselves of all that pesky bleedin emotion would do for them and their emtionally-incontinent football ....

[SydneyCity]

Emotion is the one thing we need, as the squad needs to play better than the sum of its parts to succeed.

This is what was built, and what we accepted as fans - we’d win, lose or draw but the players would always fight for the badge.

I honestly believe we had a 6th-11th squad that would be pushing for sixth until later in the season when we would inevitably do a City, shoot ourselves in the foot and end up 11th.

[AshtonGreat]

4 hours ago, DaveF said:

I don't remember the fans ever taking such a strong instant dislike to a manager before, probably doesn't help that he has had to follow an extremely popular manager that was sacked unfairly.

That's an understatement

[Ron W]

I’ve kept this to myself until now but not long after LM was appointed I spoke with someone who had worked with him indirectly in one of his previous jobs.

He didn’t comment on his ability as a manager. That’s clearly got some promise, or he wouldn’t have got Oxford or MK looking good.

However, he was pretty negative about Liam’s man management. He called it robotic, long before I read it from anyone here.

He didn’t rate the idea of removing emotion from the game, but did concede it was a very ‘new-age’ way management was going.

At the time I took it with a pinch of salt, LM came to us having got Oxford into a decent position, and started fairly well here. The biggest concern imo was how different it sounded from Pearson, who quite clearly was still a very popular/influential voice in the dressing room at the time he was sacked.

It might still be wrong, but it’s interesting that same warning sign has resonated so strongly with our fans, and is being reflected on the pitch too. Can Manning manage “without emotion”? Clearly, yes. Can he do it here? Much more difficult question to answer.

Edited March 17 by Ron W

[Superjack]

It's amazing how someone so boring and bland that doesn't like emotion can instill such off the scale emotions in me. 

Not as much as the people above him though....

[Davefevs]

11 minutes ago, Ron W said:

I’ve kept this to myself until now but not long after LM was appointed I spoke with someone who had worked with him indirectly in one of his previous jobs.

He didn’t comment on his ability as a manager. That’s clearly got some promise, or he wouldn’t have got Oxford or MK looking good.

However, he was pretty negative about Liam’s man management. He called it robotic, long before I read it from anyone here.

He didn’t rate the idea of removing emotion from the game, but did concede it was a very ‘new-age’ way management was going.

At the time I took it with a pinch of salt, LM came to us having got Oxford into a decent position, and started fairly well here. The biggest concern imo was how different it sounded from Pearson, who quite clearly was still a very popular/influential voice in the dressing room at the time he was sacked.

It might still be wrong, but it’s interesting that same warning sign has resonated so strongly with our fans, and is being reflected on the pitch too. Can Manning manage “without emotion”? Clearly, yes. Can he do it here? Much more difficult question to answer.

Ron - just before he was appointed, when it looked pretty clear he was gonna get it I sat and watched a dozen plus of his post-match interviews, win lose and draw, last season and this.  I feel post match give you a good feel for what they are like.  Pre-match is all a bit of a game, but post-match is different, date I say, you get the “emotion” of the result.

I posted on here that they all sound the same, he gives little away.  What I didn’t hear was him under pressure.  That’s the difference here, he’s in the spotlight and it’s fair to say he’s lost a bit of the cool, calm, samey style I saw at Oxford.

Mike Holden (FoxPunter) was so close to profiling him:

“In any case, Manning is everything the club reportedly wanted”….thats the biggy for me, I think the club wanted one thing, thought they were getting it with Manning, but actually didn’t know what they wanted and therefore didn’t know what they were getting.

[fgrsimon]

5 hours ago, 38MC said:

I get that Robbo. TP was an absolute sag agent and the football under him was dross, but the regression under manning and seeing him completely devalue our players such as Conway and to see him completely hammer a squad full of young players publicly when it’s clear to all that he’s the problem makes me dislike him so much. 

Yes in terms of making things worse I think you have to go back to Jimmy Lumsden to rival Liam Manning.

