The Paul Lambert thread - poll reset after our capitulation to Hull

[taylorsworkrate]

24 league games into the season, and in how many of those games can you genuinely say we played well?

Arsenal (a)
Chelsea (a)
Liverpool (a)
West Brom (h)

Would be the only games I could say we played some good stuff.

The majority of the performances have ranged from mediocre to atrocious, which is reflected by our points total (helped by a couple of quite lucky victories against Man City and Southampton to be honest). Largely the quality of football has been woeful, especially at home. People are comparing us favourably with Swansea's current situation and the fact they are below us in the league. Well surely then that is a pretty strong indictment that we only had 30% of the possession against a team 2 points outside the relegation zone at home.

The fact we are currently tenth is in my opinion more down to the bottom half of the table becoming poorer over the last couple of years, and not some sort of indication of consistent improvement on Lambert/players behalf.

[Toronto Villa]

I was in the QE at 10 30am having my heart check. 50 odd years of watching Villa  helped put me there ! Not even Villa come before my health

Why has eastie logged in as pooligan?

[Monty]

Not with reference to Lambo in particular, but I came across this excellent article by Raphael Honigstein from last year, which I thought raised a lot of questions about what we know about managers. With specific reference to Martin Jol.

http://espnfc.com/blog/_/name/bundesliga/id/159?cc=5739

Over the past few days, I have often thought back to a Twitter debate I had with my colleague Martin Lipton of the Daily Mirror when Martin Jol took over Fulham in 2011.

"Great coach" -- or something to that extent -- Martin tweeted. I replied that I had once thought the same but had changed my mind once I had heard (indirectly) from a couple of Hamburg players who had worked under him and were far less complimentary. Martin then mentioned Jol's success at Tottenham as a counter-argument. It was a fair point, and he could have mentioned the Dutchman's season at Hamburg, too. In 2008-09, Jol had taken the Bundesliga side to the semi-finals of the UEFA and DFB Cup plus they finished fifth in the league. Hamburg haven't qualified for European competition since.

What's more, Jol had come across really well off the pitch in his previous jobs as well. He was engaging, funny and intelligent. You sensed that the players responded to his genial manner. To conclude, he had everything a great coach needed -- charisma and good results. As I said, I too had been convinced that Jol was one of the best in the business. There was simply no evidence to the contrary, but then a chance meeting with a German agent in the summer of 2010 changed my view.

The agent had no axe to grind with the Dutchman and indeed stressed that both he and a couple of his players at Hamburg had enjoyed working with him. But Jol, he said, had not impressed his players in actual coaching terms. He hadn't made any particular mistakes but also didn't introduced any particular good ideas either. Jol, said the agent, had mostly left the players to their own devices. He didn't believe in minute tactical coaching but was essentially happy to pick a squad, pick a formation and then motivate the side. It's true; one can do a lot worse than that. But to my surprise, this all came down to a rather basic, old-school approach. In other words: nothing special at all.

Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, the authors of Soccernomics, have shown that football managers are to an extent overrated. Jol's Hamburg side was full of very good players like Vincent Kompany, Jerome Boateng, Ivica Olic and Piotr Trochowski -- his Tottenham team wasn't bad either. Perhaps it's only logical that his considerably less-talented Fulham side are struggling. But they shouldn't be struggling this much.

If league results closely correlate to players wages as Soccernomics has shown, the Cottagers should be smack bang in the middle of the Premier League table. (They had the 11th highest wage bill in 2011-12.) In Jol's first season they came ninth, doing slightly better than anticipated. Last year they finished 12th and this season, they're 17th again. Providing their wage bill hasn't gone down significantly, Fulham are much worse than they should be. No wonder that Jol is under pressure.

But I'm not mentioning all of this to show that I was right and that Martin was wrong. My point is a different one: what this example has driven home to me is just how big the disconnect is between media coverage and the actual knowledge of a manager's training ground work. There's never been more football on television or more intelligent debate online, on radio and in print. But closed training sessions in the Premier League, as well as a culture of omerta, have taken us to the point where we have never known less about what's actually going on in the dressing room and in the practice sessions. (Things are slightly more open on the continent, generally speaking.)

Sure, we can judge managers on results, performances, post-match conferences and on their nous in the transfer market but after that, it gets complicated because there's no reliable information.

