Naaaaarch

Unless Webber is sabotaging there's no way we'd take Bruce. Even more than the Wagner link this one stinks of the bookies manipulating the market. One of the few managers about that would have us saying that we should have just stuck with Smith.

I remember them coming to Carrow Road and looking great, it's possible they were in a hot streak at that point and I'm remembering them as more than they were. That being said if we can have that level of intensity and tactical understanding here I'll take it in a heartbeat. Schalke were a basket case around the time he was there and I believe he did better than the coaches before and after. I'd be more sceptical of the most recent role he had at Young Boys Bern. I have no doubt there are better targets out there but I don't currently trust Webber to unearthone. I think Wagner is a safe bet and will get us into the playoffs at a minimum.

That's fair, probably wouldn't have even posted in this thread if I didn't see him being called a flop alongside the likes of Ross McCormack. I will say that Daniel Farke was a very system based manager too so it's not that alone. Obviously it's a different sort of system though.

I've not watched a lot of him recently but he was a bargain for you. For us he was heart of our team though so if he's more peripheral here you might not be seeing his full potential. He's one of those players that needs to be touching the ball regularly and knitting things together. He was almost as effective defensively as he was offensively in his time here.

I remember Wagner's Huddersfield being a pretty interesting team in the Championship. After that, not so much. I'd still take him over a majority of the 'realistic' bookies favs and the version of Dean Smith we had.

Hasenhuttl is just one of those in the bookies list that doesn't make us cry at the thought of it. Not many actually thought a man with that ego would drop to the Championship though. Similar with th Bodo/Glimt guy who we were apparently after before Smith became available. As of the last few hours David Wagner is the bookies favourite. Makes sense for a lot of reasons.

Absolutely. In general we looked more joined up when we played with one of the bigger men up top, be it in that 442 or his natural 433. If he had the chance to do it all over again I wonder if he'd have been braver with the Pukki call as he obviously doesn't fit Smith's game too well.

Coincidentally Dean Smith went 352 in his final game here. Ironically he probably stumbled on a formation that would have worked had he worked on it a lot earlier. We have 2 very good attacking wing backs in Giannoulis and Aarons and it would mean that Sargent could play his natural position alongside Pukki instead of being shunted out wide. He was extremely married to 433 which never made a lot of sense to me considering most of our wing options (Dowell, Cantwell, Sinani, Ramsey when he was forced out there) aren't really built for that. In terms of next manager I don't think it'll be any of the early 'obvious' early bookies favs. Parker - His style was not liked by fans of Bournemouth or Fulham and he wanted big budgets. He openly criticised clubs and our SD doesn't take criticism well.Martin - Not actually achieved anything yet. A glance at Swans forum suggests they wouldn't be bothered if he left. That's a sign it's probably not time.Dyche - Think he's recently said he wants a Premier League job. My gut feeling is we'll be aiming for a brand of football closer to Farke's anyway.Robins - Probably more than happy to stay where he is. He plays good football at Coventry but without the Norwich nostalgia he wouldn't be getting linked.Gerrard - lol, well some of you lot would enjoy that I'm sure.Wilder - Possibly too similar to Smith with falling stock. Hassenhuttl and Knutsun are next on that list and whilst I'd absolutely take them I would think they're beyond us. I think it'll be a name from the left of field. We've moved a lot of out recruitment out to South America so perhaps a coach leaning that way would make sense. Or at least Spanish/Portuguese speaking with an eye on helping these guys settle in.

I think we tried to be a bit to clever for our own good when it came to replacing Emi. Farke wanted 3 quality players that summer, a CB and replacements for Buendia and Skipp. Webber gave him about 10 players that were minor upgrades on players in our squad. I think he was trying to recreate Emi's numbers through about 6 different players. We're in a tough position when we get promoted as players that will genuinely improve our team are hard to attract without blowing the wage structure and they obviously don't want the relegation wage drops that we need to secure ourselves. We also lost a key recruitment guy going into our last Premier League season so we were panicking. Without sales I doubt we have a lot to spend in January, even less now we've had to pay off Smith and his coaches. A part of the reason we couldn't do as much this summer was because we didn't get the offer we were expecting for Max Aarons. We focussed heavily on midfield this summer which made sense for how Smith wanted to play but he's been unlucky. Hayden has been injured most of the time and Sara and Nunez whilst looking very good at times are clearly still in there settling in phase (signed straight out of Brazil and Chile). Ramsey was pretty decent though so there's that! It'll be interesting to see what style of coach we go for next that's for sure. Hell, it'll be interesting to see if the interim team ditch the 433.

Evening all, Norwich fan in peace. I've been enjoying this thread from afar for a few months and thought it was finally time to drop in and give some thoughts/answer some questions from a Norwich POV. I'll start by saying that the sacking was absolutely 100% warranted, no doubt about it. For his sake and ours it should have probably happened a lot earlier. Before the World Cup break would have been ideal but it's clearly not been working for significantly longer, ever in fact. It's been 13 or 14 months and I don't believe we ever truly saw a 'Dean Smith team'. Between mid August the beginning of October Smith went on what can only be described as the strangest unbeaten run I've ever seen (and I witnessed a 10 game unbeaten streak under Chris Hughton). Performances were pretty awful for the most part but we were grinding out results. This spawned two trains of thought - the hopeful view that confidence would breed performances as the season progressed and the soon to be reality that results would simply catch up with performances. After the results stopped coming the confidence drained away and we were only going 1 way. Now we're only a few points off 16th in a poor league. I suppose saying 'performance bad' without context is kind of pointless. His remit was to make us harder to beat, more robust and versatile. None of those things happened. We'd go through large patches of games where we'd just break down tactically and seemingly lose the ability to play a simple 5 yard pass. It was really bemusing to watch at times and as fans we simply put it down to being coached poorly. When it comes to the squad I don't think we're as weak as some of you are making out. Our glaring hole is a traditional winger, something I'm sure Smith would have appreciated (I'm sure we tried to sign El Ghazi) but Burnley and Sheffield United are not running away with this on individual magic. Not many of us were expecting it to be easy but we weren't expecting to be 15 points off the pace at this point that's for sure. I doubt we'll end up this far away either. Away from the football I actually have a lot of sympathy for Smith. I'm not sure if you're aware but our sporting director has seemingly been doing everything in his power to burn down any relationship between the club and the fans recently. Smith has been a bit of a meat shield for him at times. Had the place been as open as when Farke joined then the club would have been working to get buy in from the fans instead he was left to fend for himself. I also get the feeling his heart wasn't always in it having just lost his dream job but we certainly didn't help there. It's hindsight 20/20 but he probably should have taken that holiday.

Been reading and enjoying the 'Dean Smith' thread over the last few months and thought I'd pop in to give some thoughts/answer questions.