Steve Bruce

[DaveAV1]

1 hour ago, TRO said:

I am not saying it has nothing to do with him......I'm saying he can't play for them.

Gary Nevile recently said " when we lost we never blamed the manager, we blamed ourselves"

Managers have a responsibility Dave of course they have, but they can only do so much, otherwise no one would be searching for quality.....and that every player can be coaached in to what we want them to be and we both no that is "pie in the sky"

I am not trying to give managers a " get of of jail free card".....but in my mind they get blamed for too much and that the players have to take responsibility too.

Yeah but look who Gary Neville's manager was, I wouldn't be blaming him either! 

I agree though that neither players or managers can shirk their responsibilities. Managers tend to take the bulk of the blame justifiably or not. That's largely due to the fact that the club hasn't just spent tens of millions of pounds on them and they would very much like to recoup most of that outlay from another mug who is desperate for a striker/midfielder/defender to dig them out of the brown stuff.

[DaveAV1]

4 hours ago, AshVilla said:

Warnock has got teams promoted from the championship more than once and he managed to finish above us with Cardiff maybe we should have got him instead

My mate said we should have gone for Warnock when he went to Cardiff. I'm sure he was saying it tongue in cheek, however he has mentioned it again recently with a certain air of, "if only you lot were as knowledgeable as me" about him. Tosser . 

[Jareth]

Warnock's tactics are filth

[slowandlow]

Bruce's tactics are filth

[Guest av1]

9 minutes ago, Jareth said:

Warnock's tactics are filth

At least he has some. 

[DaveAV1]

The main difference between the the two is that Steve Bruce is a very likeable bloke and Neil Warnock isn't. Judging purely on their public personas of course. 

[briny_ear]

3 hours ago, DCJonah said:

No we don't. We do know that he had far less money and started with a team further down the table. We also know he's not a very good manager. So the fact he finished above Bruce gives some comparison to the argument that Bruce has done a poor job. 

That is unless you're someone who buys into the myth of the exaggerated level of difficulty the task he inherited was. 

Anyone who doesn't appreciate that the club Bruce became manager of was a basket case with a long history of deterioration and a fairly disastrous false start in the Championship ( squad membership, manager and results) is living in la-la-land.

Warnock would likely be in a nursing home by now if he had tried to take on our club.

[AntrimBlack]

5 hours ago, terrytini said:

I'm not at all sure what relevance it is that Warnock did a really good job at Cardiff ?

 

The relevance is the comparable job he did starting behind us and finishing higher with much fewer resources.

[AntrimBlack]

9 hours ago briny_ear said:

I think anyone who expected promotion last season after the dismal start made by di Matteo needs a reality check.

We were close to the play off positions, we knew money would be available from the owner, and we had brought in the `expert' in gaining promotions.

I am surprised anyone would have doubted that Bruce could not at least get us into the playoffs.

[AntrimBlack]

4 hours ago, TRO said:

I am not saying it has nothing to do with him......I'm saying he can't play for them.

Gary Nevile recently said " when we lost we never blamed the manager, we blamed ourselves"

Managers have a responsibility Dave of course they have, but they can only do so much, otherwise no one would be searching for quality.....and that every player can be coaached in to what we want them to be and we both no that is "pie in the sky"

I am not trying to give managers a " get of of jail free card".....but in my mind they get blamed for too much and that the players have to take responsibility too.

It is not that I expect the manager to coach the players to be individually better. Many of our players have shown themselves to be very accomplished at previous clubs. The problem is that there is no cohesion as a team, and that surely is down to the manager.

[Johnnyp]

7 hours ago, briny_ear said:

If I were still handing out Old Briny's "dodgy statistics" awards, this one, which has been repeated over and over again, would have won the Oscar. (I've given up handing out awards because the bogus and facile statistics regularly thrown around in this thread alone would have made it a full time job.)

The hint is in the phrase "play off positions". So to qualify you need to end up at least in 6th position. 

When di Matteo left, we were in 19th position, 13 places below the playoffs. By the end of the season we were 13th position, so 7 places below the playoffs. So by the end of the season we were nearer the playoff positions than when di Matteo was ejected.

This is a very simple fact that can't be altered by playing around with other stats.

if you have read all I have posted this morning you will see that I am not simply saying that di Matteo left us with too much to do. Rather 5 years of abysmal board policy and management, systematic turbulence in and downgrading of the squad, and a dismal start to the season by di Matteo on top of that left us more or less stranded. Having two managers and bringing in 14 new players while shipping out 17 probably didn't help towards a strong and stable campaign either.

 

 So ok..when di matteo left us we 19th, 15 points behind the league leaders, not sixth, first. At the end of the season we finished 18 points behind sixth. The fact we finished 13th is neither here nor there. We were further behind the sixth place team in points than we were when dimatteo left. It's simple math. BTW I'm definitely  not pro di matteo, I just believe we're on a hiding to nothing with Bruce. 

[Demitri_C]

9 hours ago, Johnnyp said:

Still playing the "di matteo left us with too much to do card " We were closer to the play off positions in terms of points when di matteo left than when the season finished. Nope, stevie has to start delivering and sharpish. 

Let's just ignore the facts show we 

One win under him

Conceding goals in last 10 mins for fun

Rock bottom confidence 

Bruce should have achieved more but let's not kid ourselves we were a shambles before he came 

[DCJonah]

1 hour ago, briny_ear said:

Anyone who doesn't appreciate that the club Bruce became manager of was a basket case with a long history of deterioration and a fairly disastrous false start in the Championship ( squad membership, manager and results) is living in la-la-land.

