It’s time to get behind Chris Coleman

[chriswallace85]

I know you are being facetious, but a lot of our fans actually believe this. The fact he couldn't even persuade a player to sign for us ahead of Barnsley tells you everything you need to know about his pulling power, or rather lack of it.

Also, "he gets the club"? What does that even mean? Kevin Ball is just spouting shite. All Coleman needs to "get" is points on board, and he's failed massively.

Exactly.

aye because it's dead easy to walk into a shit storm with an absent owner and a CEO who's asset stripping and get us winning every week. f***ing unbelievable man.

What difference does this actually make? Would having Ellis Short sat in a Stadium of Light office have made a blind bit of difference? Would him and Chris having a Monday morning chinwag have bolstered our campaign? Ellis Short being absent has nothing at all to do with Coleman's failure in his remit. Bain is there to run the club day to day, and Coleman is there to get results. And that's it. If anything, not having Short about probably alleviated some of the pressure on Coleman.

Vaughan was worse than Fletcher and clearly didn't want to be here. His ear-cupping antics when he eventually scored was the nail in the coffin of his time here.

And Coleman wasn't given any money to buy a striker, Grayson was.

I'm sorry like but he wasn't.

 

[fyl2u]

What do you think he's going to get to achieve it? He'll have no money in the summer either.

I'd like to think he gets backed at least as much as Grayson "was". One big difference this year is how many players we're going to be short of due to contracts expiring and players being sold.

Last year I saw the sense in not giving Grayson/Coleman much money as the debt needed to be reduced, we shouldn't have been even close to being in danger of relegation with the squad we had, and it wouldn't have been the end of the world to have a breather season in the Championship while waiting for the owner to sell anyway because we had a lot of young players developing together that could have an extra season playing together before aiming for a promotion push the next year.

Next season, it's a bit different: the club will know they've ballsed up and will want to get back to the Championship ASAP due to parachute payments running out, there's no additional merit to spending a breather year in League 1, and the financial commitment to getting promoted immediately is a lot less than is needed for a similar "promotion at all costs" strategy from the Championship into the Premier League.

I don't expect us to spend tens of millions, but I do think we're likely to outspend the majority of League 1's teams, if not all of them.

 

[Donnybrook]

cos hes done wonders for us ?

 

[WHD]

What difference does this actually make? Would having Ellis Short sat in a Stadium of Light office have made a blind bit of difference? Would him and Chris having a Monday morning chinwag have bolstered our campaign? Ellis Short being absent has nothing at all to do with Coleman's failure in his remit. Bain is there to run the club day to day, and Coleman is there to get results. And that's it. If anything, not having Short about probably alleviated some of the pressure on Coleman.

It's excuse after excuse. For "shitstorm" read "lack of transfer budget".

All Coleman has had to deal with is a lack of transfer funds, which is the same as half a dozen other championship clubs. The team with the lowest budget has just beaten us at home and is four points ahead of us.
As you say, Short not being around has probably took the pressure off Coleman slightly. Coleman has utterly failed and it's time to get a new man in with a different outlook. I didn't want him sacked before as I didn't think the club could afford it, but now I think we can't afford not to.

 

[marco is god]

not advocating sticking with Coleman or sacking him either way but I'm a little confused by what some people expect, some posters will tell you
all 3 keepers are shite
O'Shea is shite
Adams is shite
Wilson is shite
Jones is shite
Cattermole is shite
Honeyman is shite
Fletcher is shite
fair enough, but then the same posters will tell you Coleman is also shite because he couldn't keep a team containing these 'shite' players up.

 

[chriswallace85]

I'd like to think he gets backed at least as much as Grayson "was". One big difference this year is how many players we're going to be short of due to contracts expiring and players being sold.

Last year I saw the sense in not giving Grayson/Coleman much money as the debt needed to be reduced, we shouldn't have been even close to being in danger of relegation with the squad we had, and it wouldn't have been the end of the world to have a breather season in the Championship while waiting for the owner to sell anyway because we had a lot of young players developing together that could have an extra season playing together before aiming for a promotion push the next year.

Next season, it's a bit different: the club will know they've ballsed up and will want to get back to the Championship ASAP due to parachute payments running out, there's no additional merit to spending a breather year in League 1, and the financial commitment to getting promoted immediately is a lot less than is needed for a similar "promotion at all costs" strategy from the Championship into the Premier League.

I don't expect us to spend tens of millions, but I do think we're likely to outspend the majority of League 1's teams, if not all of them.

So with this said, why on earth do you still back Chris Coleman?

