Finnegan

It's not snobbery it's just sense. I don't think Dyche football would be in any way an intelligent way to get us out of the Championship in the first place. Everyone's going to see us coming and be terrified even the second time around, teams are still going to be playing defensive against us and we'll still have to break it down. It's also silly to suggest getting promoted and playing anti football is the only way to stay up. We keep talking about Brentford, Bournemouth, Brighton, Fulham, etc on here but for good reason. They've all gone up and established themselves without having to resort to caveman football. They all had the good sense to know when they had to park the bus occasionally when the got promoted, it wasn't all naive silliness. But they're also capable of beating sides. I don't need us to hire the next Pep, I'm happy with a different tactical approach, we can play fast counter attacking football, sit in a lower block and wait for transition. I don't give a shit if we make like Nuno and win off 30% possession. But Dyche is a football terrorist. I don't want that shit. He's just one man out of literally tens of thousands of coaches on the planet, it's not a case of we either deluded ourselves we can perform some miracle and get Fabregas / Still OR get Sean Dyche. Who on here is going to claim they'd have thought of Silva, Iraola, Hurzeler or Frank before they moved to English football? Granted this is all moot because our board have no imagination and they've probably already approached Martin ffs but I absolutely cannot get my head around anyone as sensible as you are trying to justify Dyche. Why on earth would you want to watch that?

I'm so disappointed in you

He was the England interim manager for five minutes and before that he did international youth football. He has very little to end real experience with a club. Enzo was an inexperienced big risk but at least he'd been involved coaching in club football for about seven years prior including working in two stints at Man City who, like or loathe them, are superbly well run from a football point of view. Carsley has nowhere near even Enzo's CV and Enzo, again, was a huge risk. Carsley would need significant hand holding from a competent director of football that could just let him coach and even then what does he know about managing a squad through a league season? In any normal world, Carsley wouldn't be anywhere near the conversation getting any managers job in the Championship let alone one at a club expecting to win it. It's only because the English football world has this weird, fanatical relationship with the national team. If he'd followed any other England manager there wouldn't be the buzz, it's just Southgate plays such dour anti football that people think Carsley is master entertainer because he couldn't possibly have done worse. Insane rumour.

I honestly don't know. I wouldn't have thought of Enzo Maresca in a million years before he was linked but he was superb. I'm not qualified to comb Europe looking for potential head coaches. I 100% agree with people who want to see a culture change in the squad and a return to hiring players who are hard working, who are fighters, who are leaders, as Nige used to. But I don't think you have to be a footballing caveman to have that outlook. Sean Dyche is not the only manager / coach on the planet that values a bit of graft and hard work in his players. I even understand people not wanting possession based football, that's fine, they think it's boring. OK. But so is Dyche ball. It's ****ing hideous and nobody will enjoy watching it. There's literally no reason for us to ever hire him at all. He brings literally no value to us.

@Mark if I do the leg work and and read all 54 pages of the thread to identify everyone that's said Sean Dyche would be a good idea, can you bulk ban them in one go?

Cesc is doing extremely well but his next job will be at a big top flight club, he's not touching us with a barge pole. Insane delusion. Carsley is a ****ing ridiculous idea.

Completely delusional if the club think Fabregas is coming here. Carsley would be a ****ing joke, just another vogue name with no experience. Manages England for two minutes and now he's the English Pep, ffs. And if we straight up copy Southampton's homework and hire Martin then Top and Rudkin need to be put in a rocket and hired in to the sun.

Mate, you know most of the world doesn't see us any "bigger" than Fulham, Brighton, Bournemouth or Brentford, right?

Both parties signed a contract. People need to park their anger a moment and get a bit of perspective. He's a human being that's uprooted his family to take a job in another country. A job he's done to the best of his ability. He might have fallen short but you can't fault his ambition for trying, our board were foolish to take such a risk on him in the first place. If his contract says he's due X compensation in the event the club want to terminate that contract then he's due X compensation. People getting angry with him for this are the same as people getting angry at footballers who want to stay when we've paid them high wages or, alternatively, footballers who want to see out their contracts and leave on a free. It's what a contract is. Ruud has done absolutely nothing wrong and nobody should "hate" him on a human level, that's just ****ing unhealthy. He's just not a good enough football manager for the level we're at or probably even the level we're going down to. That's our fault for hiring him, not his.

Because I can't be arsed debating it, it's irrelevant isn't it, we're down anyway. I don't disagree but it's like debating whether one STD is better than another.

Absolutely blows my mind the amount of people not intelligent enough to hold two different opinions in their head at the same time. It is possible for Ruud to be crap and get us relegated and also Cooper to be crap and was going to get us relegated. Even if Ruud is worse (I think he actually might be to be honest) that doesn't suddenly make Cooper good. They are just both terrible managers and were terrible appointments, nothing else really needs to be discussed.

Different rules.

Entitlement would be us having the budget of Burton Albion and getting upset at not being a Premier League team. The club having ungodly amounts of money to spend, money that's partly ours, by the way, that we've paid in through high ticket prices, food prices, merch prices, etc. Having that money and wasting it as badly as they have through terrible sporting business decisions and an out dated working model? That's legitimate cause for frustration.

