May Contain Nuts

I mean... It's not exactly twisting it when it comes from the horse's mouth "I’d describe myself as a box-to-box midfielder" For the uninitiated, that's what we in the business call a "quote" (Even if it is 8 years old) 😅

George Thorne vibes. The only player never to return from a broken leg because of a random bone infection.

Well yeah but I was giving Warne the benefit of doubt... then again I did that when we signed Fornah!

Perhaps, and I'd rather we didn't make such mistakes in the first place, but admitting an error and making an attempt to correct it is better than just buggering on anyway. Not that there's any real indication Fornah is going anywhere.

Anyway, if we sign this lad (which I have no doubt we will) then it goes some way to alleviating people's concerns about how he sees the team working better as a unit, which is what most people critical of Warne do actually want from him. Awareness, learning, improvement. It's just that we haven't seen anywhere near enough of it.

Gotta keep up the idea that anyone critical of Warne for any reason whatsoever is an idiot though, and rubbish any and all notions that he's actually responsible for any of the negatives we see.

Must have been a really impressive 5 games! Glad to see his stats have been mega-impressive this season in the league above though, limited as his appearances have been.

Typically if O'Rourke says something is agreed and will happen, it happens? Thank the lord he sounds like a proper DM, although that's no guarantee he'll be used as one.

Whichever system we play we have the same issue though - the balance of the signings was haphazard, some don't suit the role they've been given and we're paying high wages for backups, or rotation players. With 'limited' resources , can we afford to carry a squad with enough players to play these 2 formations with everyone getting adequate game time?

The point isn't whether they're decent players though, it's that they were bought for a system we dropped after a few games and some of them represent round pegs in square holes (or is the other way round? I can never remember) Ward brought as a RWB, sure but then we stopped playing a RWB and he's not a good enough defender to play RB and he's not as good as NML so won't play RW... and Wilson is preferred there anyway. Elder bought as a LWB but he's not a LWB Bradley is a good CB and has played in a 3 but he's clearly unsuited to the way we played it at the start of the season. Fornah doesn't really have a position, so how is he going to develop toward and be comfortable in any particular role? We'll wait and see if CBT offers us much more than Barkhuizen, we're not sure how Warne will be askng hm to play yet tbf, hopefully we actually bother to give him the ball in the next match to find out! Nelson, Bradley AND Niambe brought in on top of Cashin and Forsyth as options in a 3CB system? Who's 1st choice RCB? It would be one one of Nelson or Nyambe, which means one of those players (likely two of our higher earners) missing out. With 3 at the back NML has to play centrally, so in competition with Collins, Washington, Waghorn AND TJJ - 5 players for 2 positions? "We can only do what we can do" but "with hardly any money" we seemed rather willing to overstack certain positions with players on high wages who may not get as many minutes as the outlay would justify.

Thanks for the carification. Fun or not gifs do have a certain power to perpetuate a notion / thought or feeling more than words, and must be wielded responsibly! 😄😉 edit: And yeah, I agree that all League One teams have their deficiencies, but IMO with our squad we should have fewer than most, and surely the point of hiring a promotion expert is that they know how to further cover these deficiences? Rather than doing that, our manager exposes them.

...except now all fans unhappy with the quality of our play are going to be branded with this idea that they're delusional and expect McClaren-esque football, which quite frankly is a load of b******* for the most part.

The thanks you get for helping people, hey 🤣

Someone criticised him in another thread for playing too deep recently, standing too close to the centre backs and waving his arms around telling others what to do (for reference, this is not a quote) when a few games ago / earlier in the season he was getting about the pitch more. I'm not sure it crossed their mind that maybe, 25+ games into a season where he's being asked to cover so much of the midfield, it might be because he needs a rest? Anyway, for reference - or really just because I quite like like the way these things look - here's CH's season heatmap. Busy boy.

Well done, you've successfully shown me evidence of someone either, at best, paraphrasing what the manager has said, or at worst making a statement based on conjecture - albeit one with plenty of evidence that points toward it being, if not the truth, not far from it. Absolutely nowhere is there a quote attributed to the manager. I'm not defending anyone. As I said earlier, I think the discussion had gone awry because things were phrased badly, and there were two posters stubbornly locked into a 'You show me...' "No, YOU show me..' stalemate, which I sought to resolve by providing some evidence of what has actually been said. I just think your attitude toward others and ceasless need to treat this place like a court of law are utterly ridiculous, and that's not just limited to this thread. The irony of you being 'calling out' people for making things up to bash another with isn't lost on me.

Nobody attributed a quote to him, unless you can point me to the post where someone has claimed Warne has actually used the phrase "I'm not interested in midfield". At worst what's happened in this instance is the use of conjecture, not hyperbole. The evidence may be incomplete, but if you take what he did say, correlate it with his actions and study how the team performas then it's hardly the world's mmost 'out there' conclusion to come to. And yes, you very much were banging on about it, repeating the same question multiple times to prove a point that nobody had actually argued against.

