The manager, whose stats in the Championship are possibly second to no one since he took over from Slav, doesn’t suddenly become a bad manager. Yes he’s made mistakes and will continue to do so. He’s playing with the cards he’s been dealt. The squad just isn’t good enough or strong enough to compete in this league, just as Luton and Burnley, the other promoted sides are finding out.
All about opinions buddy
If you look at the promotion season, results were great but performances were almost always unconvincing
and in virtually every game we had 15 minute spells where, for some reason, we couldn't string 2 or 3 passes together and we were under the cosh.
I expected Hecky to make reference to this in his post match interviews or work on the lack of composure in training but nothing changed.
Last season we also had this knack of parking the bus for the last 20 minutes of most games and booting it clear straight back to the opposition.
So the current style of play this season isn't unexpected really.
I sit with a few older/ calmer/ fairly knowledgable gents on the Kop.
We regularly can't understand the tactics and see errors BUT we often laugh, because it tends to work, so Hecky must know more than us.
We sometimes say that maybe Hecky's tactics is to deliberately look clueless then the opposition become complacent and we take advantage 2nd half.
This squad's easily good enough to compete, every Championship level club should be able to compete against PL opposition.
When I say compete I'm taking performance wise, not results wise. Even when we were in league 1 with Nigel Clough as manager whenever
we played PL clubs we still competed. The Warnock and Wilder relegation sides always competed well even in the PL relegation season.
In every home match, even when we played the likes of Liverpool and Man Utd, we gave them a tough game, had plenty of attacks and a few chances.
Also if you watch any Burnley and Luton game, you'll see they are competing far better than us.
These teams go out every match set up to win, they have plenty of attacks every match and give it a go. It's their results that are poor.
Mentioned this before, in defence of Hecky he would probably say
"Look, if you want us to play like Burnley, I can adopt the Vincent Kompany philosophy of playing nice passing possession football
and being attack minded making sure we have plenty of men forward when we attack"
"However will the majority of our fans be impressed when we're playing well taking the game to the opposition
or will then just ignore the performance and focus on the result. Agree Burnley look a decent team but they are now bottom of the league"
Hence Hecky is taking a pragmatic approach, find alternative ways to pick up points
It's not pretty but is proving effective, so even though all the signs look concerning.
You can't really argue, picking up 4 points from Wolves and Brighton is an excellent return and offers optimism.
