Interesting notion- Tony Mowbray wouldn't have bought Tony Mowbray.

And you know if a player is doing well by watching them. Yet data on players has become a very prominent tool. In most lines of work, a management hire will usually have to justify themselves at least partially in numbers. Truth is almost anything in existence can be explained in numbers. It's just a case of establishing how. Stats like possession can be used to make Mowbray look good - but only if you ignore all the other stats that make him look bad, like this terrible run we are on, an almost inevitable decline in league position and points this year, and the stats I posted in the other thread that show his strategy of controlling possession backfires. Empirically.

Maybe win percentage relative to win percentage that club had in the year before a manager took over. Like a win percentage improvement stat. Although I'd say points are more important than wins. Difficult with promoted sides, but for those you could take an aggregate of the three promoted teams from the season before (or a 5, 10 year aggregate if you liked) and create an 'expected points' metric to compare it to, sort of in the vein of xg. Then see how the manager performs for points compared to that. Depending how you view these things you could also base it on teams who have finished 1st, 2nd or won the playoffs, to tailor it more, but I think I saw a stat years ago that the team winning the playoffs actually tend to do better than the team finishing 2nd, so that might indicate it isn't too useful. It might be possible to add in other factors too, like net transfer spend relative to performance, or altering the expected points metric, with a bit of tinkering. Tricky though, especially since so many fees are undisclosed which probably makes it a non starter. Maybe player number turnover though, which could indicate how a manager deals with a rebuild. On the whole I agree managers are harder to run data on, but there are things that can be done. Comparing league finish to that predicted by the bookies could be another, although that has an element of subjectivity.

Mowbray's biggest problem, above all else, is that he simply has no fucking clue where players should really be used on the pitch.

Do you seriously need to ask that? Do you think Mowbray would still be in charge at any other club of our stature in this league?

Lots of people have been coaches at lots of clubs. Why Beattie and Duff?

It looks like it, but hard to tell. They just tend to grow a lot quieter after a defeat, and quieter still the more of them there have been. But come a win they seem to feel vindicated and spring back into life. Of course, the same can be said for those who want him gone. It can feel churlish, or open you up to a lot of nonsense, to publicly state you want the manager gone after a decent result or two. Yet when we don't continue to state it at those moments, the happy clappers come out with 'where are the Mowbray Out brigade now?' It's all very peurile. People should be able to just have a mature discussion about it, but it isn't the way of the world.

Ainsworth sounded more upset by our losing today than Mowbray did! "Blackburn have lost and I don't like that, ever. It is the first result I look for" I think he said a bit more than that about it too, but I can't seem to find it now.

Five games later, I'm updating these stats: When we have 51% possession or more: Games: 31 Points: 31 Points per Game (PPG): 1 When we have 50% or less (note: all were 49 or less): Games: 8 Points: 15 PPG: 1.875 Both have come down a bit tbf, but the under 50% has come down because of a single game, a draw away to the best side in the league, one the manager was still dining out on today. When we have 50-59% possession Games: 12 Points: 12 PPG: 1 60-69% possession Games: 14 Points: 11 PPG: 0.786 70% upwards Games: 5 Points: 8 PPG: 1.6

Most important recruitment for the new season? That's obvious. New manager.

The problem with that theory is Waggott is already on record saying it won't make us any money and we may actually need to borrow more from the owners for it.

Whilst I don't think he is the best candidate, I'd swap the two of them right now without a second thought.

I feel like that entire performance was banter.

I'll call it now, if we keep Mowbray through all of next season, we are going to get relegated. The last two times I predicted we would get relegated were the last two times we got relegated.

Someone on FB posted half the players were laughing at the end of the game. I turned it off as soon as the whistle went, so can anybody confirm or deny this? Outrageous if true - unless they've been told TM will get the sack for a loss of course.

If there are any excuses today, ANY excuses at all, I'm going to cross the border into calling him a cunt. Most managers I can think of who we have had would have been holding their hands up and calling this run completely unacceptable several games ago. Instead we have had a litany of excuses and zero accountability from him. Starting to think a diarrhoea shit has more integrity.

He doesn't need to stoop, he's already sat down. Maybe next game he will actually lie down and bring a pillow?

Literally all of them in the wrong role. He is going to reach Kean levels of resentment if he doesn't fuck off. Even he wasn't playing every player out if position as if he was trying to unlock some sort of xbox achievement.

Although it feels like they don't give the merest toss, from the constant radio silence, it's not very likely to be true. Even billionaires aren't going to ignore one of their businesses that owes them nearly 200 million and counting, with about 20 million of losses adding on every year. The fat one is probably still watching the games too I imagine. He is supposedly fairly into football. The other two probably just periodically check the results. Besides that, even if none of them are paying any mind beyond occasional reviews, their man Pasha will be.

Anyone else think Gareth Ainsworth looks a bit like Loki today?

If we are going to lose, which it very much looks like we are, I think I'd rather Wycombe bag another goal or two. Maybe, just maybe (I know, hope against hope) the penny will drop in Pune if we get tonked off a poor team likely to get relegated.

Oh I have the game on. I'm just only actually watching about half of it.

Aye we over-rotate for sure. But I was more getting at, the fact we do rotate so much should reduce the frequency of injuries we are getting. But even with the excessive rotation, somebody seems to get injured every game. Aside from whatever is happening in training, I also blame the way Mowbray doesn't wait for players to properly recover and thrusts them in too early, even when we have reasonable alternatives. The main reason for rotation should be to manage fitness, but Tony will run someone into the ground, his rotation primarily happens due to thinking he has to tailor the whole team to the opposition we face. So it ends up not really helping prevent injuries.

That moment then, where whoever that was on the edge of the box had the perfect opportunity to shoot, with a decent chance of scoring, but instead they did some ridiculous pirouette to backheel it to nobody, sums us up more than any other moment I've seen all season.

Was actually me that said that 😉 I honestly don't know what the fuck we do to pick up this many injuries, but it has to be due to the training. We rotate constantly, even in a season as congested as this it shouldn't be so bad. Obviously it doesn't help that our transfer strategy, such as it is, doesn't take any account of injury records (Ayala, Holtby).