Warnock would likely be in a nursing home by now if he had tried to take on our club.

I think people forget the wave of positivity surrounding the whole club last summer. 

And I also think people forget the performances in those early games and how close we were to actually having the points to be comfortably near the top of the table. 

And then somehow it becomes some impossible task for Steve Bruce. Even after he's back in January with money to sign some of the better players in the division. The task he faced is massively exaggerated based mainly on Lerner's reign at the club and nothing at all to do with this season. 

 

[DCJonah]

29 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

Let's just ignore the facts show we 

One win under him

Conceding goals in last 10 mins for fun

Rock bottom confidence 

Bruce should have achieved more but let's not kid ourselves we were a shambles before he came 

Yes one win. But only 3 games lost. Came back to get a point against the eventual champions. Hardly the exploits of a shambolic team with rock bottom confidence.

To say it's a shambles is the kind of exaggeration that keeps getting posted. It just wasn't. It was a few defensive lapses and a couple of goal keeping errors. We dominated a lot of those early games. We created chances for fun in some of them. 

It was far from shambolic, there were positives with certain areas needing addressing and tweaking. Yet some pretend it was something completely different so they can defend a bloke for finishing 13th. 

I don't get it. 

[Demitri_C]

3 minutes ago, DCJonah said:

Yes one win. But only 3 games lost. Came back to get a point against the eventual champions. Hardly the exploits of a shambolic team with rock bottom confidence.

To say it's a shambles is the kind of exaggeration that keeps getting posted. It just wasn't. It was a few defensive lapses and a couple of goal keeping errors. We dominated a lot of those early games. We created chances for fun in some of them. 

It was far from shambolic, there were positives with certain areas needing addressing and tweaking. Yet some pretend it was something completely different so they can defend a bloke for finishing 13th. 

I don't get it. 

So being 19th in the table wasn't a shambles? That's acceptable?

[DCJonah]

1 minute ago, Demitri_C said:

So being 19th in the table wasn't a shambles? That's acceptable?

No not at all. We were going for promotion and we were right, at the time, to make a change. 

If you just looked at the league position then maybe you could use the phrase shambolic. But if you watched the games, thought back to the summer window and tool it all in it's just not the case. 

[briny_ear]

32 minutes ago, Johnnyp said:

The fact we finished 13th is neither here nor there. We were further behind the sixth place team in points than we were when dimatteo left. It's simple math. 

It's simple maths but false analysis. If your aim is to achieve a particular position in the table, how many points you have is irrelevant. You just have to achieve the position. We didn't, we came 13th. Coming 13th would have been just as much a failure if we had been 5, 10 or 18 points off. So Bruce's 13th was nearer to 6th than Di Matteo's 19th. They both failed but Bruce got us nearer to success.

These attempts to paint Di Matteo's time here as more successful than Bruce's are laughable. They pick irrelevant statistics such as percentage of losses (what matters is points per match) or "number of points away from 6th place" and regard those as the only statistics that matter. They don't.

Bruce got more points per match (nearly 1.5) than Di Matteo (0.9) and got us nearer to the minimum target of 6th place (13th not 19th). This was of course not good enough, as Bruce has said. He expected to get into the playoffs. It always looked like a two-season job to me so I'm less surprised than he is that he failed.

But the idea being spread on this thread that when he took over we were in good shape to get to the playoffs is just ludicrous. We were 19th with 10 points from 11 games, with an unbalanced squad that didn't know how to win games. I don't think we will be celebrating the Di Matteo era in years to come.

[CosmicVillan]

2 minutes ago, DCJonah said:

I don't get it. 

Statistically over a Season based on his 12 Games RMD would have netted us  38 Pts

Statistically over a Season based on his 36 Games SB  would have netted us 66 Pts

Quite simply RMD's Villa was in relegation form - Bruce's was Top 10 form. 

You may not like Bruce's football but either way it's a win-win next season...He either gets us promoted or he's gone. Simples.

[DCJonah]

5 minutes ago, CosmicVillan said:

Statistically over a Season based on his 12 Games RMD would have netted us  38 Pts

Statistically over a Season based on his 36 Games SB  would have netted us 66 Pts

Quite simply RMD's Villa was in relegation form - Bruce's was Top 10 form. 

You may not like Bruce's football but either way it's a win-win next season...He either gets us promoted or he's gone. Simples.

I'm no RDM fan and just above said he was rightly sacked. 

My point is, the task Bruce faced is exaggerated. I don't get the desire to do that to defend him. 

I get people believing he will get us promoted. I get people liking him. I just don't get that side of it. We really were not the shambolic mess that no one could have fixed. 

[briny_ear]

10 minutes ago, DCJonah said:

Yes one win. But only 3 games lost. 

So I write all that, glance back up the thread and there is a perfect example of the false analysis! "Only" 3 games lost???

it doesn't matter how many games we "only" lost - we only had 10 points from 11 games and we were spiralling towards the relegation zone! That form would actually have got us relegated.

D C Jonah, your comments sound a lot like the complacent, delusional remarks RDM was given to making after every new setback - dominated the game, just a bit of bad luck in defence, etc. 

In my view it was actually that self-deception that got him the sack in the end. Not the poor results but the fact that he couldn't accept how much needed to be done to improve things.