 

[Dilligaf60]

not advocating sticking with Coleman or sacking him either way but I'm a little confused by what some people expect, some posters will tell you
all 3 keepers are shite
O'Shea is shite
Adams is shite
Wilson is shite
Jones is shite
Cattermole is shite
Honeyman is shite
Fletcher is shite
fair enough, but then the same posters will tell you Coleman is also shite because he couldn't keep a team containing these 'shite' players up.

Common sense ? How very dare you !

 

[MLF]

10 year contract for me

 

[flanny1]

I just don’t know how he can turn it around and repair relations with the fans after such a complete failure.

I can’t think of any positives to keeping him; he can’t motivate the players, he is tactically inept, he uses substitutions poorly, he is resistant to change, he doesn’t give our young players a chance and he is always making excuses.

What do the fans backing see in him to think he can do a job?

 

[soapster]

Is that not just as much down to the players and goalkeeper(s) though? Coleman can't physically do it for them. The players are useless man. You could give them a full written dossier on how to defend, if they need to learn the basics at this stage in their career then their is no hope for them.

You can't blame Coleman for individual errors, which are all too regular. You can question his formation however and persistance with the 3-5-2/3-6-1 formation which just hasn't worked out.

The fact that Gooch has seen little football after making more impact than anyone after coming back into the picture is also questionable. However, Coleman's heart is in it, he's desperate to succeed and I'd be willing to let him get on with it. Unfortunately, with little or no support from above, the task is going to be a daunting one for anyone.

have you not pointed to the reason for the persistence in the 3-5 formations on your 4th sentence. he also had to try and defend the goalkeepers as much as possible for reasons we all know. I am 50 / 50 on CC and will wait and see what happens

 

[flanny1]

not advocating sticking with Coleman or sacking him either way but I'm a little confused by what some people expect, some posters will tell you
all 3 keepers are shite
O'Shea is shite
Adams is shite
Wilson is shite
Jones is shite
Cattermole is shite
Honeyman is shite
Fletcher is shite
fair enough, but then the same posters will tell you Coleman is also shite because he couldn't keep a team containing these 'shite' players up.

This whole league is pretty much shite, you could do the same for over half the teams in the league. There are plenty of teams that are worse or similar, you have to question how their managers have gotten more out of their players than ours. Just look at Millwall, their players aren’t much better than ours but they are in a playoff position.

 

[fyl2u]

So with this said, why on earth do you still back Chris Coleman?

A number of reasons:

- Out of all the managers we've ever had in my lifetime, he comes across as the most intelligent and therefore in my opinion likely to be able to turn things around given time.

- With Wales he was widely praised for his man-management skills. Their players and fans were gutted he left because he had them overperforming.

- The January window is notorious for being more difficult than the Summer window to try to bring players in, so getting replacements for Grabban/Vaughan and a better keeper was always going to be tricky, and they're the positions in which we most needed some quality. Grayson had already wasted the little budget we had on dross.

- A new manager would need time to get to know the squad to determine who should stay and who should go, and decide which positions to strengthen. This would effectively give our League 1 rivals a head-start on the transfer market and may see us sticking with certain players for the first half of the season that a lot of us would like to see gone.

- A new manager will bring his own on-field tactics to the club. While granted some might see this as a good thing, our team has finally looked like they have been gelling together for large portions of the last 6 matches or so, aware of what they're supposed to be doing for large portions of the games. New tactics means relearning all this, which again would likely mean we were playing catchup compared to teams in League 1 that have the same manager as last year.

- He genuinely seems to want to be here and seems passionate about it. There may well be other managers who would fit this description too, granted.

- I would worry about who we might be able to attract to the job if we got rid of him. Last year Aberdeen's manager wouldn't touch us with a barge pole and we had to settle for Simple Simon. This year we're in a similar situation with not knowing what's going on with regards to a takeover but now we're a division below as well. I just can't see a queue of better managers beating down the door.

- I would like to see what a manager could do if he was given more than a season to achieve his goals. Again there's an argument for getting someone else in and giving them time, but I think at least some of the problems we've had over the past 10 years have stemmed from chopping and changing managers too often. Certainly a large amount of the debt has come from managers arriving with the attitude of "spend as much as possible to get us out of the shit without any regard to the future financial situation, because let's face it I probably won't be here by the time the finances bite me on the arse anyway".

- The club has a reputation of getting through managers willy-nilly and not letting them have time to turn things around. This reputation makes us a less attractive club for new managers and players alike. The manager side of this is obvious, but also players won't want to come to a club to be with a manager they already know if they think he'll likely be out of a job in 6 months and they'll be left playing for a different manager instead.

 

[WHD]

- I would worry about who we might be able to attract to the job if we got rid of him. Last year Aberdeen's manager wouldn't touch us with a barge pole and we had to settle for Simple Simon. This year we're in a similar situation with not knowing what's going on with regards to a takeover but now we're a division below as well. I just can't see a queue of better managers beating down the door.

