weedman

I don't get why some are so against this signing, he improved once he got some confidence and towards the end of the season showed he is more than capable of being a Championship goalkeeper, and we're not talking about some 37 year old journeyman, he's young and will only improve in the coming seasons, if he's happy to leave Man Utd to come here he's obviously keen to play and improve and likes it here, there's no reason not to think he could become a Prem quality keeper over the next year or two, and for £5m it's not a massive gamble. At his age even if he doesn't improve in the future we'd probably still get most of our money back anyway once we get a better keeper, win win?

Its easy to forget he's still young enough to be in the u21 squad, I've been fairly critical of Jack (maybe not here, but in general) because he just doesn't seem to have any end product, all style no substance, but he still has a long time before reaching his peak so probably would be unwise to write him off so soon. Having seen him play this and last season he hasn't been great, but compared to say Barry Bannan or Marc Albrighton at the same age he's probably been better than Bannan and around par with Albrighton, and both have grown into decent players now, so it's probably not worth leaping to judgement on him just yet

I keep seeing this "4 promotions in 20 seasons" thing, completely ignoring the fact that he hasn't been in the Championship for most of those 20 seasons. I'm sure someone on another thread worked out it's actually 4 promotions in 4 full Championship seasons...

Harder to beat/organised defensively. Our problem was conceding late goals and being mentally weak, like it or not Steve Bruce has improved that, we also win the occasional game now as a direct result of that. We were a shambles from before RDM, to suggest that 5 odd years of decline is erased because of 11 games (where we won 1) is crazy. Who knows, given time RDM may have sorted us out as well, but this rebuild requires that we put some faith in the manager, and for me I'd rather put my faith in a man who has proven time and time again that he knows what he's doing than gamble on someone who is largely unproven, but that's just me

Don't know if anyone saw it but Karanka was on sky sports earlier talking about his time at Boro, basically said when he came in they were a shambles, so the first thing he did was make them harder to beat - at the expense of attacking play and was constantly criticised for "being scared of attacking", then the following summer improved the quality and the attacking play improved with those players, got them nearly promoted before they smashed the league the following season. Just made me think of us, there is no quick fix when you are as much of a shambles as we were, it takes time, it requires patience. If Bruce had come in and had us dominating and winning games like some seem to expect then that statement simply wouldn't be true, it would have been a pretty simple quick fix by all accounts. We look more organised now, we resemble an actual football team for the first time in 5 years, is it great to watch? No, but these things take time, I'm confident that with Bruce we will be up there next season, I'm confident that things will improve with a few additions and some more time to gel together, that doesn't mean I'm happy with the football we have played so far, or with finishing 13th in the Championship, it just means I have accepted that there isn't a magic wand, there isn't a quick fix, and it will take a bit of time to get things right, I have faith that things will improve next season and am looking forward to it

I find this attitude hilarious, it was the same with Gabby, as if these players have absolutely no personal lives and banning them from training (which is what, 2 hours a day?) would prevent them from seeing or speaking to their friends at the club. If they are as influential as people think I can't imagine not training would achieve anything other than forcing them to do even less to earn their money, that'll show em!

Wasn't this kind of a transfer window hinted at after Jan? Can't remember exact details but I'm sure the Doc said something along the lines of we thought we were too far away for a real promotion push this season, so decided to buy a few players in Jan and do a mini rebuild then instead to effectively give them an extra few months settling in before the push next year? So I'd imagine half of our "Summer" business was already done and we'll see a lot more of the Jan signings next season, coupled with a few in and out from a "sell to buy" policy should see us ok

This attitude really winds me up, not everyone lives 15 minutes from the ground mate, a Saturday 3pm kick off means I leave my house around 11/11.30, put £50 petrol in the car, have to eat a dirty burger as it'll be 7pm before a pass a service station on way back, watch the game for 2 hours and try and be home by 8pm after which I'm knackered and poor, a weekday evening? No chance, with traffic I'd have to leave by about 4 for an 8pm game (and having done this before, it's tight) and I'd be lucky to be home by 1 am, it's irrelevant anyway, as it's incredibly rare I'd be finished work in time to go in any case A season ticket for me would cost £550ish (whatever upper Holte is now), plus £60 a game travelling, luckily I'll only make about 15 of them that are on weekends, so only an extra £900 there, so for the bargain price of £1,450 I can watch 15 out of 46 games, or I could try and sign up for a service to watch all 46 on TV, and try and go get to the odd one here or there when I can, guess that means I'm not a proper fan

