Worst SAFC manager: MON or Bruce?


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I despise Bruce with a greater passion than he hates us...which says something - Martin unfortunately turned out to be yesterdays man and the job swallowed him. Bruce's poison and venom since he left puts him on a par with Mcmenemy.

I don't think Bruce hates us, I think he's genuinely hurt by it and gutted it didn't work out.

I thought we'd cracked it under him but sadly it all went wrong.

MON was total shit bar the first few games.
 
MON has a better win ratio than Bruce, tbf not much between them, both had a very good run and both had a very bad run of form. Tactics wise both didn't seem to bother and both wasted money.
 
can i ask how? genuinely interested.

Mon was an utter shambles, the bloke lost all interest.[DOUBLEPOST=1377560508][/DOUBLEPOST]
MON has a better win ratio than Bruce, tbf not much between them, both had a very good run and both had a very bad run of form. Tactics wise both didn't seem to bother and both wasted money.
31% to 29% is ahrdly something to shout about. I think win ratios don't tell the whole story at times though.
 
can i ask how? genuinely interested.

Mon was an utter shambles, the bloke lost all interest.[DOUBLEPOST=1377560508][/DOUBLEPOST]
31% to 29% is ahrdly something to shout about. I think win ratios don't tell the whole story at times though.
MON had a worse team to take over than Bruce did , I know MON didn't leave us in any better situation like! Both managers would have took us down if they weren't sacked imo.
 
I don't think Bruce hates us, I think he's genuinely hurt by it and gutted it didn't work out.

I thought we'd cracked it under him but sadly it all went wrong.

MON was total shit bar the first few games.

I think he does hate us - its the natural trait of a black and white bastard....especially after rejection

Both Bruce and Mon were shit and both were taking us down before Short acted
 
Hard to judge really. From what Bruce turned us into, a team that could have been pushing for 6th/7th with players like Bent, Gyan, Henderson, Malbranque etc to what he left us with was an absolute joke.

No doubt O'Neill did an absolutely awful job, but I'm still not sure how Bruce fucked up that badly.
 
Nee fucker over 20 on this thread?[DOUBLEPOST=1377559929][/DOUBLEPOST]

Showing your age. There was Football before SKY you know, not that what you know is worth much. Typical SKY=kiddie with shit between his ears. You know what YOU know, nothing more.

It was 21 years ago though, so anyone under 30 won't remember it to be fair to them....
 
O'Neill was worse but the instant effect he had after replacing Bruce kept us up that season.

Hopefully that wasn't the start of a pattern...
 
O'Neill.

Both failed but Bruce actually finished 10th (he never mentions it like) and I remember we had a right go at the big teams. Beat Liverpool, Arsenal Chelsea and came within a whisker of beating Man United. Transfers wise, he signed better players and i'm sure near recouped his money back. His trouble was having built a fairly decent team, he preceded to dismantle it totally and replace it with utter shite. He had a terrible 2011, in January we were 6th with Welbeck Bent and Gyan. By December all 3 had gone and Bruce was sacked.

So there were ups and downs to the Bruce era. As there are with most Managers. Under O'Neill however it was all downhill.
 
MON had a worse team to take over than Bruce did , I know MON didn't leave us in any better situation like! Both managers would have took us down if they weren't sacked imo.
Disagree about the worse squad part. Look at what Bruce took over, our midfield consisted of leadbitter, whitehead, reid. Nosworthy, Collins, mcshane at the back :lol:
 
can i ask how? genuinely interested.
MON turned out to be a disaster. But apart from Graham he didn't do much long term damage. Bruce turned the comfortably mid-table team that started his first season, with lots of potential in to relegation fodder. Mismanagement, bad decisions and ineptitude at almost every turn. People still think he was good in the transfer market because he signed Figueroa, Palacios et al. Which is ridiculous.