We didn't need to settle for Grayson at all. We poached him from Preston when a better manager, Grayson's replacement at Preston was out of work. Grayson wasn't a desperate last gasp appointment, he was actually selected by Bain as a suitable manager.

 

[fyl2u]

We didn't need to settle for Grayson at all. We poached him from Preston when a better manager, Grayson's replacement at Preston was out of work. Grayson wasn't a desperate last gasp appointment, he was actually selected by Bain as a suitable manager.

He wasn't by any means our first choice.

 

[WHD]

He wasn't by any means our first choice.

Yeah, McInnes was. But he certainly wasn't our last choice either.

 

[chriswallace85]

not advocating sticking with Coleman or sacking him either way but I'm a little confused by what some people expect, some posters will tell you
all 3 keepers are shite
O'Shea is shite
Adams is shite
Wilson is shite
Jones is shite
Cattermole is shite
Honeyman is shite
Fletcher is shite
fair enough, but then the same posters will tell you Coleman is also shite because he couldn't keep a team containing these 'shite' players up.

What if you don't think they're as shite as those posters will have you believe? What if you think that despite there being an obvious lack in quality, they're still on par with a lot of players in the division. What if you think that maybe with a little better organisation and instruction, as a collective the team could and really should have been better than the sum of it's parts?

For me, O'Shea is not shite. Cattermole is not shite. Kone is not shite. Oviedo, McNair, Gibson, Matthews, Asoro, McGeady, maybe even McManaman and Gooch are not shite. They're not all of them great either but there are players in there. Then you have the likes of Honeyman, Love, Robson, Vaughan who are at least going to give you some effort.

To me, there's at least a semblance of a team there, and has been all season. On occasion it's even proven results aren't beyond us in this division. So you have to question the selections, the formations, the tactics, the substitutions, and the then training, the team talks and everything that goes with it. Grayson was not good enough, and Coleman has not been good enough. Five wins in 28 games at this level is not good enough for Sunderland AFC. Guiding Sunderland AFC to League 1 after 30 games in charge is not good enough. In fact it's fuckin' despicable. The man should be vilified and chased from the club.

 

[fyl2u]

Yeah, McInnes was. But he certainly wasn't our last choice either.

Maybe not, but Grayson certainly wasn't even on the press's radar for the weeks leading up to his appointment. There were many names linked before his name cropped up. Nobody outside the club really knows how far down the list he was, but given that he comes across as what Smiffy from The Bash Street Kids might turn into when he grows up, I seriously doubt he was particularly high up on the list.

 

[marco is god]

This whole league is pretty much shite, you could do the same for over half the teams in the league. There are plenty of teams that are worse or similar, you have to question how their managers have gotten more out of their players than ours. Just look at Millwall, their players aren’t much better than ours but they are in a playoff position.

that's fair enough but Millwall are a team who where just promoted, their squad will have been full of confidence, plus they are probably made up of players their manager brought in, where as we had just been relegated, have only won 2 games at home in something like 14 month and I don't care what anybody says you can't tell me the players brought in, in January where Coleman's first or even second choice.
Not saying Coleman hasn't made mistakes though

 

[WHD]

Maybe not, but Grayson certainly wasn't even on the press's radar for the weeks leading up to his appointment. There were many names linked before his name cropped up. Nobody outside the club really knows how far down the list he was, but given that he comes across as what Smiffy from The Bash Street Kids might turn into when he grows up, I seriously doubt he was particularly high up on the list.

Yeah, but if we were really desperate and couldn't attract anyone else, why didn't we go for an out of work manager like Alex Neil? We weren't totally desperate and were able to attract an in work manager, even though that was a massive mistake.

 

[flanny1]

Is that not just as much down to the players and goalkeeper(s) though? Coleman can't physically do it for them. The players are useless man. You could give them a full written dossier on how to defend, if they need to learn the basics at this stage in their career then their is no hope for them.

You can't blame Coleman for individual errors, which are all too regular. You can question his formation however and persistance with the 3-5-2/3-6-1 formation which just hasn't worked out.

The fact that Gooch has seen little football after making more impact than anyone after coming back into the picture is also questionable. However, Coleman's heart is in it, he's desperate to succeed and I'd be willing to let him get on with it. Unfortunately, with little or no support from above, the task is going to be a daunting one for anyone.

Not sure I agree, sometimes a good manager can make the difference; drilling the players and/or playing a formation that puts less pressure on the defense.

BSA proved it can be done, even cancelling a holiday to drill the players. We went from having a leaky defense that couldn’t defend set pieces to a solid one that looked comfortable defending set pieces. Not saying Coleman could have done the same, just that I think he could have done a lot better.