I’m not sure whether this deserves it own thread so have posted it here, and apologies to all but there’s a significant amount of nominative determinism in this post.
But, how is this appointment different to the previous 3 managers we have appointed (I’ve excluded Ole and the caretakers here for reasons that will become apparent).
When City were lining up to appoint Pep, they spent two seasons appointing scouting staff, Directors and coaching staff that would facilitate and complement him coming in and changing the face of the playing side of the club. Player recruitment started to lean towards players that could play his kind of football as well as satisfying the current needs of Pellegrini. A DoF (Txixi) that knew what he wanted and how he operated was put in place week in advance to pave the way for him.
Pool did it differently, they had an idea of what they wanted, built a structure and appointed a manager that could deliver what they wanted. Juergen ended up being wildly more successful than they ever anticipated, but hey-ho it worked. There was nothing in Klopps Dortmund side that would suggest he’d end up being a world beater, but he is, and fair fecks to them.
What have we actually done? We’ve put bums on seats in positions we’ve been told we need to fill (DoF & Technical Director), we appointed a hipsters choice for an interim manager whose been an utter disaster and is now going to expand on his failure by imposing his questionable will upon the entire structure of the club. We have now appointed a manager whose style of play is completely at odds with the technical abilities of the squad we have previously assembled at great cost, and have told him there are limited funds and he will have to accommodate certain players who we have invested heavily in who we cannot shift.
How Is any of this different to the appointments of Van Gaal or Jose? Two managers with a very different ethos to the natural ethos of the club, both of whom had had some recent success and both of which were parachuted in with no prior preparation and the expectations they would wave a magic wand and fix all of our ills.
Currently it seems peoples optimism is based around some unquantified belief that EtH is some kind of messiah along the lines of Pep or Klopp. Pep was a well prepared move, planned in advance and executed with a limitless budget. Klopp was a lucky confluence of circumstances for a club that had been getting it wrong for 30+ years.
I hope this goes well, but I really have no real reason to believe it’s going to. Murtough and Fletcher have no experience whatsoever of building a club and developing a plying style separate to what is already in place. So we’re back to hoping the new manager has a magic wand to wave, a la Fergie, and that he’ll grab tha club by the scruff of its neck and mould it as per his vision.
Will Murtough and Fletcher impose a possession style of football on the club from youth to U23’s? Will our youth recruitment now be focused on getting those kinds of players on the books?
What happens if it doesn’t work with EtH and the whole thing turns into a depressingly sterile LvG possession based experience? Will we stick with tiki-taka? Is that what we are as a club now? Or will we embark on another wholesale change and restructure the club from top to bottom.
Ole may not have worked, but it was at least clear we were being true to some kind of identity that was familiar to the club and sat well with what we were set up to do. I’m happy for the club to change direction and feel we probably need a new direction, but I’d like to know we actually have a direction in mind and we’re not just going wherever the wind blows us.
