blue-shifted
Banned
Anyone who makes the Nathan Jones been gone too long joke for the 896,774th time, is even more so
Not at all. I don't know if it was on this thread or another but I posted about the time of Jones's move that he was making a mistake: that it was better to stay at Luton, get another club on his CV, than move to a club that's in decline, with a trigger-happy board. That's not hindsight: I was quite clear on my opinion.
Yes, he'd get a short-term boost to his salary but my argument was that, in the long term, it would be better to have a couple of promotions on a CV than one promotion and an ignominious sacking.
Players are really letting him down in my opinion, but its his job to sort that.
Anyone who makes the Nathan Jones been gone too long joke for the 896,774th time, is even more so
Personally, I think it was the right move for him but at the wrong time. He would have been far better off taking a Championship job at the end of the season, so he could have had the whole transfer window in order to move on the players he didn't want or were earning too much for the club to choose to keep.
I disagree. He took over in the middle of January, with Stoke sitting 14th in the table. So no imminent risk of relegation, it wasn't a firefighting job. It gave him half a season to assess the squad and prepare for a proper tilt at promotion in 2019/20, safe in the knowledge that he had a chairman who would fully back him in the transfer market that summer with some parachute money. He'd have been NUTS to have turned that down.
I don't know whats gone wrong since then. Primarily from the outside looking in it appears there's been some poor recruitment, and he still doesn't know his best team. But the notion that he should've stayed at Luton and waited for something else to come along is bobbins. Stoke was a huge step up for him, one that he couldn't turn down. As we're now seeing, it would seem he's bitten off more than he can chew, but it doesn't mean he was wrong to take a bite.
Maybe, just maybe he's not as good as he/people think he is?
I think it's difficult to overestimate just what a horlicks he has made of the job. Taking them from an underachieving midtable side who should be pushing for promotion to the worst record in League football in little under a year. A win percentage of barely 10% with at that level a decent squad of players.
I disagree. He took over in the middle of January, with Stoke sitting 14th in the table. So no imminent risk of relegation, it wasn't a firefighting job. It gave him half a season to assess the squad and prepare for a proper tilt at promotion in 2019/20, safe in the knowledge that he had a chairman who would fully back him in the transfer market that summer with some parachute money. He'd have been NUTS to have turned that down.
I don't know whats gone wrong since then. Primarily from the outside looking in it appears there's been some poor recruitment, and he still doesn't know his best team. But the notion that he should've stayed at Luton and waited for something else to come along is bobbins. Stoke was a huge step up for him, one that he couldn't turn down. As we're now seeing, it would seem he's bitten off more than he can chew, but it doesn't mean he was wrong to take a bite.
He has no clue who his best team is, he's used 26 players in the league so far this season in 10 games. Madness.
He has no clue who his best team is, he's used 26 players in the league so far this season in 10 games. Madness.
He inherited some absolute shite on big wages: Tom Ince, James Mclean, Jack Butland and so on. None of them are any good and you could argue that he was always going to struggle to get them playing well.
Yup, possibly.
He worked wonders on a shoestring budget at Luton. But maybe at Stoke there's an element of "well who the f*ck are you ?" towards him from some of the more high profile former Premier League players in that dressing room.
Those are precisely the two reasons why I thought he'd struggle. I can see why an ambititous manager would want to move but he was sitting pretty in League I with Luton. He could have had another promotion on his CV and move four months later for a club with better prospects. A club recently out of the PL would have a bunch of deluded players that an inexperienced manager was going to struggle with. Stoke should have picked someone like BFS to sort that out.
Jones is young; he could have bided his time. Now, he's tainted with failure