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The 'If You Still Need to Purge Yourself Of Ange' Thread

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  • Total voters
    36
Silly McSilly Face said:
So what youre saying is that the only time we looked like a decent team was because the players weren't doing what Ange wanted. Sounds about right....
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😂

Well I wouldn't quite be so abrupt to put it like that but I do think that evidence says those first ten games were not a marker for Angeball given we never really looked like playing that way again and that Ange himself said as much one way or the other.
 
harr1984 said:
It does make me laugh how posters like you try and asterisk anything positive Ange achieved. He got us finishing 5th in our first Kane-less season, 'Yeah, but...' He wins the Europa League in his second, 'Well yeah, but...'

The facts are he was here two seasons, had us finishing 5th in the PL, one very poor league campaign and Europa League winners all in two years. Dress it up any way you want, he's in a net positive....
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Well next he wouldn't have had us winning the CL, and it was obvious he couldn't organise us against premiership sides. If we had of kept him the chances are we would have a handful of points after 10 games and he would have been sacked. By that time we would have to play catch up and the season would be over.
 
Silly McSilly Face said:
Exactly. There is a downwards trend in PPG clearly evident after the Chelsea game and that trend was never arrested. Thats a clear sign of us being worked out and then that blue-print being refined over time to the point where there was a very well refined blueprint to beat us in place across the PL resulting in us losing the majority of our games.
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Again, I’m asking people to actually look at the results in the 23/24 season after the first Chelsea game. I don’t get the sense that it was us having been figured out at all. There was a tough 4 games after that Chelsea match, then a tough 4 game stretch at the end of the season with difficult games one after the other. And then a perfectly fine stretch in between that where we won plenty of games.

It doesn’t read to me like a blueprint being refined over time against us. It just reads like a manager in his first season getting 5th, one with some highs and lows and some middling periods thrown in.

The next season, we have in theory a better squad, a deeper squad, are would operate in an entirely different context. That squad then gets decimated by injuries.

I’m really open to the idea that Ange may have never led us to the promised land. I am even open to the idea that he may have been bottom half with us the next season. Especially if he was so uncompromising as to not adjust to circumstances, and being insistent on playing largely his way despite the players he has available. I just wish, on the other side, there would be an acknowledgment that maybe with normalised injuries he actually might have done pretty damn well with us in the third season. Because he, like any manager who has that uncompromising belief in his system, might actually do very well when he can play those pieces.

Because the reality is, we just don’t know either way. Obviously the trend after the first 11 games of his first season points down. And if you want to say that is that, no further analysis, then fine. But like, the outright refusal to allow any other form of context into the discussion beyond the downward trend itself really grates.
 
Mikey10 said:
When Gary O’Neill was at Wolves and they won against us he gave a post-match interview to Sky in which he was pretty clear on the gameplan which teams were using to beat us. Opposition players said similar things in other post-match interviews too. Our response was to continue playing the same way in the PL - and to continue racking up the defeats.



Now tipped to go to Saudi or the States. Says a lot in itself.
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Having an uncompromising belief in a system is not in and of itself a bad thing. It’s a choice. Just like being flexible and pragmatic is a choice. Just like being reactive or proactive is a choice. Of course these managers can go on TV and talk about how to beat a system in which that manager is uncompromising with it. But when that manager has the pieces in places that make it work, then it is just difficult to stop.

Because you’ve made the choices in squad building, you’ve accepted the trade offs that other ways of playing won’t work as well, because you’ve signed a very specific profile of player to play a certain specific way, and when you can actually play them, even if the opposition knows how to stop you, they can’t. Because there have also been PLENTY of managers who have given the quote ‘we knew what we were supposed to do, we just couldn’t stop them’, because the game is complex and there are lots of ways to skin the cat.

I do wonder how Bielsea for example can have a 30 year career if it’s so easy to figure out how to stop what he does? Because surely by now teams would just roll the blueprint out and he’d be unemployable?
 
BrainOfLevy said:
Again, I’m asking people to actually look at the results in the 23/24 season after the first Chelsea game. I don’t get the sense that it was us having been figured out at all. There was a tough 4 games after that Chelsea match, then a tough 4 game stretch at the end of the season with difficult games one after the other. And then a perfectly fine stretch in between that where we won plenty of games.

