McEwan's Lager
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Posts posted by McEwan's Lager
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Most interesting part for me was where he was saying he has chucked away his principles this season on playing injured players.
Said normally he would not have a player back in a squad until they had completed a week to ten days training after being injured, but he had no choice but to rush players back otherwise he wouldn't have had a squad to put out.
Also said he's doing too much day to day, again, points to a lack of structure in the football department.
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Not exactly a dynamic player but I don't get the hate for him he gets from some quarters.
He was a pretty decent player for us in our league winning side with 7 goals and 12 assists.
Early doors this season he looked to be in far better nick than Cantwell, Lawrence and Lammers.
Probably time for him to move on but if he's still here next season I'm not going to be upset about it.
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Just now, DT78 said:
Your right I haven’t is it better now? In saying that Napoli looked very good the other Season.
Far more attacking these days. Been averaging over 3 goals a game for the past few seasons I think.
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2 minutes ago, DT78 said:
Living off his dad’s reputation. Now he was a player. Italy would suit him, slow build up and ponderous football.
You clearly haven't watched Serie A lately.
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6 minutes ago, ForeverAndEver said:
Is that strider not pals with Edgar and those on H&H?
Yeah and he was one of the co-founders of 4Lads.
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11 minutes ago, Prso's headband said:
Keep telling yourself that mate when they sell O’Riley for another £20m on top of guaranteed CL money.
Their recent record will include him and Jota, £50m in transfer fees alone.
O'Riley is another one which illustrates the point I was trying to make earlier. They have plucked him from the same league where we got Aribo - he's on the up, a player that rejected a deal at Fulham so he could go and play football. He's young, and doing well in League One. They sign him and soon he'll go for decent cash to a decent team.
Whereas we have effectively tried to replace what we were missing for 6 months with Aribo with Cantwell, but he's in the middle part of his career and who is on the opposite trajectory after once being a £40m rated player, poor loan at Bournemouth etc. His boyhood club have basically written him off. But, come to Ibrox, here's £20k odd a week.
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8 minutes ago, J-Maestro said:
@McEwan's Lager rather than quote the whole post, I wouldn't say there's anything entirely wrong about signing guys who hadn't reached their potential yet. Butland, Sterling and Bassey would come under the category too, but when our whole recruitment is like that then it shows badly.
Bassey and Sterling, and Kamara too, weren't players that were hyped up though and had lost their way though. They were just normal EPL academy players that we have picked up where we have seen value. Players like Brandon Barker were heralded as the next big thing, Barker was as hyped as much as Phil Foden before he kicked a ball at City and he never got there, had loads of poor loans. We've picked him up on a downward trend thinking we can reverse that.
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Just now, STEPPS BOY said:
On the academy part, it’s probably in it’s worst state for years.
No Accountability.
Absolutely no setting of standards.
Years of being told that winning or losing doesn’t matter.
Morale at an all time low.
I’ll say no more about it but don’t be surprised to be reading about it in next weeks/months.
At the junior and intermediate level I think this make senses, up to a point. For me where that point stops is continually getting smashed 6-0, 8-2, 4-0 etc which seems to be happening a lot at that level from the reports we get on here. That's not good for anyone's development or confidence.
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3 minutes ago, CoplandRoad83 said:For a start, we need to stop acting as if we have an endless supply of money or as if its the 90s again. We need to be smart with our finances. A few things spring to mind:
- Refusing to sell our best players even if we get offered considerable profit on them
- Spending high wages on known injury risk players
- Letting players of value run down contract and leave for free
- Ignore cheap high value options in our own country
- Rewarding players on the decline with huge contracts (paying the most in the country).
We do ourselves no favours at times. I think its because historically we've never had the culture of a 'selling club'. but the world is very different now.
You could have put posted this before I wasted my time writing an essay
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TL;DR: We need to build a proper, sustainable, modern football department bottom up. Koppen and Robertson need time to build it. Short term: Don't sign injury prone or old players. Sacrificing 'most successful football club in the world' short term is worth it if we can build an organisation that eventually gets into the habit of winning two or three titles on the spin, have a rebuilding year, win another few titles on the spin. Otherwise we'll continue having to overspend just to win one title every 8 or 9 years and continue sacking managers and having continual upheaval.
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We could go out and throw the kitchen sink at winning the league next season. Sign a whole bunch of players, load ourselves up with more debt to the directors and investors etc. Buy a new striker for millions and still retain Dessers and Danilo, things like that. That's the sort of thing we did to an extent in the 55 season and it's not given us any real long term success and consistency. We need to have a club wide football approach rather than just a next season approach. Players, staff and fans treated 55 like the be all and end all and that, imo, has cost us.