A handful of managers get their teams to play in an obvious, highly specific style -- think Jose Mourinho's first Chelsea squad, Tony Pulis' Stoke, Marcelo Bielsa's Athletic Bilbao or Pep Guardiola's Barca -- so you can see their hard work on the pitch. Others are good at making clever impact substitutions. But we have little idea what most of them do, because neither they nor the players tell us.

You'll find that only managers with a chip on their shoulder or those who feel insecure will openly talk about their tactics in great detail. The good ones keep quiet -- because they don't want to divulge trade secrets -- and as for the bad and lazy ones, those who don't turn up at the training ground at all from Monday and Thursday, also keep quiet -- to pretend that they're guarding important secrets.

Because there's no real external scrutiny and because many Premier League clubs still don't employ sporting directors who can evaluate a coach's work, football remains an industry in which it's possible to get away with mere pretense. I know of one coach who made a point of never speaking to his Premier League team. He left everything to his subordinates and effectively told the players that they had to coach themselves on the pitch. His pre-match team talks consisted of banalities like "play with intelligence." One foreign player could see that the season was heading for disaster but couldn't bring himself to speak out. He didn't want to be seen as a trouble-maker. The club was duly relegated but when I asked him to go on the record after he'd moved to another club, he declined. The manager was a nice man, he explained. He didn't want to hurt him.

Occasionally players will brief about outrageous dressing room behaviour from managers, but these are very rare cases -- think of Paolo Di Canio at Sunderland -- where the trust between squad and coach has broken down completely. What you don't hear or read about is the much more common, low-level incompetence or dereliction of duty, about a top four manager never bothering video analysis, for example, or another one only buying players from one particular agent he's very close with (yes, that's a euphemism). Players and officials feel it's wrong to talk about these matters and without sources, journalists can't write about them. And even if they do, these pieces are invariably sourced from off-the-record conversations and are thus seen as unconvincing by readers. Their natural instinct is often to suspect bias, both from the writer and/or his informants.

Furthermore, there's an interesting psychology at play. Supporters are happy to debate whether a coach is good or bad but they will refuse to believe point blank that the man entrusted to lead their club might simply do very little. It's like the emperor's new clothes in reverse: many look for intricate patterns and tactical layers in matches that aren't there. Or to put it more precisely: they might be there, but will only have come about by pure accident as a result of the complex interactions between players on both sides -- while the manager had, say, spent his entire team talk banging on about "mentality."

It took a book from Germany captain Philipp Lahm to reveal what many had known but never openly discussed: Rudi Voller, the Germany manager who had taken the team to the World Cup final in 2002 but crashed out in the first round at the Euros two years later, had done almost nothing by way of proper preparation with his squad. He'd pick his best XI, set them up in a shape and then hoped the players would take it from there. No player complained about it until long after he was gone. No journalist wrote about it since everyone liked Voller and appreciated his efforts. He himself probably knew that he wasn't a great manager in a technical sense.

Barring a fundamental change in the rules of media access or the dressing room culture, we -- meaning reporters and supporters alike -- will remain largely in the dark. Football, you sense, wants it that way; it doesn't like the attention before and after the final whistle.

I wish there was an uplifting conclusion to draw from all of this but if anything, it looks as if the gathering of real information will become even more difficult in the future. The best I can do is leave you with a warning. The next time you see a nice, well-spoken manager on TV, ask yourself what you really know about the way he works.

That's a cracking article. I know which side of the fence I feel most comfortable coming down on with regards to Lambert, but the argument really does go both ways: we know nothing for sure, so we're down to our suspicions. However, perhaps with regards to Lambert but more pertinently with regards to MON and the debates on here during the later part of his tenure, I found the highlighted paragraph very telling (and I was one of those finding intricate patterns which, truth be told, were not there at all). It really can be easy to get away with pretense in this industry.

Also, that Kuper/Szymanski book is called 'Why England Lose' in England, and while not always wholly convincing it's an interesting read.

[Rudy Can't Fail]

Frankly it's utterly stupid that they have fired Laudrup. How are they ever going to achieve consistency or stability if at the first hint of things not going as planned they sack the manager. Like I said, Lambert has plenty of room to grow and improve, and every so often we signs that he's doing that. I'm also now even more glad that despite not everything being rosy in the garden we are looking to retain him. Laudrup won a cup and got them into european competition and he's been sacked. Madness.

