Quote Originally Posted by Saxo1man41 View Post
If we'd kept the same line up and APPROACH as against Walsall, no complaints.
But the manager alone doesn't dictate the "approach". I managed an excellent schools-squad once. We won four successive games by four or more goals, and lost the fifth 3-0, to a team we'd beaten 6-1 in that run. I used the same 13 players throughout. How do you explain the sudden defeat? There is NO answer. That is the nature of sport. Draw conclusions from a long sequence of games, for sure, but predicting a "falling away" on the back of this is ridiculous. Even if your prediction turns out to be correct, there will be no science in it.
If you do that, and I say we are going to be much better from now on, and a third person says we will be so-so, one of us will be right, but that won't be because he read the situation better than the others. So much of sport is random. The "good" managers are those who get most things right in a particular season. The same man often gets it "wrong" the following year.
I'm starting a club, entitled "Let's Not Buy Into This 'Good Manager/Bad Manager' Nonsense".
I don't imagine you will be applying to join.
Obviously, SOME do prove better than others in the long run, but the margins are tiny. Which category does Roy Hodgson fit into?