Re: AVB Sacked page 224
I don't think it's fair to say that AVB f ucked Harry over. They barely know each other?
One side note re: AVB…looking back (and hindsight is easy I know!) it seems to me he really had great trouble dealing with the relaxed, fun attitudes of Ade and Benny. A shame. He seemed, early on, to have established that this type of attitude = not caring as much. I'd say that for AVB to fully fulfil his potential, he needs to be a better judge of character and also understand man management better. It's been clear to me for over a season that Ade needs nothing more than some love. As for BAE, well, the man is a ledge for me…I look forward to having him back as my avatar.
I have to massively argue this, and your fairly consistent recent pegging of AVB as a guy that simply couldn't handle the personal side of the game. I don't agree with that at all, and if it were true I think you'd see a lot more stories of players who he didn't get on with, rather than the two obvious player types that he didn't really think lent themselves well to his style of coaching.
Read the Van Gaal extract in one of the current hot threads on here. He talks about players that will listen to him and work for the system, and judge it as important behind their individual means, vs players that were too experienced and will not listen, or do things of their own accord away from the system who he would clash with.
Now, whatever people think of system managers vs non system managers, they both have their merits. If a system manager is able to build his squad and given the time to implement it properly, they can implement big rewards from it. Obviously if they are not given the time, or they are half way there, it can look like a bit of a cluster**** and it's up to the club whether they want to persist with their patience or not.
My point is, Ade and Benny are not bad players, but for AVB to send them away they are likely players that thrive on being given freedom as individuals on the pitch rather than playing to a system. The idea that AVB simply couldn't manage them is plain wrong, he got on with Ade last year and Benny was writing articles in the Standard saying AVB was 'cool'. I think he decided this year (based largely in Ade's case on the fact he dd not perform well when given the chances last year) that he wanted a squad full of his personality types, that he could coach properly to play a system effectively. It's nothing to do with not being 'able to handle Ade' or any other such thing, I think he's perfectly capable of doing so if he wanted to, but I think this summer he viewed it as the time he would get the backing to build his squad, and get the benefits that come with that. He wanted a consistent personality type along the squad, and didn't want players that disrupted that.
And we will never see those benefits now, because he wasn't given the time to get it his way, because the club decided to go in another direction. But I won't have it that AVB was simply incapable on a personal level of managing certain personality types. It does him a complete disservice. He didn't want to manage them, because he wanted the benefits of a full squad high on teamwork and low on individualistic tendencies. We largely won't see those benefits now because we didn't back him..and fair enough I will back Sherwood now as loud as anyone, but let's not do the previous man a disservice.
It's sad that the collective opinion on this board seems to veer towards that AVB just didn't know what he was doing, and that it will go down in history that one of his greatest mistakes was not using Ade. If we had backed him, signed Pato and sold Ade (for example) then it would be a completely different story. But the clubs decision to go in another direction does not change the potential of the man to do well for us, or what his ability was, or what the logic of his decision making was.
I'm completely opposed to 'camps' on here. Ever since Jol and certainly since Harry people have fallen into one camp or the other. I back the incumbent manager with my fall support but I don't think that had to take away what the previous guy(s) have done for us.