The "consistency or stability" has been their football since 2007. It's not as though they sack their manager every other year, Laudrup is the first to be sacked in almost ten years and there are rumours he was off at the end of the season. I'd imagine their lack of points despite their league position and poor home form compared to previous seasons in addition to the drop in footballing standards are the main reason they've let him go.

It's a risk changing the manager at this time in the season but I'm pretty sure the Swansea board see it as a calculated risk that will get them back on track.

[Nastylee]

Going back to my posts a few pages back. I, like many others on here, would rather see us playing like Citeh but it's not going to happen, for now at least. The point I was trying to make is that changing a manager, even one with a different ethos, doesn't necessarily bring about an upturn in fortunes. Laudrup has gone for whatever reason but the facts are that they are in trouble despite playing the style many want us to emulate. Is 70% possession and losing any better than 40% and losing? Would fans be satisfied losing so long as we passed it around a bit? People would still be moaning it's not good enough because at the end of the day it's about results. Villa are stuck where they are until RL provides some money to upgrade the key positions in the team. Being in better players and the rest sorts itself out - simple really. Until then prepare to spend most of your day on here moaning about it. I don't think PL asks us to play 'hoof' tactics but in some games where we become overrun in midfield (due mainly to the fact it's very weak), some of our players get desperate and try to fast track the ball to threatening areas to make things happen. Improve the team and the style will improve too.

[Phil from the upper holte]

We played some good football last season which is why I find this seasons kick and rush stuff utterly surprising.

I know he hasn't become a bad manager overnight. I put a lot of this down to Lerner and really he hasn't backed him so were stuck with Players such as Westwood & Lowton who are having second season syndrome, I'm baffled why there is talk of a new deal now rather than at the end of the season. It's probably a shot in the arm for a man who's doing exactly what he's been told to do..

[Phil from the upper holte]

Frankly it's utterly stupid that they have fired Laudrup. How are they ever going to achieve consistency or stability if at the first hint of things not going as planned they sack the manager. Like I said, Lambert has plenty of room to grow and improve, and every so often we signs that he's doing that. I'm also now even more glad that despite not everything being rosy in the garden we are looking to retain him. Laudrup won a cup and got them into european competition and he's been sacked. Madness.

The "consistency or stability" has been their football since 2007. It's not as though they sack their manager every other year, Laudrup is the first to be sacked in almost ten years and there are rumours he was off at the end of the season. I'd imagine their lack of points despite their league position and poor home form compared to previous seasons in addition to the drop in footballing standards are the main reason they've let him go.

It's a risk changing the manager at this time in the season but I'm pretty sure the Swansea board see it as a calculated risk that will get them back on track.

On tv this morning they were saying he's totally lost the dressing room, he won't let more than 3 spanish players sit together, apparently after the West Ham defeat he went to Paris for a few days on his own and apparently he just doesn't seem arsed.

Probably why they've got rid now

[Nastylee]

We played some good football last season which is why I find this seasons kick and rush stuff utterly surprising.

I know he hasn't become a bad manager overnight. I put a lot of this down to Lerner and really he hasn't backed him so were stuck with Players such as Westwood & Lowton who are having second season syndrome, I'm baffled why there is talk of a new deal now rather than at the end of the season. It's probably a shot in the arm for a man who's doing exactly what he's been told to do..

Much of that good football was away from home in the run in using our counter attacking style, norwich, stoke to name a few. The Sunderland game stands out but that was a bit of a freak. Were we really passing it or were we blinded by the fact that everything CB hit seemed to in during the run in? If CB had bagged another 10 goals from August to now we'd be sitting pretty and no one would be moaning.

[Rudy Can't Fail]

Frankly it's utterly stupid that they have fired Laudrup. How are they ever going to achieve consistency or stability if at the first hint of things not going as planned they sack the manager. Like I said, Lambert has plenty of room to grow and improve, and every so often we signs that he's doing that. I'm also now even more glad that despite not everything being rosy in the garden we are looking to retain him. Laudrup won a cup and got them into european competition and he's been sacked. Madness.

The "consistency or stability" has been their football since 2007. It's not as though they sack their manager every other year, Laudrup is the first to be sacked in almost ten years and there are rumours he was off at the end of the season. I'd imagine their lack of points despite their league position and poor home form compared to previous seasons in addition to the drop in footballing standards are the main reason they've let him go.

It's a risk changing the manager at this time in the season but I'm pretty sure the Swansea board see it as a calculated risk that will get them back on track.

