London Irish
Well-known member
Yes, you've hit on a big truth there. I think a lot of discussion on NSC over the past season has been framed by that very thing.
I found that frustrating because I didn't think Oscar was being judged on his actual merits. It was almost as if making any criticism of Oscar's football was whitewashing the way Gus behaved. There was an emtional logic to that because if football is about anything, it is about experiencing extremes of emotion, that is what makes it addictive and fun.
For me, I was not masiively disappointed by Gus because I was never amazingly into his persona and manner from the moment he arrived. So all I was looking for from Oscar were signs that he was improving our play or at least not taking it backwards because of injuries and FFP.
I think it became clear after a few months that were 4 things that were noteworthy about Oscar's football and 3 of them were negative. First, our passing declined because he was allowing our defenders/midfielders to be less patient and fire more channel balls and direct long balls to the front men. Second, partly as a consequence of that our play became less satisfying to watch, we exerted less control over the ball and it was all so much more haphazard - I think this was a big factor in the sense many fans had that our football was becoming less entertaining. Third, we were scoring less goals because the chances we were creating were less clear cut, less a result of properly carving open defences, more a result of scrappy long balls and speculative shots from distance. Finally, we enhanced our reputation as a very disciplined defensive team, we kept the deep lying midfielder of Gus days (almost a third central defender) and Oscar got his central defending pair right, promoted good players like Ward/Ince to augment the system and got some consistency out of Calderon (let off too lightly by fans in my view for his hopeless defending against Bolasie in the Palace disaster). The iron efficiency of our defence carried us to a very unlikely play-off place, although the rank embarrassment of Pride Park for me degraded somewhat the miracle of the City Ground.
Overall, the balance sheet was negative but it seemed disloyal to say this because of the Gus mess.
Which is why I hope now we've all properly moved on and can judge the new manager on his merits. Speak freely about the good or the bad.
There is a view that we shouldn't really be saying anything bad because of Hereford, Gillingham, Withdean etc etc. But I don't agree with that - the club has moved on and taken a direction towards a very modern business model of revenue maximisation from fans and a corporatised vision of football. The quid pro quo of that is that we fans get to watch higher quality football than the bad old days when it was commonly understood fans had to pull together more so the club could survive. Our payback as fans is high quality football - and if the manager is not delivering that, we are entitled to say so - that for me is the deal.