We spent the last couple of months of one season playing, and spent all summer and pre-season preparing and signing players for one system, but when it came to playing competitive games we were pretty much forced (the alternative doesn't bear thinking about) to change the system because of a combination of injuries and a number of the players, both new signings and existing players, looking terribly uncomfortable playing it. ...and we're supposed to look at this and turn it into praise for the manager's adaptability? Can someone pass me the Valium because that just ain't gonna come naturally!

Like someone who understands how humans being speak, understands what the word paraphrasing means and like someone who actually wanted to discuss the topic at hand in a civilised manner, rather than like someone who wants to hold everyone to weirdly exacting standards like you're a prosecutor grilling a witness and need to find a way of proving them wrong? Essentially it boils down to the original post saying "he's said so" instead of "he's said as much", which naturally you've jumped on. All the context has been explained to you, yet you're still banging on about midfielders he's using in an advanced / attacking role.

The only place I've steered the conversation toward was some form of resolution to your argument with another poster wherein neither of you seemed to want to budge.

Think the discussion has gone awry tbh, partly because of the way things have been worded, and partly because you're more interested in using the way something is worded to steer the argument in your favour, than using common sense to figure out what was actually meant. The insinuation, and what I suspect most people could gather from what was posted, isn't that he's not interested in any aspect of the midfield just the defensive side of things, so whatever he's said about one of our attacking midfielders is beside the point. When you watch us play, do you think we look like a team where due care and attention has been given to the balance in midfield? It seems to me that most people believe it to be a problem area for us and even those in support of Warne generally don't quite understand or don't agree with the way we set up in that central area.

It's not that hard, it was discussed on here the other day. He's on record (RamsTV before FGR at home last season) as saying he's aware that his way of playing leaves us open to the counter attack, but "thats how I want to play" That might not mean he has a total disregard for suring up the midfield, but he's OK with the compromise - at least for the time being - if it means we're an attacking side and we try to win every match, even if it causes us to lose. He's not interested in draws. We haven't been linked to, and he hasn't talked about, signing any midfielders specifically to fill the holding/defensive role, the one midfielder he has brought in who previously played that role plays further forward when playing for Derby, he uses our only other player to have history playing that position (Max Bird) in a more advanced role too. It hardly takes a genius see where his priorities lie, whether you go quote hunting or not.

Oh, but in your defence I do imagine / believe that you're a really good bloke IRL - there's only really one or two posters I don't believe that of - none of the above is meant to be personal, I just see your postings sometimes as almost coming from a fictional character! 😅

They're only really being linked with leaving by posters on here though, aren't they? Nobody in the outside world has identified them as the players on the fringes we may move on.

I'll give you your due, you're slick. An expensive PR team couldn't do a better job of selling the image you wish to portray of yourself on here. You should probably apply to be on the next season of The Traitors, get the money back you've spent on the wedding and then some! You were absolutely anything but even handed and fair in your attitude toward Cocu. The absolute master of saying "I understand and sympathise with the difficulties" to make it sound like you were being fair, and then not applying that understanding when it came to judgement time. The way you've backed Warne, hedging your bets after seeing an opportunity to be 'right' about him given the odds of him being a success here are stacked in his favour, again, impressive. The way you went after posters who'd doubted him after our unbeaten run last season rather distasteful, however. You've recently posted about how you were critical of him after Stevenage and Reading games, all that says to me is you've read the room and waited for a moment where it would be almost impossible not to be critical. Well done. Good game playing. I agree with the point about Rooney though, A lot of what he said and did was part of a PR game too, and people fell for that! Freedom of the City FML! The rest of your post is just supposition. Does any manager truly have a settled side? Will having better players remove Warne's tactical blindspots, the ones we keep having to come up with some individual brilliance to cover up? What if, despite our signings, we still have a bottom 3 squad - does Warne have anything in his locker to get them performing above that standard? There's no evidence so far to say he can get a team functioning collectively to a level that belies the quality of his squad. You're saying that there's a 'clear effort to dismiss what's happening' but don't consider that it works both ways. Most of Warne's critics (previous to our good run, anyway) have been because of what is happening, most of his defenders center on what might happen. There's a clear effort, of which you're currently leading the charge, to dismiss just how low quality the opposition we're up against this season, and use the results of other teams as a distraction in order to to pretend that Warne has it all on to get a top 3/6 side placed in the top 3/6. 15 months is plenty of time to have things running far smoother than they are, yes. Mousinho at Portsmouth managed (6 months into the job) to get a squad featuring more new signings than ours playing cohesively as a unit right from the off. They've faltered recently, of course, but they're still top of the table and that's because they started the season with workmanlike and well organised, consistent (if uninspiring) performances.

No. Nyambe will be back soon and we won't concede more than another 10 goals all season. Be like a new signing. Brown will return from his loan a fully formed first team player and lead us to glorious victory with a play-off final hattrick.