Since 2015 we have focused maybe a bit too much on first team player issues without properly looking at everything as a whole. That's not a criticism per se, most fans only care about success on the park at first team level. There's obviously been changes and a focus at times in the academy, medical, sports science, recruitment but we seem to go through different approaches and ripping things up regularly in every aspect, and it doesn't always change at the same time as the manager.
At DOF level we had McParland come in and implement an old school model of using a small pool of agents and an agency he knew, he was basically head of player recruitment rather than DOF. We've then given £10m or so to Caixinha to go out and buy his own personal preferences. Then we've moved to Mark Allen and Ross Wilson via a DOF model, before scrapping that for one summer when we gave the keys of the kingdom to the court jester. Now we seem to have a bit of a hybrid approach where from the outside looking in it seems Creag Robertson is more of the Technical Director and Koppen is a Head of Scouting / Recruitment. Lets give them a bit of time and a remit to go through the club root and branch.
At youth level we have had a big churn in the Senior part of the academy. Over the past few years we've had people like Murty, Lovenkrands, and Johansson all leave, although I think Johansson is now back in. At the top, Mulholland goes, he's filled by promotion by Jacobs, who is out the door less than a season after getting the top role. I'm not sure what happens at Intermediate phase and below, @STEPPS BOY may know.
On the scouting front Mark Allen built up the scouting network, again from scratch. But then I think we had quite a few leave under Wilson and it's been ripped up in the summer to move to this new data driven model.
Medical we've had Waller leave and come back, Sports Science seems a bit more stable with Polychronopolous and Flannigan still there, but different football fitness demands from successive management churn will have taken their toll. I'm not sure what's happened with that injury management approach we signed up to using last season. If it's still in place it doesn't seem to be working well?
All of this chopping and changing has occurred over 9 years. The majority of it accelerated over the last two / three seasons. Hyper accelerated this past summer. We got away with having no discernible and coherent structure under Gerrard through his sheer force of personality, his drive basically held the football side together. But this is the 21st Century. Force of personality managers like him (and Walter, and SAF) don't exist anymore at the top level and any sane top level club is no longer run where they rely on sheer determination to cut through. If we want to appoint decent managers, especially from Europe, then they are going to expect to have a fully functioning and coherent structure in place. Modern coaches expect that.
It's a hard thing to stomach but getting scouting, recruitment and the academy right, and making sure that Koppen and Robertson are in it for the long term is just as important as putting a team on the park next season. Otherwise we may have some short term success, we then eventually sack Clement, get another manager in, who will then inevitably fail as well because we haven't got a structure to support a modern day manager.
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In terms of recruitment for next season the first thing that really needs to stop is our saviour complex approach to signing players. At times our recruitment over the last few years resembles that one friend we all have who lurches from troubled partner to troubled partner because they have they think they can fix them, eventually realise they can’t, and then move on to the next person they think they can fix. Rinse and repeat.
Seeing potential upside value in a player has often fit into one of two categories for us. The first is players that have had significant injury/health issues or recurring issues to overcome (Goldson, Balogun, Helander, Roofe, Dowell, Davies, Souttar, Ramsay) and the other is players that had high potential as a youngster but haven’t quite lived up to their promise yet (Barker, Flanagan, Hagi, Lawrence, Bacuna, Matondo, Cantwell).
Whenever we sign one of the two types of players above, here, FF and X are inundated with comments that start along the lines of “if we can get them fit again”, or “if we can get them back to their best” and invariably finishes with “we will make a fortune/we’ll be laughing”. It hardly ever works.
Out the list of the above, only Goldson has given us significant return on investment over multiple campaigns. And I don't think it's a coincidence that was because he had a fixable health issue rather than an injury issue. Morelos, Aribo, Bassey and Kamara are the best upside value signings we have made and none of them fit into the above. We need more of them, and we need to cash in at the right time (Aribo and Bassey) vs the wrong time (Kamara) or never (Morelos).
It's imperative we don't sign a load of players that are 28/29 years old as well. We need to look at players on the up in the 21-24 year old bracket. That's where we will maximise any potential returns against on field results.
The two exceptions I would make is an experienced 6 and an experienced CB. We need a proper footballer in the middle of the park and a leader at the back, as well as having personalities that can drag the squad with them. The biggest thing we have squandered imo from the 55 season is losing McGregor, Davis (and Arfield, sort of), with no cross over of players to carry their torch, so to speak. They were signed to bridge the continuity gap with successful sides we lost when we got demoted. Take a hit on contractual value with those two positions in order to actually get some experienced winners in the side that can take the squad with them. And ensure that players we sign can grow and pick up the mantle. If we can find a 24 year old that can fill that roll, even better. Celtic have managed it with Carter-Vickers. Why can't we?
The other thing we need to stop is filling the squad with filler options that are expensive. Devine, McKinnon, Fraser, McCausland etc can all do jobs as options. Celtic do this with Scales, Walsh, Ralston. Why can't we? We can't be paying £4m for our 4th choice CB any longer.
