And yet Ralf is somehow being compared to a guy who failed after three years. Some of you really embody the word shameless.
Its astounding isn't it.
1. Hes been given a mess of a squad that the previous manager expensively assembled to play god knows what style of football.
2. Hes taken over from a guy whos only real skill seems to have been keeping players relatively happy by letting them run the team so he wasn't taking over a team hating their manager.
3. Hes not a charismatic manager who will pick up a team and get the good vibes rolling and he wasn't hired to do that.
4. He hasn't been able to bring in a team of coaches he wanted because it was all last minute and mid-season.
5. He was given no money to spend in January.
6. Greenwood was found out to be at utter cnut so there goes one of our "get out of jail free" players.
7. Rashford hasn't given 2 shits for a while now. There goes another one of our game changers.
8. Cavani has been MIA for a while
9. Ronaldo has both saved us at times and been a meme of his clinical former self.
Quite the easy job if you ask me. Would Conte have done better? Probably. Would we be having this same conversation in 2 years time after spending another £200m? Almost certainly.
I think that many of us pinned our hopes on the idea that this bunch of overpaid twats would respond well to some structure and technical coaching and that they would have some vague level of pride in the shirt and put in even 80% effort. How foolish we feel now...
So we should just accept that 9 wins in 20 league games is good enough because the squad is "disjointed" Does Arsenal really have that much better squad than us?
No but they have a squad that is far more balanced than ours and the most important thing, they have a squad that is motivated and works for each other. This is what boggles my mind. The basic level of football understanding that so many of our fans lack. I swear half of you would play 11 Ronaldos in a team if you could and then scratch your head when you got absolutely pasted every week.
Perhaps this level of analysis should have been levelled at Ole occasionally over the past 3 years when we were getting outplayed by relegation fodder and pretty much every team in the league. Where was the "why are we looking worse than Burnley when our squad cost 10x theirs?". Where was the "we shouldn't be happy when we are routinely outplayed by 70% of teams and only win because we have more
talented players in our team". Why weren't our fans looking at how every other top team in the world plays and saying "dear lord we are like a pub team compared to these boys and yet we spend the same or more money".
I accept that we have a poor squad who have been really poor this year but I also acccept the fact that Ralf has failed in pretty much every department. Our attack has not improved one bit and we still leak in goals. This is not an agenda it's just the truth.
See the first part of my post. I agree that RR has failed in his job purely as our manager and I would also be amazed if any other manager would have done considerably better unless by some miracle these players transformed into people who give a shit. I think that we set him up to fail from day one and I think his mind has been blown by just how dysfunctional a multi billion pound club is. I think that he would have been find if there was even a little buy in from the players.
Yes, a managers job is to motivate players but honestly I am kind of glad that he didn't manage to perform some sort of miracle that would potentially lead the board to think things didn't need a complete rebuild from the ground up. As I said earlier, if someone like Conte came in and got 4th place I would be 100% sure that he would have got a 3 year contract and nothing would have changed by the end of it other than a few hundred million more down the drain.
I basically have nothing but sympathy for RR. Not an elite manager but shouldn't need to have been to get 4th place if these players didn't throw him under the bus.