He has scored 24 goals in 213 games, 17 of them in 125 for Groningen, hardly Barcelona are they? Since he's scored 7 in 88 for us, in the Premiership and Championship, he's not a goal scoring player, he's not regressing, poor goal scoring returns are the norm and the "good" season where he netted 5 times in a good league was the anomaly. He had some potential for sure, it's why we signed him most likely, but he has never come close to reaching it and where be was a poor player with potential before, he's now just a poor player. I really like his engine, runs his socks off but his attitude is terrible and he has worse ability than Alan Hutton. Also Roberto Carlos was not good at free kicks, I watched a lot of his games as a kid and he took every free kick and shot every time it was in the opposition half, scored maybe 1 in 30 as his left foot was a cannon and some keepers at the time were woeful, most of his attempts went miles off target or straight into the wall, but that's off topic so I'll stop now lol

Its because he's not good at scoring from distance or free kicks. He's a poor long range shooter who scored a few good ones once upon a time rather than a good long range shooter who mysteriously forgot how to shoot. Him scoring is the anomaly, not the norm. The norm is him being crap Its like the Roberto Carlos debate. Everyone thought he was a world class free kick taker because he scored that absolute worldy but the reality was he was terrible at free kicks and hit the jackpot once.

I play football with a Hull fan and he loves Bruce, as soon as we signed him he said we'd be going up either this season or next. Said the football can be crap at times but he'll get results even if you're not really sure how he keeps getting results, he also said Alex Bruce is a decent enough defender when we inevitably sign him

I hate DOL for calling us fickle all those years ago, since then people seem to think they need to form an opinion instantly and never change it regardless of circumstance. We have a good budget, some top championship players, have the manager with the best ever record in this division in terms of promotions, and are on our best run of form that I can remember, what is it, 7 wins and 1 draw in 9 games? When was the last time we had a 9 game period like that?! Wanting the manager out now is ludicrous and shows an incredible bias. Its been said before, but the magnificent Wagner nearly relegated Huddersfield in his first season, some want Bruce out for only getting us top half, madness

Comments like this really irk me - the reason those sides cost so little is because the players weren't good enough when they signed, given time and a run in a settled side they begin to stand out so until our players, regardless of cost, get that same opportunity it's impossible to compare. I was interested a while back to see what Leicester fans thought of Vardy when they signed him and none of them thought he was good enough, the highest praise I found in his 1st season with them was "Decent enough as a squad player in the Championship but need better if we have any chance of promotion". Give him a run and some time and suddenly everyone's crying that we spend all this money on players when there are players like Vardy available for peanuts. Its not all about money spent, time is a big thing, look in the Bjarnasson thread, people had written him off after 45 minutes, people are judging Bruce's whole managerial record on the last 12 games as if the previous (plucking number out of thin air here) 300 games are pure luck, and it's these 12 that prove my point Have a little patience and we may just reap the rewards, or we can just sack another manager and start again, that's worked well over the last 6 years

It was exactly my point, if we'd made attacking subs and lost everyone would be losing their minds here, as it happened he made defensive subs that worked, we won and kept a clean sheet. I know some people like to moan about all things Villa, and won't be happy til we win every match of the season with over 80% possession every game and making Barcelona look like a pub team, but to criticise the manager after his decisions completely worked is a stretch for me, he's been rightly criticised for some of his decisions this year, let's give credit where its due, enjoy the 3 points, and hope it sets us up for a little run now

Remember when we were playing great football and smashing Leicester 2-0 and Sherwood decided to make 3 really attacking subs and the team fell apart and lost 3-2? Yeah, me too. I'll take defensive subs resulting in a win over attacking subs resulting in a loss every time thank you

Makes sense, I fully agree, if a striker is going to be limited to only a handful of chances I'd trust Hogan more, but given our current style, there really isn't much effect on our team whichever one is playing

If we're playing the no service card, surely the same applies to both players though? Or has our team suddenly struggled to create chances just since Hogan arrived? Just playing devils advocate

And that itself is a byproduct of the players not yet being a team. The only way to resolve that is for them to play and train together consistently. Changing the manager changes the training and they would have to start "gelling" and getting to know each others game all over again. It's a painful process, but one we have to go through whether we have Bruce or anyone else in charge, and Bruce has at least proven he is capable of doing this for multiple clubs over his career, most of the other candidates I've seen here haven't

This is an excellent post and fully sums up how I feel. People are talking about Bruce as if he's some unknown bloke who's never managed before, he's not. He is clearly a competent and successful manager especially at this level. I've also noticed a lot that people seem to want us to keep chopping and changing managers every 5 mins until it works, and then have stability after that. It doesn't work like that, for a club to be stable things have to stay the same for a while and that means sticking it out when things are pretty shit - like now, it's the only way to break the cycle we're in and like the poster above said, I'd be shocked if nothings improved towards the end of the season but if that's the case then Bruce will have to go really