[Superjack]

21 minutes ago, fgrsimon said:

Yes in terms of making things worse I think you have to go back to Jimmy Lumsden to rival Liam Manning.

Difference is, Lumsden got the job because a good manager decided to leave. 

Manning has got the job because a good manager was 'engineered' out.

[Lew-T]

He’s just not Bristol City for me. His face doesn’t fit here..

[petehinton]

Nailed my colour to the Luke Williams flag when Pearson went. 
 

LM - take the emotion out the game, something something behaviour

LW - running down the touchline joining in the pile on for their second goal in the derby yesterday

Sigh. 

[petehinton]

To add to above comment….

Out on the piss with fans after!

[Sir Colby-Tit]

18 hours ago, Harry said:

We keep hearing Liam Nothing (sorry Manning) say how he’s always trying to make sure the players take the emotion out of the game. 
 

I don’t like this approach. Emotion is part of football. Sometimes it can affect you poorly but in my experience it can also have as much of a positive effect than a negative one. 
 

I actually WANT to see my team playing WITH emotion. Not without it. 
 

I’ve really had enough of this bloke. 
 

We also hear him say “at half time we spoke about how we might think about how to engage higher”. 
No no no!! It’s your effing job to TELL them how to engage higher. Not have a polite feckin conversation about it. 
 

Enough. Honestly. 

I'm beginning to think Mr Manning might be a Borg drone that managed to break free of the collective.

[Olé]

18 hours ago, Harry said:

I actually WANT to see my team playing WITH emotion. Not without it. 

I’ve really had enough of this bloke. 

I honestly expected to get a notification by now from a club tweet to say Manning has gone, to be honest I’m a little surprised he hasn’t. The football is absolutely dire, league position is irrelevant, it’s when the product on the pitch is so visibly awful and regressive that the real alarm bells should all be going off and is when SL normally acts, and Steve is not stupid - bad decision maker yes but he knows an irredeemable shitshow when he sees one, it was the same at the fag end of the Holden experiment and SL admitted as much when he pulled the plug.

You’re a sensible and balanced poster and I'd like to hope I try to be too and I am already in the same place as you - not being in the least bit knee jerk but absolutely convinced of the need (with some urgency) for Manning to go and hoping SL is seeing the same things the rest of us can all see - he’s totally out of his depth. It’s actually frightening how fast he has sucked the life out of a promising team and devalued and demotivated so many players. I actually feel a bit sorry for players who are playing within themselves in a laboured and emotionless fashion. 

The emotion piece is an interesting one. Pearson used to talk about something similar but not eradicating emotions but being able to always have control of them. He knew that emotion is a huge force and extra percentage if channeled correctly and a huge problem if not under control. Asking players to own and manage and use their emotions went hand in hand with his repeated mantra of asking the players to take responsibility for finding solutions. Players tasked with developing personality and leadership that contribute to us playing with pace and passion.

Manning, on the other hand, by simply switching off emotion and force feeding the players the same relentless script as ‘process’, has created robots stripped of the instinct and fight to play with a zip and determination and perhaps even to entertain. Which is why the football is so utterly tedious and uninspiring, and which is why in turn you can see visibly so many City fans recently walking out of matches from Hillsborough to the Hawthorns looking like zombies, hollowed out and brain numbed from the suffocating lack of emotion in our football any longer.

The great irony where emotion is concerned is while removing their ability to channel and benefit from positive emotion Manning has left his side totally exposed only to negative emotions, of which there are lots: players with confidence shot to pieces, players sulking, players frustrated, and in the case of Tommy Conway, once a key asset of ours, all three. For SL that is the biggest alarm bell of them all. Pearson had it right, there will be emotion so control it and use it. Manning has got this approach, like many other things, badly wrong and we’re far worse off for it.

Sadly this is par for the course for Monotone Manning and his monotone brand of football - he is out of his depth and I will say it again, I am genuinely surprised he hasn’t gone already today.

