Really I think at the time Ralf came in a lot of us believed that the players primarily just needed decent coaching. We thought Ole’s coaching was poor or non- existent, which it was.
Since then I think it has become absolutely clear that the players themselves are a massive part of the problem. To be fair, some posters saw this years ago, but most of us continually blamed a succession of crap managers, who were indeed either bad or past their best, whose style had worked in a previous era but not now: or, like Ole, were just unqualified.
I think Ralf, in contrast to his predecessors, has in fact done well, though really he’s a consultant in a managers job. While the performances have been dreadful, it was obvious in that first game what he wanted the players to do: to press and play as a team. It was also obvious that they couldn’t or wouldn’t cooperate, and that from then on he was compelled to try and be pragmatic.
However, and this is the key point, I think it likely that his brief was always to come in and identify what the exact feck was wrong at UTD, which at times has seemed mysterious( to the extent that some argued that we were cursed or lacked managerial baldness). This I believe he has done, and it’s in that sense I mean that he’s been successful. I for one think it’s worth a bad season to get that message out loud and clear, so that we can - finally - start to address the issues.
