...I know his record but he’s still accountable and its very reasonable to question his selection and tactics.
The game is lots to do with what you do with the ball and what you do without it. In possession we carry genuine threat in the top third but I fear we don’t exploit that enough by getting the ball quickly to the players who can hurt the opposition.
Without the ball we are easy to breakdown and score against. A key objective of any coach is to make his team defensively sound. The players are there to be shot at but so is the manager.
Maybe Ancelotti has had a look at it and gone ‘you know what, these defenders are rubbish (which they are) and so is my goalkeeper, rather than focusing on getting my world class front three to defend, I’ll let them attack, and we might lose some games but we’ll win some as well, and that’s a better plan than relying on Keane and Pickford to concentrate for more than five minutes’
Losing to Leeds is disappointing, but beating Fulham gets us more points than drawing both games 0-0 with two solid clean sheets which some of our previous managers would have been made up with. Despite some dodgy performances at times it’s only been the Southampton and United games we’ve not been in as a contest. A bounce of the ball of VaR call the other way and we could have beaten Newcastle and Leeds whether undeservedly or not.
Isn’t this what people cried out for? All those fed up by Moyes, Koeman, Allardyce, Silva. ‘I don’t want to see 4231, KITAP1 is killing me, we’ve got no formation flexibility, same names every week, we don’t play it on the deck, we’re awful to watch no excitement at all, we don’t carry threat away from home, I’d rather lose more games if it meant we won more’
All sounding familiar? Now we have a manager who has us playing on the deck, we play some of the best attacking football in the league, we can cut teams down away from home. we literally can’t do KITAP1, we change formations, we change players, we draw far less games, we’re far more open and exciting even in a loss.
But lo and behold some people don’t want that now, ‘give us a bloke with a philosophy who is building something, a young coach who doesn’t have outdated methods, with a clear formation that he doesn’t change’. Why don’t we just go and get Martinez or Silva back then? We really have come full circle. All these flavour of the month shouts will be forgotten about in a second when they’re relegated in their second season (or even this one the rate some are going)
Bielsa (still currently below us in the table), Pochettino, Hasenhuttl, Nuno - Ancelotti couldn’t wipe his backside on a combined list of their achievements in the game. Bielsa had a decent side at Bilbao and that’s all he’s done as well as failing multiple times to get the championships best team out the division. Poch lost a title race to Leicester and didn’t win a bean with one of the worlds best strikers in his team. Why are we even comparing Ancelotti to them? He might lose one off games to all of them but over the longevity of time one simple truth prevails. Ancelotti wins trophies, loads of them, all the others don’t.
How ironic that the club who hasn’t won a single trophy for 25 years us some fans who are questioning the bloke who is probably the surest bet there is for ending that drought and are instead suggesting managers who have won very little.