[Bristol Oil Services]

Enzo Bearzot should've subbed Marco Tardelli, after that absurd, histrionic, latin reaction to scoring a bleedin goal, ffs 

[One Team]

13 minutes ago, Olé said:

I honestly expected to get a notification by now from a club tweet to say Manning has gone, to be honest I’m a little surprised he hasn’t. The football is absolutely dire, league position is irrelevant, it’s when the product on the pitch is so visibly awful and regressive that the real alarm bells should all be going off and is when SL normally acts, and Steve is not stupid - bad decision maker yes but he knows an irredeemable shitshow when he sees one, it was the same at the fag end of the Holden experiment and SL admitted as much when he pulled the plug.

You’re a sensible and balanced poster and I'd like to hope I try to be too and I am already in the same place as you - not being in the least bit knee jerk but absolutely convinced of the need (with some urgency) for Manning to go and hoping SL is seeing the same things the rest of us can all see - he’s totally out of his depth. It’s actually frightening how fast he has sucked the life out of a promising team and devalued and demotivated so many players. I actually feel a bit sorry for players who are playing within themselves in a laboured and emotionless fashion. 

The emotion piece is an interesting one. Pearson used to talk about something similar but not eradicating emotions but being able to always have control of them. He knew that emotion is a huge force and extra percentage if channeled correctly and a huge problem if not under control. Asking players to own and manage and use their emotions went hand in hand with his repeated mantra of asking the players to take responsibility for finding solutions. Players tasked with developing personality and leadership that contribute to us playing with pace and passion.

Manning, on the other hand, by simply switching off emotion and force feeding the players the same relentless script as ‘process’, has created robots stripped of the instinct and fight to play with a zip and determination and perhaps even to entertain. Which is why the football is so utterly tedious and uninspiring, and which is why in turn you can see visibly so many City fans recently walking out of matches from Hillsborough to the Hawthorns looking like zombies, hollowed out and brain numbed from the suffocating lack of emotion in our football any longer.

The great irony where emotion is concerned is while removing their ability to channel and benefit from positive emotion Manning has left his side totally exposed only to negative emotions, of which there are lots: players with confidence shot to pieces, players sulking, players frustrated, and in the case of Tommy Conway, once a key asset of ours, all three. For SL that is the biggest alarm bell of them all. Pearson had it right, there will be emotion so control it and use it. Manning has got this approach, like many other things, badly wrong and we’re far worse off for it.

Sadly this is par for the course for Monotone Manning and his monotone brand of football - he is out of his depth and I will say it again, I am genuinely surprised he hasn’t gone already today.

Brilliant post mate, absolutely how I feel as well. 

Seeing Williams and Robins emotions in their respective games yesterday is what football is all about. Manning has sucked the life, enjoyment and energy out the club in under five months. 
 

[BanburyRed]

Try telling Gerry Gow or Norman Hunter or Gary Shelton or Tommy Doc or Robbie Turner to NOT play with emotion. Manning would be decked by all of them.

[Davefevs]

1 hour ago, Olé said:

I honestly expected to get a notification by now from a club tweet to say Manning has gone, to be honest I’m a little surprised he hasn’t. The football is absolutely dire, league position is irrelevant, it’s when the product on the pitch is so visibly awful and regressive that the real alarm bells should all be going off and is when SL normally acts, and Steve is not stupid - bad decision maker yes but he knows an irredeemable shitshow when he sees one, it was the same at the fag end of the Holden experiment and SL admitted as much when he pulled the plug.

You’re a sensible and balanced poster and I'd like to hope I try to be too and I am already in the same place as you - not being in the least bit knee jerk but absolutely convinced of the need (with some urgency) for Manning to go and hoping SL is seeing the same things the rest of us can all see - he’s totally out of his depth. It’s actually frightening how fast he has sucked the life out of a promising team and devalued and demotivated so many players. I actually feel a bit sorry for players who are playing within themselves in a laboured and emotionless fashion. 