It doesn’t read to me like a blueprint being refined over time against us. It just reads like a manager in his first season getting 5th, one with some highs and lows and some middling periods thrown in.

The next season, we have in theory a better squad, a deeper squad, are would operate in an entirely different context. That squad then gets decimated by injuries.

I’m really open to the idea that Ange may have never led us to the promised land. I am even open to the idea that he may have been bottom half with us the next season. Especially if he was so uncompromising as to not adjust to circumstances, and being insistent on playing largely his way despite the players he has available. I just wish, on the other side, there would be an acknowledgment that maybe with normalised injuries he actually might have done pretty damn well with us in the third season. Because he, like any manager who has that uncompromising belief in his system, might actually do very well when he can play those pieces.

Because the reality is, we just don’t know either way. Obviously the trend after the first 11 games of his first season points down. And if you want to say that is that, no further analysis, then fine. But like, the outright refusal to allow any other form of context into the discussion beyond the downward trend itself really grates.
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Ange has never had "normalised" injuries at any club he's managed. He had a load of injuries in his first season with us concentrated l and he had even worse injuries in his second season (with more games added). This isn't bad luck. As to your other points, there is a clear PPG downwards trend across the two seasons. And it appears to be completely agnostic of the circumstances.
 
BrainOfLevy said:
Having an uncompromising belief in a system is not in and of itself a bad thing. It’s a choice. Just like being flexible and pragmatic is a choice. Just like being reactive or proactive is a choice. Of course these managers can go on TV and talk about how to beat a system in which that manager is uncompromising with it. But when that manager has the pieces in places that make it work, then it is just difficult to stop.

Because you’ve made the choices in squad building, you’ve accepted the trade offs that other ways of playing won’t work as well, because you’ve signed a very specific profile of player to play a certain specific way, and when you can actually play them, even if the opposition knows how to stop you, they can’t. Because there have also been PLENTY of managers who have given the quote ‘we knew what we were supposed to do, we just couldn’t stop them’, because the game is complex and there are lots of ways to skin the cat.

I do wonder how Bielsea for example can have a 30 year career if it’s so easy to figure out how to stop what he does? Because surely by now teams would just roll the blueprint out and he’d be unemployable?
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Well he’s been sacked a lot and not really won anything since early in his career.
 
Silly McSilly Face said:
Ange has never had "normalised" injuries at any club he's managed. He had a load of injuries in his first season with us concentrated l and he had even worse injuries in his second season (with more games added). This isn't bad luck. As to your other points, there is a clear PPG downwards trend across the two seasons. And it appears to be completely agnostic of the circumstances.
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I can’t prove anything either way on the injuries, but I would just say if the player were genuinely concerned that he was causing their injuries and putting them in harms way long term, I don’t think they would be as behind him as they were. Clearly there was some disagreement with the medical staff this year, and clearly he has been public about players bodies needing to adapt to endure after his first season.

Which is why I would have been curious to see a third season.
 
Baleforce said:
Changed his system?

Added some pragmatism?

I’m not sure he has though has he? He ended up in the championship with Leeds.
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But he didn’t really change much. He suffered a ton of injuries in the first season, got promoted with Leeds, continued the play style in the PL and had them finish 9th. If the blueprint was out, why did 11 other clubs finish below a newly promoted side with such an obvious playing style to counter?
 
billyiddo said:
You don't get your players up to speed with a complex system that quickly - Ange made reference early on that when his system is fully implemented the players actions on the pitch will look natural/spontaneous but in truth everything will be fully regimented (similar to what Conte said about his approach - every action being preplanned given any circumstance the game throws up) so those first 10 games were clearly not the blueprint given the timeframe and you can see that with the way certain players were playing then vs how they were playing this season - Maddison & Sons roles for example were night and day imv there are probably other examples but these two stand out for me.

It'll be the same with Frank, he will come in to a team that has been coached how to play Ange's way for 2 years, the players will all carry over a lot of that coaching and in-game instinct, even if subconciously, and it will also take Frank time to get his ideas & methods in to the players - early this season will likely be a mishmash before things start to settle and Frank's ideas become more embedded.
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I said this about our defending of set pieces initially under Ange (and was heavily rebuked). I felt like a lot of it was a remnant of Conte and as more time passed Ange's lack of attention to set pieces started to show through.
 
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