I dunno, whenever I've watched it seems like our best goalscorer isn't actually getting into many positions to score. Call me dumb but I'm struggling to understand how someone watches Morgan over the last couple of seasons and says "I think the best thing to do here is to change the formation and put him somewhere he can be less dangerous".
But yeah, maybe it's just a mix of bad luck and all the players taking a team decision to be lazy and shit. Definitely must be that.
And yet it feels like every struggling manager did exactly that.
Come on Jim, have a word with yourself. This isn't the time for careful analysis. This is a time for moaning and wanting the world to be different, even if we are not prepared to say what that might look like, why, and how we might reasonably go about doing it. No point attempting balanced criticism, when you have at your fingertips hyperbole and a cast iron conviction that your lazy assumptions are always correct.
You're dumb. Happy to oblige.
What were the other bits? Ah yes, would you say that MGW is a great finisher, what are his strengths weaknesses...is he a tight space precision player? Let's forget about how we get there without being bummed...but if morgan was up along the opposition back line he's probably not the most precise at short creative passes...he's probably better as a quick delivering (slightly lower completion rate) transition or mid to long range passer.
So you might reasonably have a number nine who stretches the space to open up those sort of options, and play MGW deeper to get on the ball and hit the spaces.
My personal opinion would be that Ndoye, Schlager, and McAtee are the problem with this particular setup and formation...not the other two that you identify. Ndoye because nothing happens when the ball reaches him, Schlager because he's a trundler without the quality of pass, and McAtee becasue he is short range precision and doesn't have the longer range of (quick) pass. If anything I'd play MGW deeper, and McAtee further forward....maybe MGW is dropping in deeper in game because of this?
Where is his best position? Seems to me he's everywhere but the defence over the last few seasons. I guess his best goal-scoring return was the tail-end of last season when he was playing to the left of a central striker .... which is pretty much where he's playing now.
Take a look at this:
www.fotmob.com/en-GB/leagues/47/stats/season/27110/players/expected_goals
You'll see that, over a season, most players have the number of goals that they are expected to get. My eyes also tell me this.
You'll then see that this season, this trend (albeit small sample) is continuing (and will no doubt look even more similar come May 2027):
www.fotmob.com/en-GB/leagues/47/stats/season/36781/players/expected_goals
Well. Except if you zoom in a little and look at Morgan you'll see he should have 2.6 goals already. But he's got 1.
This is yet another attempt, which you won't like, at trying to show you that the problem is players are missing chances they shouldn't be (compounded by ridiculous mistakes by defenders) - and if they weren't we'd be doing fine. Further, if we continue doing what we are doing and creating the chances we are doing, then players should start finishing more chances and we should start getting more points. I don't see how changing manager improves the woeful finishing of our players or things like Milenkovic's backpass.
Still, you thinking we should sack Glasner, give ANOTHER manager a huge pay-off, and write off ANOTHER season cause we've "got to give the new guy the summer and allow him to install his tactics and buy his players" and then gamble on precisely who you want in instead is a perfectly valid opinion. It's just stupid.
Tldr
Look, I'm not binary on this. Could the players be doing better? Yes, absolutely. Is the manager making them worse? Also yes. You pick out random examples like Milenkovic's error, but that guy has been an absolute rock for us. He didn't just decide to be shit. He's being asked to play in a different role, in a different way, that minimizes his skills and maximizes his weaknesses.
Good management isn't about imposing a system that you know and then blaming the squad that isn't built for it for their failure to execute it.
We were on the right track with Vitor, even arguably with Dyche. We have gone badly wrong with Glasner. It is very fixable though with one easy move.
Please though, enough with using xG to justify why the manager isn't actually at fault. It's complete nonsense and you know it.
I listened to the most recent Forest Focus podcast with Max Scott yesterday and this morning - I think I'm generally aligned with his view. The idea that we should be sacking any manager after 4, 8, 10 or even 15 game is preposterous - do we really need a shot of adrenaline that badly, that we need to feel better after a short period of any manager. If we continue at the rate we have been moving on from any manager then ultimately we will go down- for some reason this fanbase has convinced itself that we should be in the Premier league and this is our rightful place, does anyone else remember, the on loan to league 1 t-shirts, or the years slogging around the lower leagues convinced we had a right to be in the Premiership/Premier league.
the facts are that none of us know enough about managing in the premier league or the requirements to be a full time pro. Nor are we best suited to state what formation we should play, (we all know its 3-5-2 obviously) but I'm getting to stage where this is all tiresome and frankly taking away any fun there is in watching from afar - look at any match day thread on here and its like being in the Brian Clough stand 15 years ago - all sat on the sofa critiquing everything pass/shot/ save/ tackle. boo, rubbish, etc etc
if you look at well run clubs in this division, they don't bin the manager after 10 games, they stick with the process, they create a template for how they should play, they don't change who is responsible for buying players every 6 months and they reap the success (albeit constrained by the fucked up nature of football these days, outside of their control) - were often quick to criticise other clubs who fuck up through a series of managerial failures, yet 'we' don't have any patience with any manager - if we go back I suspect we'll find in Glasner's 2nd game we had people calling for his sacking.
you may or may not like the current manager - I'm yet to be wholly convinced but I do applaud the club for appearing to recognize the chaos of the last 5 years, where we battled relegation every season bar one is not sustainable. I hope they stick with it, because otherwise we really will be fucked either this season or next and I'd rather be in this league and boring in 13th than on loan to the Championship or league one for the next 23 years.
Being boring in 13th sounds fine. I wouldn't be bothered if we were.
But the system is working. That's the point. It's making chances, and restricting the opposition chances. The players are fucking up individual pieces of skill. It's not that our defence is all over the place and we're giving away loads of chances, and it's not like we aren't creating anything either - we are.
XG is useful here as it's an unbias way of putting numbers on things I am seeing with my eyes which you don't seem to want to believe.