The emotion piece is an interesting one. Pearson used to talk about something similar but not eradicating emotions but being able to always have control of them. He knew that emotion is a huge force and extra percentage if channeled correctly and a huge problem if not under control. Asking players to own and manage and use their emotions went hand in hand with his repeated mantra of asking the players to take responsibility for finding solutions. Players tasked with developing personality and leadership that contribute to us playing with pace and passion.

Manning, on the other hand, by simply switching off emotion and force feeding the players the same relentless script as ‘process’, has created robots stripped of the instinct and fight to play with a zip and determination and perhaps even to entertain. Which is why the football is so utterly tedious and uninspiring, and which is why in turn you can see visibly so many City fans recently walking out of matches from Hillsborough to the Hawthorns looking like zombies, hollowed out and brain numbed from the suffocating lack of emotion in our football any longer.

The great irony where emotion is concerned is while removing their ability to channel and benefit from positive emotion Manning has left his side totally exposed only to negative emotions, of which there are lots: players with confidence shot to pieces, players sulking, players frustrated, and in the case of Tommy Conway, once a key asset of ours, all three. For SL that is the biggest alarm bell of them all. Pearson had it right, there will be emotion so control it and use it. Manning has got this approach, like many other things, badly wrong and we’re far worse off for it.

Sadly this is par for the course for Monotone Manning and his monotone brand of football - he is out of his depth and I will say it again, I am genuinely surprised he hasn’t gone already today.

Who needs a post match report….this is the truth of the matter imho.

We have / are all reaching the same conclusion.

It is such a mess.  It has to be ended…asap.

[LondonBristolian]

20 hours ago, Harry said:

We keep hearing Liam Nothing (sorry Manning) say how he’s always trying to make sure the players take the emotion out of the game. 
 

I don’t like this approach. Emotion is part of football. Sometimes it can affect you poorly but in my experience it can also have as much of a positive effect than a negative one. 
 

I actually WANT to see my team playing WITH emotion. Not without it. 
 

I’ve really had enough of this bloke. 
 

We also hear him say “at half time we spoke about how we might think about how to engage higher”. 
No no no!! It’s your effing job to TELL them how to engage higher. Not have a polite feckin conversation about it. 
 

Enough. Honestly. 

This has been annoying me for a while. I also think it's symptomatic of a manager whose approach is rooted in theory and following a coaching manual rather than someone who's learned the skills to apply learning flexibly. 

Ultimately the best managers - in any walk of life - are those that treat their teams as individuals and think about the different skills and approaches needed to get the best out of them. I've no doubt there will be players that perform to their best when they take the emotion out of their game and purely focus on the job in hand but I don't in any way think that that's the right approach for every player, or even most players. I think there are a lot of players - Flint is the most obvious recent example that comes to mind - who are at their best when they impose their character and personality on games. If you removed Flint's personality from his game, you essentially got a competent but technically limited centre-back. Add the emotion into the mix and you got a committee leader who could raise his game beyond his natural abilities and get that type of goal scoring return you'd expect from a midfielder or striker, to boot. Similarly, it's hard to imagine Adriano Basso would have been a better goalkeeper without the emotion. And those are just the really heart-on-their-sleeve players. On the flipside, I think Callum O'Dowda probably managed to take the emotion out of his game and I'm not too sure it helped him. 

I'm sure there are players that do need to be told to keep their emotions in check to produce better performances but I don't think it is most players and I don't want to watch a team of robots week in, week out. I think what often happens if you tell people to take emotion out of their game is that your get a flat, underwhelming team that are unable to express themselves. Mind you, in fairness to Manning, if that is what he does want then achieving it is the one metric where he is actually succeeding. 

[LondonBristolian]

2 hours ago, petehinton said:

Nailed my colour to the Luke Williams flag when Pearson went. 
 

LM - take the emotion out the game, something something behaviour

LW - running down the touchline joining in the pile on for their second goal in the derby yesterday

Sigh. 

