Chewie

Ah FFS Jurgen.. You're telling us there's a chance.. Real talk is nonsense but I may coach again - Klopp - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/c8ejkj69jzro

The whole thing is a fascinating case study on leadership, organisations and cultures. Jurgen was quite simply a leader, and they've tried to replace the leader in the aggregate, with the Edwards/Hughes/ward/slot structure. What's clear though is that for the aggregate to work, and you do need the support structures, you need to have the leader. They made him the coach but they never said who the leader was to be, and it's not implied either as no-one has emerged as the totem pole around which everything else gets built. In English football culture its the manager. In Spanish football it's usually the President.. Notwithstanding the aura of Simeone. In Munich it's the board of former bayern players. That's why in those clubs they get to swap in and out their managers/coaches, but in England it's the manager. Now if they wanted to replicate the la liga or bayern model etc, fine.. But everyone needs to know who the leader is. The players, the fans, the staff. We're back in the time of Rodgers, when everyone had a say but no one was actually in charge. In our club I believe it should be the manager but that's not the same as saying it must be the manager. It needs to be someone though who is driving the whole organisation to greater heights, holding everyone to account to the highest standards and demanding absolute excellence. I have no idea who's doing that at our club. Either appoint the leader and put everything into supporting him (most likely a him) or someone step up, take the lead, and appoint whoever it takes to produce success. I've no idea if those who currently comprise the aggregate are the best or worst of all worlds. The worst being those who think they can lead by being the smartest committee, but who never wanted to lead, but whose egos won't accept they need the leader to make all their smarts count for something. I reckon slot is a decent, and maybe even highly capable, 'manager', but he's not a leader, and was never actually appointed to be the leader. They were all going to work together to replicate Jurgen, but that only works when you're winning and everyone's feeling good and smug. But when the winning stops it's clear no one is actually truly in charge and leading the charge. That's the one area I feel sorry for slot. He's not truly in charge, but they're all quite happy to hide and let him bear the brunt of the blame.

When Jurgen was here we built our club on rock n roll Not as much of a timeless conundrum as whether you would have Gerrard or lampard

Everton and Brentford are looking at us and Chelsea and thinking 'game on' for that 5th place. Beeb form table has us at 1.4pts per game over the last 10. The Ev are 1.7. Over 7 games that doesn't put them ahead of us, but the clincher is the derby. 3 pts behind us, still to play us, with 7 games to go. They'll be right up for that

This content is not viewable to guests.

You can hear them laugh in feyenoord Arne slot, is a total bore .... ah I'm sure if I could be bothered there's a song to finish there but he's taken that fight away 'n all...

Ibou is such an enigma. He's either unplayable or unplayable

Yup.. Bulked when he said that

Great interview with the opposition.. Milner https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/cly0yykzkplo

Show us your workings..

Klopp back with Jimmy Milner and Adam lallana alongside. Sorted.

I have it on good authority that those 18 words (same number as titles up to when stevie was playing) in italics are actually a cipher taken from the Tomkins article using an advanced algorithm taking the first letter from every 2,374,894,126 words, ergo Tomkins, the source, may turn out to be the hero in all this

Which one is it then..

Good to see with the evidence of our own eyes that the problem has really been low block teams and nowt to do with how we play football............

Getting to the stage where they'll be thinking of creating max limits on players within zones for things like corners.. No more than 2 outfield from each side in the 6 yard box and no more than 4 from each in the pen box not including the 6 yd box. Having 10-12 players on the goal line is just a scrum

Tomorrow (27th Feb) 1200 CET

Spoiler alert

I thought at this stage we can end up on either side of the draw? The chart here shows us or spuds as possibilities on both sides of the draw https://www.uefa.com/uefachampionsleague/draws/

Reasonably high chance there'll be no Italian sides in the last 16 of the CL this year.

Rio needs to look Arne straight in the eye and tell him 'I'm your man', not least because he would even give us a different corner option.

We've won loads of turgid games in our history. Bank it. Take it. Get in and move on

'gainst Northampton?!

Here's where I'm at.. . 1. Hearing how someone speaks in pressers and then reading what they say are two different things. Only reading words in particular is riddled with confirmation bias as it's easy to project what you already think when interpreting what is said. I'm not gonna hammer him for mis-read press conferences. All that said, a big part of the role now is speaking well knowing you will be read, so he doesn't get a blank cheque. He has to inspire belief in his players and fans, and he's falling short in that. 2. Success is not linear and great managers, including our own, have had fallow periods. I'm not going to hammer him for not winning all the time. No-one does. There's the long told tale of retaining good people who make mistakes as why should someone else have the benefit of the price you paid for them to learn. Making that judgment call is critical - is this a really good person to retain who has messed up, or is this symptomatic of someone who will not make it? We don't know as no-one has seen Slot have to bounce back before. The club and powers that be really need to get this judgment call right, and I dare say that if they back him at least part of that will be because they believe that the failures this season are organisational and not just personal in terms of Slot as a coach / manager. 3. However, unless the failings are truly organisational and the collective knows exactly how to solve the puzzle in terms of squad rebuilding and signings, here's why I don't really want to risk finding out if we've got a guy we should keep who will get better for his mistakes, or if we should let him go - as above, Slot has no precedent for this, so it's as much of a roll of the dice to keep him as to let him go - the stats are truly horrible. The same points as Hodgson over 20 games, the most defeats in a row in decades, the most defeats to late goals in the history of the prem - quite simply: we look badly coached. Fed up of seeing other teams better set up to play to their strengths and exploit our weaknesses - we look unfit. Yes, pre-season was impacted horribly, but that was months ago. We should be match fit by now, and that's on coaching - expectations have been managed down. Why is it that everyone believes Chiesa is not good enough for us, that Endo is a risk, that Jones is not consistent enough? These things become self-fulfilling mantras. We are not going to build a side around any one of these as the main man, but with good coaching, man-management, and utilising at the right times each one of those - and others - can and should have contributed so much more. Make the players feel a foot taller and you'll get 6, 8 even 10 games out of them when they'll give absolutely everything. Right now, we all believe there's only about 6 players fit to put on a shirt. It's horrible. - the football is poor fare. end of. - complaining about how other lesser teams block us with their anti-football is just baffling on so many levels. so - stats, coaching, fitness, man-management, fan-management, tactics, communication - none of these make me believe we wouldn't be better off giving someone else a chance. All of this informs and increases the confirmation bias when he talks about any or all of this. anyway - that's a ramble, but in essence the only reason I could support for having him stay is if the combination of Slot, Hughes and Edwards are all completely aligned on what has gone wrong, and are all aligned on how to make it right. I can buy into leadership that stays the course, doesn't panic, doubles down and comes out better than ever. But, that's the stuff we can't see. On the basis of what we can see, change is needed

This content is not viewable to guests.