I say this every time this comes up, but the Bent deal was in place before he came, I'm sure if he'd disagreed with the deal we would have pulled out, but that doesn't mean he should get credit for him. Similarly, I said at the time and still think that if he'd been managed properly, it would never have come to Bent leaving the way he did. Obviously his move to Villa was a disaster, but for us at the time he was vital. Who knows what went on with Gyan, but the likes of Bent leaving won't have helped and at least it seemed we got most of our money back there.

Mignolet worked out really well, but he was doing the rounds training at most clubs in the country, it's great that we were the ones who gave him a chance (£2m mind, he wasn't free) but it wasn't like he plucked him from nowhere with his immense contacts and footballing knowledge. There were far too many loan deals, which has left us worse off long-term too. Look at the amount of times he picked injured players and they became injured straight away; absolutely absurd. Not practicing set pieces too! I still can't get my head around that.

Wasted money after wasted money with him and before anybody come up with this in vogue "net spend" bollocks. It's not accurate as we don't know the actual fees paid or received and it excludes agent's/ player signing on fees, which are a big part of modern day deals. Beyond that, it's also skewed by later deals like Bent and Henderson when we were falling to pieces.

Just because we were shit under MON, doesn't mean we weren't shit under Bruce too. Bruce made things worse, O'Neill just didn't improve things and obviously lived on his past glories, probably in his own head as much as anything else.
 
O'Neill by a mile.

Say what you like, but Bruce established us as a Premier League team, built the best squad we've had in years, and gave us some brilliant performances.

He was let down by both the Bent and Gyan sagas, it was his failure (disastrous failure might I add) to replace the both of them during Summer 2011 that cost him his job, I honestly think that if he had done a better job of that, and targeted key positions he'd still be here.

Going from a squad containing Mensah, Malbranque, Zenden, Henderson, Gyan, Bent and Welbeck to replacing them with Gardner, Larsson, Vaughan, Wickham, Ji, Brown and McClean in the space of a summer was suicide.
 
O'Neill, and in my opinion it's not even close.

Bruce was extremely close to cracking it here and brought some exciting players to the club. We were 5 points ahead in 6th place in the league when Bent fucked off, which was a killer blow given how the team was built around him.

O'Neill never came close to producing anything like that.
 
Disagree about the worse squad part. Look at what Bruce took over, our midfield consisted of leadbitter, whitehead, reid. Nosworthy, Collins, mcshane at the back :lol:

Give me Andy Reid and Malbranque over Larsson, Gardner and Vaughan any day. Bruce also managed to leave us with 1 loan striker who had experience and PL quality. Leadbitter and Whitehead may have been poor enough, but Bruce was able to shift them quickly. We can't get rid of most of the mediocre shite Bruce overpaid for. Bruce was shite man. Totally fucked up his, and our, best chance of establishing ourselves in the top 10 since Quinn took over
 
MON.
in the little time he was here he seemed more interested in working his way through Romano's menu than managing a football club.
thank f**k ellis saw right through him.

Well Ellis hired him, it took him a year to "see right through him" but he got there eventually.

MoN was worse. Signing Fletcher, and to a lesser extent AJ were the only positives.
 
Well Ellis hired him, it took him a year to "see right through him" but he got there eventually.

MoN was worse. Signing Fletcher, and to a lesser extent AJ were the only positives.

In just under two years and five months Bruce's bad signings were (to me); Kilgallon, Brown, Da Silva, Angeleri, Bramble, Riveros, Wickham, Gardner (nearly 6m on him) even 6m for Cattermole (who only a year before moved for 3.5). Some people could add Larsson to that.

In just under one year and four months O'Neill's was Graham. Maybe Cuellar (not much worse than Turner to me).

O'Neill was shit for us, no doubt. But Bruce was famously "shopping at Harrod's". My definition of "nearly cracked it" doesn't mean playing well for six months after spending loads of money. Nobody at the time doubted that Bruce would have taken us down, yet history is being re-written after it seemed even worse under O'Neill.
 
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