It doesn't help that Premier League wages have ballooned over the last decade. We probably weren't paying Musa THAT much on a global scale but I imagine Faes is paid prohibitively too much to stop him getting a lot of moves to Italy, Spain or Germany that he'd probably be willing to take from a footballing point of view.

Think you're letting your bias show a little bit equating Arsenal to Inter in the sense of being defensive (or just trolling @Torquay Gunner in which case you have my full support .) Also think people are being very naive and selective with their view of PSG thinking they're some sort of antidote to possession, systems based football because you've seen them play one or two games in the Champions League. They're literally managed by Luis Enrique, they're about as structured as you can get, they just have the talent to score decent goals on the break. Stylistically, there isn't an enormous amount to choose between the current iterations of Arsenal, PSG and Barca. Honestly, none of the teams in the last 4 should fear any of the others. It's quite a refreshingly balanced semi final spread and any of them could win. They've all got flaws. Whilst I'd probably agree with the majority that a PSG / Barca final would be the most entertaining, I could see any of them winning and wouldn't begrudge it (well, PSG's grubby money over it would be a bit sickening but then so was Man City's.) Preference would probably be Inter shit-housing it frankly, hideous as it might be to watch.

The phrase tone deaf gets over used. But jesus christ.

Depends on who leaves. I imagine Vestergaard, Okoli and Faes would all rather leave its just about them having suitable offers. If I had to put money on it, I'd say Okoli will go back to Italy on a loan deal that'll make the fanbase roll their eyes and Faes will get a move to a club on the continent. His amortisation has dropped now to a point that makes him pretty sellable. Both of them have ambitions of international careers regardless of whether we think they deserve it. Yeah I'm all for having a destroyer somewhere in the middle of the park but your whole team can't be blunt instruments.

But if Souttar's all round game is never going to be good enough long term then we need to find a better option now while CB is arguably our biggest priority. Okoli is dreadful in the air. Not only is his aerial duels won hilariously low but he fails to even track his runner and make the duel in the first place a lot of the time. Height isn't everything. Vestergaard is a crane but he's in the 32nd percentile for aerial duels which is frankly hideous. Nelson is a tad better in the 57th but that's not enough. You're looking to have at least one CB well and truly in the 90s. You need to have at least one aerially dominate CB for longer term premier league survival, it's why Mings used to be so vital for Villa despite having a lot of mistakes in him. I think we need two completely new CBs because I think we've ****ed around for years neglecting the position and I'm fed up of us being defensively terrible. We need two absolute horrible bastards back there, a return to Wes and Huth, that strikers are going to completely dread playing against. I generally don't tend to advocate caveman football but I think the squad needs SOME needle, we need more warriors and ideally at the back. I want Nelson to be a long term success here but he seems like a fairly nice, cultured lad. We need at least one if not more complete bastards to play with him and I don't see that in Souttar who also happens to be possibly the slowest footballer I've ever seen. That's just daft IMO. Winks was just absolutely unbelievable in the Championship last time out. He was far too good for that level and was brilliant beating the press and getting out. He's been completely wasted this season by managers who have no use for him tactically, I can't fault him for wanting out, it's been a crap year. JJ, eh, he's fine. He's good enough. He had an absolutely torrid time with very little support at the start of the season. Would I like us to get a better left back? Yes of course but he's good enough to get us promoted and we have other positions we desperately need to fill more urgently.

I found it a bit weird people turning excessively on Maddison. I think his personality just invites fairly obvious ageist digs from boomers who find him a bit weird for acting like Gen Z... which he is? I thought he always put a shift in, I'd say a lot of the time he looked like he cared a lot more than most of the people on the pitch.

Every year journos and pundits tip the promoted teams to go back down and it very rarely if ever happens this way. Forest have only been up a couple seasons and they're Champions League. The gap between the divisions may be growing but idea that it's an impossible chasm to bridge and all newly promoted sides are doomed is a huge myth. There's very obvious context why all three newly promoted sides are going down with a whimper this year. Ipswich have had to panic build a squad having had two promotions back to back. They've got a lot of League One still in the club, it was always a big ask. Leicester are still hamstrung by the financial problems that got us relegated last time, we lost our manager before the season started and then replaced him twice in a row with absolute clowns. And Russell Martin is just ****ing terrible and Soton let him stick around inexplicably long.

In the event we actually keep all of these, this is the elements of a team that gets us promoted: * Mavididi, Bilal, Fatawu Skipp, Winks JJ, *, *, Woyo Stolarczyk Needs a reliable striker and most importantly we really need to put together a decent centre back partnership that's going to last us a few years. Two guys that can actually defend and who aren't afraid of a scrap. At least one of them MUST be a beast in the air, ideally both. If Nelson and Souttar can do that, great, but we probably want a better option than Souttar and Nelson is never likely to be dominant in the air. Normally I'm the first to defend the players that got us out the league last time, Winks and JJ for example I'd happily give a pass to for this year. But I just want Vestergaard and Faes out of the club at this point. They need to go.

That Tory poser has nothing on the Caledonian Mafia

I thick Tucker is a bit too mild for our current predicament. It might call for more Jamie Mcdonald levels of subtlety.