I know it was said by someone on here that there was some sort of falling out behind the scenes but, whether that's true or not, the fact the club actually helped develop a genuinely talented young manager who fitted the criteria the club laid out when Pearson went and then couldn't or wouldn't recruit him and went for someone who appears not to fit the criteria at all is frankly a shambles. 

[Loosey Boy]

30 minutes ago, Davefevs said:

Who needs a post match report….this is the truth of the matter imho.

We have / are all reaching the same conclusion.

It is such a mess.  It has to be ended…asap.

Question is @Davefevs - will it be ended??

[Davefevs]

3 minutes ago, Loosey Boy said:

Question is @Davefevs - will it be ended??

It’s too late already!

Id have done it after Cardiff!

[LondonBristolian]

14 hours ago, Davefevs said:

Ron - just before he was appointed, when it looked pretty clear he was gonna get it I sat and watched a dozen plus of his post-match interviews, win lose and draw, last season and this.  I feel post match give you a good feel for what they are like.  Pre-match is all a bit of a game, but post-match is different, date I say, you get the “emotion” of the result.

I posted on here that they all sound the same, he gives little away.  What I didn’t hear was him under pressure.  That’s the difference here, he’s in the spotlight and it’s fair to say he’s lost a bit of the cool, calm, samey style I saw at Oxford.

Mike Holden (FoxPunter) was so close to profiling him:

“In any case, Manning is everything the club reportedly wanted”….thats the biggy for me, I think the club wanted one thing, thought they were getting it with Manning, but actually didn’t know what they wanted and therefore didn’t know what they were getting.

It's really hard not to see it as a massive failure of due diligence. 

If I recollect correctly, I feel the club set out the following criteria for a new manager:

1. Be closer to promotion than we were under Peason, which at the moment has to be seen objectively as not a success.

2. Get the best out of players in terms of level of performance, which has to be seen as not a success.

3. Play attacking, expansive front-foot football - again not a success.

4. Continue to bring in and develop young players. Not a success.

5. Continue to play the style of football the club has brought in the players to play. Harder to assess objectively but the impression seems to be Manning wants the team to play in a way that the team are not comfortable with.

6. Reduce injures. Again, that has not happened significantly enough. 

 

Ultimately I just cannot see that Manning is hitting any of the club's own defined success measures. 

Edited March 17 by LondonBristolian

[Red from afar]

You get some people in life that are very intelligent, have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of their subject, but when it comes to the practical/ real world application it just doesn't come naturally. It's all great when everything is following the standard/expected pathway, but they just don't seem to see the subtleties, or be able to react to the unplanned scenario. 

I think this is where we are with LM. With the right practical football mind/tactician and motivational personnel next to him maybe it could work, but as it is he's got BT above him marvelling at his textbook drills in training. 

[bearded_red]

Far too much emotion on display at Old Trafford this afternoon.

[BarnzFM]

I don’t get it, really don’t. Let’s remember football is an entertainment business, the characters, the incidents…. THE EMOTION is what makes it entertaining. 
 
Get this clown gone now.

 

Edit - clown is the wrong word, clowns at least show a bit of emotion, even if it’s just painted on their faces 

Edited March 17 by BarnzFM

[BCFC_Dan]

I find this odd too.

I've always been in favour of hiring modern, progressive managers and I prefer them to be on the rational side rather than the emotional. I don't want a manager who can do nothing more than run up and down the touchline bellowing and waving his arms.

However, I cannot think of a single top manager who would talk about entirely removing emotion from the players. Pep Guardiola plays a highly structured form of football but you only have to watch him communicate inside and outside of the match environment to know he's looking to harness emotion, not eradicate it. Jurgen Klopp clearly uses emotional techniques to motivate his players and to raise the atmosphere. Listen to Ange Postecoglu and you can see that for him the sole purpose of the game is enjoyment. Remove the emotion and it's simply not worth bothering with.

Controlling and harnessing emotion is vital, but seeking to remove it from sport? That's going to make things massively more difficult for no obvious reason.