On tv this morning they were saying he's totally lost the dressing room, he won't let more than 3 spanish players sit together, apparently after the West Ham defeat he went to Paris for a few days on his own and apparently he just doesn't seem arsed.

Probably why they've got rid now

It will be interesting to see who they eventually bring in. If I was a betting man I'd fancy the odds of Paul Clement, he seems to fit their vision.

[sirlordbaltimore]

We now have a squad, not on stupid wages.

If we continue to spend £20 million a season, but on quality instead of quantity, we are in a good position, I'd give him a new contract.

If we spend 20m a season on QUALITY, example 3 players of 7m ish each then they wont be coming in on the wages we're now offering surely ?

Proper quality players aren't going to come in for peanuts, and after all this stripping back to the bare bones why would we then go out and increase the wage bill again ?

And if we did bring in players earning a lot more than the ones we have now, why would they stick around without a pay rise to match the new big wage earners ?

It's not going to happen is it ?

[Dave Cooper please]

If we spend 20m a season on QUALITY, example 3 players of 7m ish each then they wont be coming in on the wages we're now offering surely ?

Proper quality players aren't going to come in for peanuts, and after all this stripping back to the bare bones why would we then go out and increase the wage bill again ?

Because the previous players we had on big wages weren't contributing to the team. We've by and large offloaded these now so that will leave enough slack in the wage bill to bring in some quality who WILL contribute to the team.

We showed that Lerner isn't toatally averse to increasing the wage bill for the right player when Benteke was persuaded to sign a new deal so I'm sure that the wages will be found if Lambert wants to bring in quality in the summer.

[sirlordbaltimore]

If we spend 20m a season on QUALITY, example 3 players of 7m ish each then they wont be coming in on the wages we're now offering surely ?

Proper quality players aren't going to come in for peanuts, and after all this stripping back to the bare bones why would we then go out and increase the wage bill again ?

Because the previous players we had on big wages weren't contributing to the team. We've by and large offloaded these now so that will leave enough slack in the wage bill to bring in some quality who WILL contribute to the team.

We showed that Lerner isn't toatally averse to increasing the wage bill for the right player when Benteke was persuaded to sign a new deal so I'm sure that the wages will be found if Lambert wants to bring in quality in the summer.

Do you seriously believe we'll start paying out semi decent (eg 40-50k) wages again ?, Not a chance IMHO

Benteke isn't even on as much as Delph apparently never mind Gabby!

[eastie]

I was talking today to an Evertonian friend  who has always been pretty accurate with what he says about them - he was telling me that they are looking to sign back rodwell and had talks last week about it but couldn't take him on loan as they already had Barry on loan from city - he mentioned everton were keen on signing Barry on a permanent deal but said his wages were £140k at city and well out of evertons reach unless he is prepared to take a huge drop in wages .

If that is true then we are going to have real problems trying to sign quality players if we are not prepared to pay the going rate that others may pay.

[Concrete John]

If we spend 20m a season on QUALITY, example 3 players of 7m ish each then they wont be coming in on the wages we're now offering surely ?

Proper quality players aren't going to come in for peanuts, and after all this stripping back to the bare bones why would we then go out and increase the wage bill again ?

Because the previous players we had on big wages weren't contributing to the team. We've by and large offloaded these now so that will leave enough slack in the wage bill to bring in some quality who WILL contribute to the team.

We showed that Lerner isn't toatally averse to increasing the wage bill for the right player when Benteke was persuaded to sign a new deal so I'm sure that the wages will be found if Lambert wants to bring in quality in the summer.

Do you seriously believe we'll start paying out semi decent (eg 40-50k) wages again ?, Not a chance IMHO

Benteke isn't even on as much as Delph apparently never mind Gabby!

140K a week for Barry?  No, that won't happen.  But £40-50k a week for a player that would improve our first team?  yes, that'll happen.

[not3bad]

I was talking today to an Evertonian friend  who has always been pretty accurate with what he says about them - he was telling me that they are looking to sign back rodwell and had talks last week about it but couldn't take him on loan as they already had Barry on loan from city - he mentioned everton were keen on signing Barry on a permanent deal but said his wages were £140k at city and well out of evertons reach unless he is prepared to take a huge drop in wages .

If that is true then we are going to have real problems trying to sign quality players if we are not prepared to pay the going rate that others may pay.

£140k a week isn't a 'going rate' kind of wage though is it?  As soon as you mention Man City 'Going Rate' goes out the window.