You wrote a single line on a post I spent half an hour to write. But I will summarize in short, our pre-season was far from ideal, so is our injury situation and there were continental tournaments both in Europe and in South America. No other team has nearly been disadvantaged as much so far (Arsenal is an outlier but their problems lay ahead for the NLD which has not been played yet).
You can call it excuses, realistically speaking the situation is really difficult to handle. To answer your question, I am not searching for excuses at all. Let's just not pretend we have the squad depth to ignore it, just see which players sat on our bench during the last few games. Yet, we played excellently well against City and Fulham. I do not see which attainable coach would have done better. If there was any, I would give you the name and advocate for a switch.
You’ve written a lot but not actually answered the question
What’s your breaking point as an advocate?
Just checked some translations and I will try to rephrase to make sure I understand your question correctly. Please correct me if I am wrong:
What’s your breaking point as an advocate? -> "what's the weakness of your argument" -> "After what event that would make you change your mind" or "when would you stop backing ETH respectively INEOS regarding ETH?"
I would like to make it clear that there exist of course be many factors that would justify a change of opinion. In order not to go beyond the scope of this discussion, I will limit the answer to the sporting level and ignore off-pitch factors. An exception, or gray area, would be if the players publicly oppose the coach.
The main criterion is that our game continues to develop. Results play an important role in this, but the evaluation of individual games must be put into perspective. Yes, it's always tragic to lose to Livepool, but it was just as satisfying to win the FA Cup final against Man City. A valuation horizon of several weeks/months appears to be a more suitable benchmark.
In my opinion, and I've emphasized this several times in past discussions, our system of play is based on a strong back four and a responsive counter-attack. Whether the system is the right one to bring our club back to the top I leave open, but I would have to be convinced of the opposite.
So, to get to the point, I would set the line like this:
If we don't look better with De Ligt/Yoro as strong central defenders alongside Martinez than with Evans, Lindelof or Maguire, then a change would be appropriate.
If our full-back pairings with the addition of Mazraoui (and hopefully soon Amass) can't cushion the regular absences of Luke Shaw, then a switch would be in order.
If our counter pressing efforts can be improved by the availability of Ugarte, Mount and Amad to complement Bruno in place of the insufficiently fit Casemiro or Eriksen, then a change of coach would be needed.
If we ever lose 7-0 to Liverpool again, then we need to sack our coach on the spot.
What I'm trying to say is that, based on these four factors I've selected, we can evaluate the game's progress and correlate it directly with the style of our coach. I'm optimistic that we'll soon have the opportunity to see ETH's game idea in realized form - with a more suitable squad than in the first season, with fewer emergency line-ups than last season. If we do not see any progress, say by the end of December, even though the conditions have objectively been met, then I would be forced to consider the project a failure. I don't know how you would rate the last 4 games. We lost 3 out of 4, which is very unfortunate. In my opinion, we played much more decisively overall and, above all, we concentrated on our game concept again after the embarrassing last season. I also know that we are far from being "above average" or "outstanding". The important thing is that we are continually improving.
ETH can't do much about that, but we have at least given up a lot of injury-prone, limited or too old players. At the same time, we have brought in young and hungry talent. This is a huge change, and I think his quality as a coach is also evident in how he can work with these new personalities - but it is still too early to express praise or criticism. We have improved our salary structure in a financially demanding climate. Lower costs, a younger team, higher potential and hopefully more tactical flexibility to implement our game three times a week. Ineos has done an excellent job and has undoubtedly increased the value of the squad.
I don't expect it to be perfect this season, but I demand an improvement in line with the progress I have listed that we have made in the squad composition. If the season goes normally in terms of squad availability, then ETH must clearly deliver this improvement. That is how he should be judged.
