Lee Johnson won us the JPT or should at least take 85% of the credit, all Hecky had to was win one game against lower league opposition. Over the last year he has continually showed tactical naievety with substitions & formations, an inabilty to establish a settled starting 11, numerous negative and very poor performances & a shocking amount of wins.
I seriously doubt that any football fan will always agree with a manager's team selections, formations and substitutions. We all have our individual views on who are the better players, how they should be deployed, what system we should use, etc, etc. If the manager is successful, disagreeing with his game plan causes no problems because with the team winning, there are no problems, and we usually begin to praise his way of doing things as though it was our own. We offer team selections and formations that mirror those of the manager. We copy. If the team is losing it's easy to fall in to the trap of believing that if the manager had done things how we wanted them doing we'd be much more successful. Because our theories are never tested, because the manager doesn't do exactly what we want, we can never fail. We can always say if we had done blah, blah, blah the outcome would have been far better. (And when the manager does pick the team and formation we have been advocating, we conveniently forget that fact. 4-4-2 was going to save us, except it didn't). If the manager is doing things differently to how we want them and we're losing then he's tactically naive. If he sticks with the same players he only picks his favourites. If he makes changes he has no idea of his best team. If we're not all over the opposition from the off we're employing negative tactics. Have I agreed with all Hecky's team selections, formations, substitutions this season? NO. Do I believe if he'd done the things that I want to see us do we'd have won more matches? Do I believe a different manager could have got better results with this group of players? No. The players we have are just not good enough at this level at this time. I don't believe many of them will ever be good enough, others disagree and think the lack of success is more to do with youth and inexperience than a lack of talent. I don't think it matters what the managers does; with this squad of players we're going to lose more than we win and I've actually been surprised we've got as many points as we have and find ourselves outside the relegation places. The squad isn't good enough and no amount of tactical nous is going to overcome that. In the past, criticism could be directed at the manager for bringing in a squad of players that aren't good enough. A manager didn't just coach and pick the team, he also signed the players. I don't know how our recruitment process works, but I have a strong feeling that if I started blaming Hecky, I'd be pointing the finger at the wrong guy.
We have a group of players who on the whole are not up to Championship standard. They will be, but they are not quite there. We are not going to change the plan to such a degree as to ship out the current crop and replace with championship proven quality. Apart from being financial suicide, it would be folly to start again from scratch. That being the case, the current players need continued COACHING and DEVELOPING. We already have the best man in place to work with that process. Therefore, in Hecky I trust.
