I remember having a conversation with a few young(ish) away fans on the train following us beating Villa 3-1 at Selhurst Park a couple seasons ago.

I told them I was a huge fan of Gerrard the player but their team looked far less than the sum of their parts and I believed Gerrard to be the problem. They agreed, Villa sacked Gerrard, appointed Emery and the rest is history.

That's just one example but there are plenty more where a manager is the problem and a change may be necessary. If we are losing most of our matches, scoring less than everyone else, turning up to away games like at the Emirates and not even trying, players are voicing their discontent, we can't fashion chances or defend set pieces, amongst other things, the manager has to shoulder that blame. If it aint broke don't fix it, if it is, fix it.

We can all voice our subjective football opinions and they can be lazily rubbished but the facts speak for themselves. It doesn't excuse the players, it doesn't excuse the lack of investment in the team, it doesn't excuse bad decision making, but it is the one thing that's probably easiest and quickest to change in order to salvage our absolutely dismal bombing this season.

Or to make it devastatingly, irreversibly worse.

As the posts above point out, far more people have changed managers on the way to relegation than on the way into Europe.

Again, in our case, it depends on whether you think the players are underperforming for their level of ability and/or that the same players are capable of playing a noticeably better style of football.

I don't see any reason to think that. I also don't see our position as dire (it is much the same as it always is - we are hardly in uncharted territory here).

For those two reasons, I wouldn't take the significant gamble of making a change.

Edited by TheBigToePunt (24 Jan 2024 12.33pm)

The argument presumably is that if this clubs had kept their managers, they would have stayed up. Leicester & Burnley were having completely dismal runs and I can’t see how anyone could argue the incumbent managers could turn it around.

To those who insist that Roy is the best option for the rest of the season, is there any point at which they could contemplate a change?
For example , if we take only 1 or 2 points from the next three games?
Or is this immaterial and he should stay regardless?
I recall Parish saying that he felt he made a mistake by holding on to Pardew too long when it was obvious that Pardew was unlikely to turn things around.
However, he sacked Vieira when a poor run showed no sign of ending.
Roy does seem to be allowed more leeway because of his history with the club, but he will understand it’s a results business ( think Blackburn, England, Liverpool and Watford) so he doesn’t have an unblemished record.

The absence of key creative players is of course critical for any team, but especially for one of our means.

Beyond that, I was deeply unconvinced by the idea, floating around on here at the time, that we had some sort of 'Roy Version 2' at the end of last season - as if a manager famed for sticking to the same basic principles for decades would suddenly change what he does, especially when he was brought in to stave off the lingering threat of getting drawn into a scrap at the bottom of the table.

It goes back to my earlier point about Dyche at Everton. These guys like Roy, Pulis, Allardyce, Dyche etc, have stuck around to make a successful living managing the smaller sides in the top league in the world whilst a cast of thousands of exciting, upcoming, tactically astute coaches from all over the world have come and gone without trace. Why? Because these dinosaurs know what works in the real world.

All of this old guard produce stodgy, cautious teams who seem to be playing for a nil-nil every week. Within that, there will be moments where they get cut apart by the big clubs, or perform disappointingly in non-descript games they might have won, but very often the average points per game will work out OK, and there will be the odd phase where form comes and the team play good stuff.

I think that's what we got at the end of last season, just the usual brief period of good form (aided by playing pressure-free games after a while). I don't attribute it to a different approach from Roy at that time, nor do I see it as evidence that he has done something very different this season.

One of the key reasons players do not progress from clubs like ours to bigger stings is that they are only capable of their best form fleetingly, but do know how to do a job otherwise.