Taxi for Tommy?


George Grieve
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I think sacking our best ever manager because we got knocked out of a cup competition before the season started is sound logic. We should ignore the fact that we’ve finished;

6th (cup win)

4th

4th

4th

8th 

7th

in his six full seasons previous. 

Barry Ferguson, who is doing an ok job in the fifth tier of Scottish football with a club that is being bankrolled, after being hounded out of Clyde, would be a great successor. I can’t see what could possibly go wrong. 

#tommyout #bazzain

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Getting to the point where Brown will be thinking about it.

He let him sign a lot of players last season & we finished lower in the league.

The football has been abysmal & the crowds are drifting away.

The start of the season has been a disaster just when we needed a boost ahead of a tough start to the league.

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7 minutes ago, RandomGuy said:

Barry Ferguson :lol:

This x100

Christ. Let's ditch one of the most successful, peer respected managers in the game on the back of meaningless results and bring an unproven guy universally derided as being thick as mince and a bigot to boot. 

Could not make it up. 

All that said, we should have done much better on the hiring front this pre-season. That's not to say (a) that's Tommy's fault or that (b) we won't pull it out the hat. 

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The club really needs to work on its communication, and I think Tommy needs to be quicker off the mark with transfer targets (does he give the Chairman a list? How does it work?).

However, stability has always been successful for us. The one thing that we offer players is that they are likely to be with us for a long time, we don’t have a large turnover of players. Some SPL clubs sign players for a year, play them a few times then let them leave. If we let Tommy go, we’d be in free-fall as we’d lose that stability that has served us so well.

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2 hours ago, Valentino Bolognese said:

This x100

Christ. Let's ditch one of the most successful, peer respected managers in the game on the back of meaningless results and bring an unproven guy universally derided as being thick as mince and a bigot to boot. 

Could not make it up. 

All that said, we should have done much better on the hiring front this pre-season. That's not to say (a) that's Tommy's fault or that (b) we won't pull it out the hat. 

Agreed.  And I would point out to anyone advocating Barry Ferguson that the Joke thread is in the Chit Chat section.

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2 hours ago, St Mikey said:

Makes you question it seriously. 

Start of the season. 3 defeats and one win. 

2 away defeats against League One sides. 

Continual negative 4-5-1 formations.

Getting fed up seeing this crap. 

4-5-1 is a terrible formation for us. 

However Tommy has very little choice as we've not even got one striker never mind 2. We have 2 decent full-backs and a bit of a bloated midfield, including 3 wingers he feels he has to fit into the team. God knows what happens when Wright is fit again. 

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15 hours ago, Valentino Bolognese said:

4-5-1 is a terrible formation for us

Yes it is terrible. We fall into a defensive mode and very rarely get out of it. With the attacking options we have (Kennedy, O'Halloran, Swanson and Wright) 4:2:3:1 would be better; giving a solid 6 man defense and 4 attacking players. But it will not happen, Tommy will be bawling at the two wide attacking players to get back and defend and we finish up with 4:5:1 and our 4:3:3 formation ends up 4:5:1 for the same reason.

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23 hours ago, Valentino Bolognese said:

4-5-1 is a terrible formation for us.

The problem that most teams of our level have (and something many people seem to miss) is that the two central midfielders can make a huge difference as to whether to the team plays in the 4-2-3-1 formation or just becomes a defensive 4-5-1. Two central midfielders that are competent on the ball and continually look to keep possession, whilst being able to pick a pass often let's the 3 Infront go forward and pick up more attacking positions.... You could have Barca's front line but if your midfield can't make chances it's going to blunt your attack... When they have to drop deep constantly to get possession and we isolate our striker it just seems a more direct route with two up top would work better.

Our current best option upfront is Chris Kane and the majority of his good work is deep with his back to goal, often bringing the wider players into play.... I do wonder if his worth to the team would go up if he was in a 4-4-2 and there was another striker tasked with staying in the danger area. A Kane/May combo could well work if that was the case and Stevie was tasked with doing what he did best for us- scoring goals.

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30 minutes ago, SlickDT said:

The problem that most teams of our level have (and something many people seem to miss) is that the two central midfielders can make a huge difference as to whether to the team plays in the 4-2-3-1 formation or just becomes a defensive 4-5-1. Two central midfielders that are competent on the ball and continually look to keep possession, whilst being able to pick a pass often let's the 3 Infront go forward and pick up more attacking positions.... You could have Barca's front line but if your midfield can't make chances it's going to blunt your attack... When they have to drop deep constantly to get possession and we isolate our striker it just seems a more direct route with two up top would work better.

Our current best option upfront is Chris Kane and the majority of his good work is deep with his back to goal, often bringing the wider players into play.... I do wonder if his worth to the team would go up if he was in a 4-4-2 and there was another striker tasked with staying in the danger area. A Kane/May combo could well work if that was the case and Stevie was tasked with doing what he did best for us- scoring goals.

Absolutely agree about Kane. You will remember that Tommy was quite open that his frustration with Tony Watt was that he didn't get into the box. When he did he missed sitters, so you can understand why his comfort zone was back to goal and drawing fouls. We need the striker that we thought we were getting with Tony Watt. 

As above though I think that we're in an odd situation with too many wingers (definitely the case when Drey returns). 

I'd happily swap Swanson for a playmaking central midfielder. Many fans have been saying for a  long time we need that position filled, but the need for a striker is even more painfully obvious. You could I suppose say that Swanson could be re-purposed in a central midfield role, he has got touch and vision, and he wouldn't have to run as much. That type of player needs to be really in tune with the team though and I get the feeling that Danny just isn't. 

I think that with a proper penalty box striker we could cobble together a 4-4-2 with the squad we have, but we can't do that yet and whatever version of 1 up front we go with we're immediately hampered as we don't have a target man. 

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I wondered about Danny playing that central role while watching the Forfar debacle.  He was pinging some nice passes long to Matty Kennedy in particular.  With Drey on the other side it would open up play a lot.  It was his shorter passes that were coming unstuck.  Still think Danny could do the job though.

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9 hours ago, Greylag said:

I wondered about Danny playing that central role while watching the Forfar debacle.  He was pinging some nice passes long to Matty Kennedy in particular.  With Drey on the other side it would open up play a lot.  It was his shorter passes that were coming unstuck.  Still think Danny could do the job though.

Don't like making plastic pitch excuses as we should be way beyond that, but IMO it's much harder to play subtle touch football on artificial. We really struggled with little lay-offs and give and goes at Montrose, and narrow pitches don't help either as the opposition can close that down. 

I've been so frustrated by Swanson since he came back that any ideas that bring out the best in him are welcome, would be good to see Tommy try some stuff out. 

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