Big Sam


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dofs dont really sign first team players..not pften anyway..southamptons dof doesnt for sure..
I accept there are varying ways that clubs employ DoFs, I was thinking along these lines taken from Wiki.

The presence of a director of football acts as an intermediary between the manager and the board and may relieve pressure on a manager by handling aspects away from day-to-day coaching, allowing a manager to focus on on-pitch performance. The director may also help to stabilise the club – many examples exist of director stepping in as a caretaker manager on the departure of the manager. The director – often an experienced football figure – may also positively advise a less experienced manager or the board of a less well developed club.
In contrast, there are many examples of tensions arising between director and manager, often due to questions over the remit and powers of the two positions; particularly with regard to control over transfer policy. This had led to many well publicised and often, highly damaging disputes within clubs.
 
I've just heard what he said commentating on the Man Utd v Chelsea game where he criticised Lampard for chasing the game at 2-0. Aye, let's all just shut up shop and accept defeats eh fat chops?
 
He worked an absolute miracle with what he had at his disposal. Behave.
No he didn’t.
You must have been over the moon with David Moyes then ffs
Never rated him before he came here. Though thought the shower of shite on the pitch did him no favours. Players held the power.
Can't complain about some results overall but it would have been 7 in a row against the mags if he wasn't so cautious, in fact the sixth was blighted by the fact in his need to play six feet plus strikers he had Fletcher up front and Toivonen who was an absolute passenger behind him. Even during the run in that year his obsession with six feet strikers saw Graham first play wide and then N'Doye playing a wide role, both who were absolute dross in the roles.

He did get us playing as a team mind, but the last performances against Chelsea and Everton put a much more positive spin on how we'd actually played.


Was absolutely no miracle. He done well and no more.
Everton players wanted shot of Martinez. I think they got a right roasting against Leicester a week later to put the tin hat on that one.
But Sam was hailed as a saint for that performance.
 
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No he didn’t.

Never rated him before he came here. Though thought the shower of shite on the pitch did him no favours. Players held the power.

Everton players wanted shot of Martinez. I think they got a right roasting against Leicester a week later to put the tin hat on that one.
But Sam was hailed as a saint for that performance.

It's a performance rated among the very worst probably since Walter Smith was sacked, certainly in terms of attitude.
 
I think you’re right in citing the DoF experiments as being high up on the list as to how we became so bad, for me a manager should live or die by who *he* chooses to play for him.
Big Sam getting rid of the DoF is one of the main reasons we're in this mess. It meant he had full autonomy for all of one window. By the time the next window came around he had no intrest in the club as he was courting the England job. This meant we had a large chunk of the window with someone with no footballing nous running football operations. Unfortunately for us, what no one predicted was this wouldn't improve when Moyes came in.

With 20/20 hindsight we should have just signed Kessie and loaned him back to Atlanta until he could have obtained a work permit, then bit the bullet and signed Mvilla for the £8m quoted (which in the modern market is peanuts) instead of trying to be cute. That summer stank of money men making footballing decisions.

In theory Kessie could have obtained his work permit by January and we could have had a midfield pairing of mvilla and kessie for circa 18m. Instead we tried to save 4m buy buying Ndong instead and getting Mvilla on a free, look where that got us.

Congerton gets a lot of stick from Sunderland fans but he mostly is paying for the mistakes of de fanti who was an absolute charlatan. Defoe for Altidore was one of the best pieces of business the club has done in my lifetime. Rodwell is the stick in which people will use to beat him but at the time, to a man, every Sunderland fan thought that was a good signing.
don't think he would have tbf
He might not have gone to palace but I think he would have fallen out with short sooner rather than later.
His record wasn’t exactly earth shattering.
Not the best sample size tbf. But our option of him is slightly skewed by the fact he never had to deal with get the players motivated for the difficult second season after a miracle survival, which literally no manager in our most recent premier league era ever really achieved.
 
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There was also Brown, Graham, Fletcher, Vergini, Giaccharini, Coates, Matthews and Lens (along with half a dozen others like Roberts, Bridcutt, Gomez, Buckley etc)
im a bit confused- everyone of them except lens was out on loan under Sam and he never got a game- (gomez went the season before didnt he?)
the only other ones that Sam had available and moyes didnt were yedlin and toivonen and losing them was not an excuse for going down
 
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im a bit confused- everyone of them except lens was out on loan under Sam and he never got a game- (gomez went the season before didnt he?)
the only other ones that Sam had available and moyes didnt were yedlin and toivonen and losing them was not an excuse for going down

Most only went out on loan for the last three months or so of the season, but I take the point that they weren’t a big part of the excellent second half
Most only went out on loan for the last three months or so of the season, but I take the point that they weren’t a big part of the excellent second half
There was that N’Doye fella too - although I had to wiki it to remember him!
 
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