Welcome Ange: To Dare is to Didgeridoo

[Bishop]

Ok, say we win the EL, Ange somehow stays as manager, and we do some pretty good transfer business in the summer.

What will it take for Ange to win back the doubters and the Ange out crowd next season?

Somehow I have a feeling a few decent cup runs and us being on course to a fourth/fifth place finish with a bit more defensive solidity won't do it.

For me if all of those things played out he would be back in my good books. I have nothing personal against him, I just think he's too much of an ideologue and hasn't taken stock of the materials he has had available to him. So for all of that to flip around he would have had to have taken stock and made some significant philosophicsl adaptations and that would certainly put him in my good books.

Alas as it stands I don't think he should get another season even if we do win the EL because it's all too predictable as to what will happen and what his approach will be. To even get to next session is have to see significant changes right now and that's just not going to happen.

 

[Welshspur60]

Ange's position is completely untenable.
We are currently a joke of a team. Sorry to break it to you. We are not serious.
Our defence is wet tissue paper:

29 Dec our defence held out for a massive 6 minutes against the mighty Wolves
4 Jan we held out for a full 5 minutes vs Saudi Sportswashing Machine
19 Jan we held out for a full 12 minutes vs Everton
9 Feb we held out for a full 0 minutes vs Villa
22 Feb Ipswich should have been 2 up in the first 5 minutes
26 Feb we held out for a full 11 minutes vs Emirates Marketing Project
6 Mar we held out for a full 16 minutes vs AZ Alkmaar
10 Apr we held out for a full 5 minutes vs Eintracht Frankfurt
13 Apr we held out for a full 1 minute vs the mighty Wolves AGAIN!
21 Apr we held out for a full 4 minutes vs Forest.

That is 6+5+12+0+?+11+16+5+1+4 = Embarrassing

Hes got to go, no doubt about it.

 

[tommysvr]

Even for the many here who don't like him, I ask the following question. Would it really have done the club/us any more harm to have had Munn give a statement saying something to the effect of, "Nobody is satisfied with the results or league positionm least of all Ange and the players, there are significant factors such as injuries, there are several areas of the club which we are reviewing, but we must all back both Ange and the club at this time. Considerations can be taken at the end of the season, until then it is vital that everyone at the club and it's supporters, continue to stay together and focussed."
Or something like that?
I don't think so.
I'll take a wild guess here that Levy is relieved Ange has been the hate punching bag more than him this season, albeit that was in the balance around January, when a statement such as the above would've certainly alleviated some of the pressure building on the manager...

...in the end, this is all a bit like those movies where you see the ending and spend the next 120 minutes getting to how it happened. I feel certain he won't be here, the question is how we got here in the first place...

The trouble with something like that is that there's a situation where we lost to AZ and now you look like a bit of a fool for committing to Ange until the end of the season, or a fool for saying you would and then sacking him in March. The famous vote of confidence/kiss of death.

That's not to say that I think that way. What you're saying is absolutely the logical thing to do. But the British press don't work on logic. Ange is consistently held up to two comments he made: "we never change"/"it's who we are" (consistently taking out of context) and "I win something in my second year" (a fact until it's not anymore).

Damned it you do, damned it you don't.

 

[glasgowspur]

Cup runs and to a lesser extent wins often come down to luck at the end of the day. The league is the true measure of where a team is at, as the monotonous grind of fixtures and the playing of everyone home and away rewards consistency, good game and squad management and tactics.

The last manager to win us a trophy was Juande Ramos.

We were very lucky that the three promoted teams to the PL proved to be among the worst in a long long time and that the threshold for being in a genuine relegation dogfight has been lower than normal.

I think it is likely that the club will consider it too much of a risk to keep Ange into next season.

A EL win will allow a mutual parting, rather than a sacking. We could thank Ange for everything he's done, he'd maintain his "always wins a trophy in his second season" and so on and so forth.

However, even if we win the Europa league, while the season overall would be a success, the league campaign has been a disaster and could even be our worst ever performance in the PL

I don't disagree with any of that, and although I think it would be taking great liberties with the truth, it could be spun that we don't have the squad to compete on multiple fronts so "focused" on the cups.
We went out to Liverpool in the SFs, the form team, lost to villa away in the FA Cup and should we win the EL then the no trophy monkey is off our back and we qualify for CL.
At the beginning of the season nobody seriously expected our squad to compete for the PL our even top 4 and manage decent runs in all the cups.
I can see it being put across that we gambled on the cups, got caught out in the PL with the injuries and freakish form of others but the gamble worked and now it's time for a new chapter.

Considerable massaging of the truth butt it would save a lot of face.