Lastly I'd want to know wider issue around culture at the club and the environment we create for players. I do want to know why players like Cedric Itten and Sam Lammers can't produce at Rangers. Celtic can sign a player from the Eredivise with a good scoring record like Giakoumakis and he comes in and while not exactly on fire, he more than contributes to two title wins and then off he goes for a profit. We seem to chew up players who do well in leagues better than ours and spit them out. It will kill us long term as an attractive option for talented players.
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The above is the only way we get back to being a successful club long term, with sustained success in bursts of seasons upon seasons. If we continue as we are we will win the league once every 8 or 9 years while spending a horrendous amount of money, and only winning it when Celtic are in a transition period. I'd sacrifice not being the most successful club next season and the next across leagues / trophy count, if it meant we gain it back in 5 or 10 years and then never relinquish it again.
- AGM_72, Colin Traive, Roy Hobbs and 2 others
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9 minutes ago, SkylineBlue said:
What's the waiting list like now? The kids are getting a bit older now and I know it'd be a few seasons at least before we'd have any hope, but was thinking of going on the waiting list.
The sooner you are on it with MyGers building up yours and their points the better in terms of getting an offer.
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1 minute ago, ForeverAndEver said:
Done it when they played Inter and it was between Inter and Roma as well.
Was that one of the years Inter won the league under Mancini or Mourinho?
When Roma won the league Inter were garbage.
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2 hours ago, RFC55 said:
I could never sit at ibrox and hope the team playing us beat us.
its an absolutely fucking embarrassing situation to be in. Imagine being happy your club is missing out on the champions league.
that league in the last few weeks has shown it’s not the “greatest league in the world” teams fucked out of Europe left right and centre, fans of clubs wanting their team to lose.
genuinely as someone said earlier, give me the tin pot shite we watch each week over that over rated and over inflated pish
When Serie A was still considered the best league in the world you had Lazio fans actively supporting Inter and going mental at their own players for winning as it meant Juventus won the league and not Inter
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3 hours ago, mus said:
Well he certainly gets about, Neil Warnock has become the unpaid football advisor at Torquay United!
Sure he holidays down there a lot.
He often takes his teams down to play local teams in pre season.
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Just now, Roy Hobbs said:
I don't think he gives a fuck about the fans being on his back. He keeps doing what he's always done and keeps putting himself in the position to do it.
Which is a great mentality to have. You absolutely need to have that ability to block out the crowd at Ibrox.
- AGM_72, ayrshireranger, Roy Hobbs and 1 other
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2 minutes ago, beararse said:
This. Maybe not having the fans on his back would improve his outcomes in front of goal.
20+ goals in what has been a turbulent maiden season is a great return for a striker who doesn’t take the penalties and who’s missed some glaring opportunities. He’s just a frustrating player to watch, but he never hides and puts in a shift in every game.
This isn’t just true of Dessers but 40,000 fans screaming shoot every time someone is in the box does my head in.
A lot of the time a shot isn’t actually on and that’s why players are passing or trying to work an angle.
- Inigo and Laudrupsleftfoot
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1 hour ago, .Williamson. said:Still don’t understand this mate
Fans always say that even if someone’s not playing well as long as they are putting effort in we will back them.
It’s not really true of Dessers. Guy works his socks off every game and it feels like a significant amount of the support are constantly on his back.
Not the best finisher in the world but he’s contributed a hell of a lot this season and plays with a smile on his face and he’s got a good mentality.
Deserves a bit more support off the fans tbh.
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11 minutes ago, jackg93 said:Think he could be a decent squad player next year as a back up to Danilo based on his goal return alone this season. Works hard for the team as well.
Assuming Roofe is released and we get a new striker and we enter the season with Danilo, Dessers & a new signing and we keep them all fit we should be ok for a central striker for next season.I'm not convinced Danilo is a better player than Dessers based on what we've seen so far. He may well be but I don't think there's enough to judge on yet.
I think the only time Danilo looked better was right at the beginning of the season when Dessers was still trying to play his way into fitness. Danilo was showing him up because he was a lot sharper when coming on.
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59 minutes ago, The Specky Forum Organiser said:Sounds like he's ready to chuck it
He's basically finding out Spurs are Spurs.
A totally pointless club with tinpot fans.
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30 minutes ago, ForeverAndEver said:
Was in Clockwork before the Scottish Cup Semi under GVB so assuming he is a Rangers fan
When he was at Falkirk someone claiming to be a relation of his picked me up in a taxi said he was a Rangers fan.
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`Going by everything that went on tonight I'd say that was his last game at Ibrox?
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Welcome to Rangers, Philippe Clement!
in Jimmy Bell's Kitroom
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He alluded to that in the conference tbf with the comments about Roofe.
Between the lines it was like he was saying anyone not 100% focused won’t play at Hampden.