duncanjwitham

Obviously I don't want Frank to go etc etc. If we do have to replace him, then I don't care *who* it is, I care *what* it is (if that makes grammatical sense). It has to be someone that is going to play a similar style of football to Lampard, that can just take the current squad, maybe tweak it slightly, but not make any radical changes to the style of play. The last thing we want to do is go McClaren->Clement->Wassall->Pearson->McClaren->Rowett->Lampard again, with all the associated turnover of players and 'time to adapt to the new system' etc each time. Plus it keeps the same path for youth players coming into the first team, so we don't suddenly decide we want to play direct when we have an academy full of ball-players. Beyond that, I don't care who they are, whether they're all proven manager at this level or an unknown rookie, English or foreign etc.

You can make rational arguments for any of the options - Marriott is our top scoring striker, he should be playing etc. But you can guarantee that if we'd left Marriott on the bench and still not scored, Lampard would be getting lynched on here for that reason.

It's a symptom of the mess the squad is in. All of our central midfielders are better in a 3 - Huddlestone is too immobile to play in a 2, Johnson isn't disciplined enough, Bryson/Mount/Wilson/Holmes etc all need cover in behind to let them do their jobs and make forward runs and so on. That makes it difficult to play 2 up front as you can't play a flat 442. And we don't really have the players to play a back 3 in a 352 either - we only really have 2 senior centre halves, plus the untried Ambrose, or we play Wisdom or Bogle out of position. So we're stuck with one up front, and that either means playing Marriott as a lone striker and shunting Waghorn out wide (or dropping him), or leaving out your top goal-scoring striker. With the squad we have, whatever way you approach the team, you'll either have to drop a player that really should be playing, or hamstring some other part of the team to fit him in.