Ok I'm confused, you said Southampton were better coached than us and they are 11th in the table, now you are saying they should be lower with their squad. Your points don't make any sense and no they shouldn't be lower as they have a decent team compared to the teams below them.
I do think they're better coached, being better coached doesn't necessarily mean they perform better than us or they get better results than us. The way I measure coaching, I may be wrong here but it's the way I think it should be measured, is which football you play and which results you get according to the quality of your squad. They being 11th or 8th or 15th doesn't change that.
If you are comparing the last 18 months, numerous points tables have us near the top since the beginning of last year so again makes no sense. And no, I wouldn't swap the whole Leicester for ours.
Beggining of last year is not 18 months, thats 12 months. I'm quoting 18 months since it's last season and this one until today, based on that we have 5 more points than Leicester and were equal in goal difference. Do you think the difference in quality between our squads is reflected in those results? Or has Leicester overperformed to what it should be expected from them?
Of course you wouldn't swap squads, ours is way better then theirs. Still they get almost even results than us in the last 18 months, so its either them performing better than they should which I attribute to good coaching or we have underperformed which would be attributed to coaching as well.
In the 2 years, we have shown improvement, we are now competing for the title and we should certainly keep competing this year and next year and onwards as well.
I agree we have shown improvement, my claim is that we still have to improve a lot more and I dont think Ole can take us that far.
To be fair we are competing right now, we will almost certainly not win it, but competing at this stage is more than we have done in the last years. Still I feel this is because of the strange season, not only us but a bunch of other clubs that werent in the race are suddenly in it. The point gap between Bayern and the rest has shortened, same in Ligue 1 with PSG. Serie A has Milan as a leader and Juve far from the top to give some examples. I think this season is an anomally in europe. Most likely next season we will be back to normal and we'll see the same old City and Liverpool making 90+points.
I don't feel confident at all nor I think it's a given that next year we'll be challenging again. In fact I think this season is our opportunity and if we don't take it it may be a long time after we get another one.
Why do I feel this way? Because even after good results I'm not convinced with the performances. I think we have got more points than we deserve performance-wise and it will eventually catch up to us. That doesn't mean we have performed badly, it means we haven't performed good enough so we can comfortably say that we are challenging this year and will be in the next years.
The basis of the squad is good enough for that with improvements in certain areas required. I don't see how you can say the path for him is ending when he is still improving the squad so you should at least see how we fair next season with hopefully those weak areas improved.
I agree the squad needs to be strengthened, we still have holes in the squad. But I dont think thats the only problem we face. We still have the same weaknesses we used to have. The main ones in my opinion is that we are weak on set pieces and we don't have clear attacking patterns.
Both of those problems I think must be solved with coaching more than with bringing more/better players. Ole brought Bruno, VDB, Cavani and James for the offense and while Bruno have been a massive success it doesn't change the fact that we are still without a clear attacking patterns. Even a medium/poor squad can develop clear attacking patterns, we see it with Southampton and Leeds for example. Thats due to coaching not quality in the squad, of course the level in which you perform those patterns is up to the players but the patterns themselves are from the coach.
In defense he brought AWB and Maguire, and while we are arguably more solid in defense we are still weak on set pieces. Again I dont think bringing better defenders will automatically solve this. This is a coaching problem.
As I've said multiple times here we are facing special managers in Pep and Klopp, one which also happens to have a better squad. So we need a special manager ourselves to level the ground. I don't think Ole is special, but that doesn't mean he is a PE teacher that can't do anything right. Of course he could improve us further with better players, but that's not the question. The question is can he improve us enough so we can actually beat City and Liverpool in the league and challenge in the UCL?
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