Without a doubt, if it begins to look like we might actually go down then I think the doc will have no choice but to weird the axe but, as poor as we have been, I'd say the chances of us actually going down with this squad are pretty slim, it's more like last season when Chelsea were like 15th or something half way through the season and we were all laughing about them going down, or that season when Spurs were bottom after about a dozen games. Deep down we all knew they wouldn't actually go down, but I'm sure a few of their fans were panicking about it for a bit too, ever so briefly. I'm 99% certain we won't go down, and I'm sure most of us are too if we're being totally honest. We will pick up some points again soon (even the worst teams occasionally win) and that could be a catalyst but, if we actually look to have a chance of going down then I think we'll have no choice but to sack Bruce, at the moment we are still fairly comfortably clear of those places. 6 points at the bottom is a lot because the teams down there don't all win often

But this is one season. In fact, not even one season, barely half a season, I'm not saying keep the guy forever, he has a ceiling of course (PL survival maybe), but all I'm saying is shouldn't he get a season (or a year as I said earlier) to show what he can do? We as a club are extremely unsettled, loads of new players, loads of new managers, new owner, new backroom team. We finally have the nucleus of a good team, we have a good passionate owner and we have, at least on paper, one of the best managers in the league - all I'm suggesting is give a bit of time for all that to come together before another overhaul. A new manager means new backroom team, it means new players, it means a new "system", for the players that are here it means new training regime, total upheaval and, like I've already said, it's not like we've hired an unknown in this league, we've hired the Mourinho of the Championship, dull but effective - and even Mourinho is notorious for winning the league in his 2nd season, after being up and down in his first. This isn't a manager we would hire to win the Champions League, we've hired him to gain promotion from the Championship, let's give him a bit of time to achieve that, as other 'soon to be promoted' teams have before us

EVERY manager makes tactical choices that many fans are left baffled by, MON did all the time but got us up and challenging, Man Utd fans used to say the same about Fergie. Bruce's record throughout his career in this division prove he is not "out of his depth and/or completely useless"

How about we pick a manager (for arguments sake, let's say one of the best managers in the history of the division we play in, with a proven track record of getting teams promoted), give him a bit of time to sort us out (think a year is about fair?), and then judge? Everyone talks about "stability" and yet the first bad run instantly wants managers sacked. It's like some people understand that it's important, but don't quite realise what stability is. We have a new owner, whole new squad (again), a new manager (again). We are the opposite of stable. I understand that people don't want to stick with someone that isn't up to the job, but we haven't brought in some unknown gamble like Garde or Sherwood or even Lambert to an extent, we've brought in a proven winner in this division, a man with multiple promotions on his CV as recently as last year (and that bit is important unless the Championship has "evolved" so dramatically in the last 9 months that he is now totally out of the loop). Bruce is not the problem here. Why not give him a little time and see what happens? Sacking managers every few months hasn't exactly worked out brilliantly, why not see how we do when we stick with one for a bit? Since we started our cycle of hire/fire/hire/fire we've gone from mid table (even top 6) Prem team, to being borderline relegation battle from the Championship, perhaps instant gratification is off the cards and we should try something else?

I agree it hasn't been amazing and the choice of goalkeeper is bizarre (perhaps down to lack of options in Jan?) but I meant in terms of setup, come into a new, often struggling club and rule one is to organise them and make them hard to beat, you won't score many goals or be involved in many "thrillers" but you'll be generally harder to beat. The attacking takes a hit and left us overly dependent on Kodjia, so we really struggled without him but it's a longer process. Boring at first but should be better once everything settled. The thing is this time is we know the manager is good enough to get us promoted, because he's done it before and very recently, we know the owner will provide the players he needs as well. It's different to our other recent managers because they were largely unproven give or take a season or two, I truly believe that if we show some faith and patience in Bruce he will have us playing much better and get us promoted (likely next season)

I agree that the good football thing is largely irrelevant if you're winning, it's only a thing if you're losing. If you lose playing well, you can say "at least we played well", but that's about it. I remember our last minute 3-2 win against Everton with Ashley Young getting the winner - we were atrocious that match, 3 attacks and managed to score 3 goals and under the cosh for 90 mins - if we'd lost 4-0 it probably would have been fair, but no one cares because we won, and in the last minute too! Anyone remember Andi Weimann scoring that bizarre winner against Man City? Another game we were terrible in, and again, no one cares because we won, and against a team like Man City too! Remember the 1st game V Forest at VP earlier in the season? We battered them, had about 70% possession, 20 shots to 3, but drew 2-2. Does anyone care how well we played? Of course not, because we only drew against bloody Forest. Screw "good football", give me a season of matches like the Everton or City ones than a season of matches like Forest. We all want to win, good football is a bonus. If Mourinho came here now, we won every remaining match 1-0, got promoted, then won the PL with a season of 1-0 wins no one would care that we only have 28% possession and 5 shots on goal per match. Good managers always do the same thing with clubs, build from the back. Sort the defence out first, organise the team, then start allowing the creative players to express themselves once its sorted.