Jonathan Woodgate

Do you want Woodgate in charge first game of next season?

  • Yes

    Votes: 102 49.5%

  • No

    Votes: 104 50.5%
  • Total voters
    206
  • Poll closed .
DJ said:
Indeed, all Eddie had to do was walk into the building and that squad turned things around.

They then overhauled a 20 point gap to Tranmere in 4 months. Of course Howe gets credit for developing them further, but to compare to Tindall and end up looking favourably on Groves? Some history is being rewritten there.

Tindall, who was working amidst a global pandemic, truncated seasons, natural shake up of relegation from the Premier League, the loss of £80m worth of talent in Ramsdale, Ake and Wilson. The disruption of Josh King and yet still had them top for a bit and never out of the top 6.

All the while working under the pressure from the top, who made it clear he was a sitting duck the moment he lost his first game. But didn’t give him the power over who he wanted to keep, who would be offered contracts, who would be sold etc.
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Comedy gold! The few apologists for the leather skinned 2020 version of Jimmy Quinn queuing up to clutch at the tiny amount of straws they can find.

He made a squad of full internationals look inferior to divisional whipping boys Sheff W not once but twice! Not even the original Jimmy Quinn would have done that. Butt of all the dressing room jokes, clueless in the media and sacked by his own best mate it got that bad behind the scenes.

But no, the few people that that laid their hat on him because they had heard of him and he’d played for us keep banging the drum he’d have been the next Pep if we’d just given him the Birmingham game to play Shane long his fantastic new signing...
 
Neil Dawson said:
Comedy gold! The few apologists for the leather skinned 2020 version of Jimmy Quinn queuing up to clutch at the tiny amount of straws they can find.

He made a squad of full internationals look inferior to divisional whipping boys Sheff W not once but twice! Not even the original Jimmy Quinn would have done that. Butt of all the dressing room jokes, clueless in the media and sacked by his own best mate it got that bad behind the scenes.

But no, the few people that that laid their hat on him because they had heard of him and he’d played for us keep banging the drum he’d have been the next Pep if we’d just given him the Birmingham game to play Shane long his fantastic new signing...
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For me I was never happy about the JT appointment, but gave him a chance, whilst there were some dodgy performances, usually one half, we were top 2 for a long time. Then things turned, few injuries, formations and team changing every week.
Worst manager in our history with the squad he had, think personally that's a bit harsh. With JW appointment felt the same, not what I wanted, but after 5 wins on the spin, and players actually pressurising teams and look like they are enjoying playing.
Where this leads us, I'm not sure JW is long term, but he's definitely improved things
 
Neil Dawson said:
Comedy gold! The few apologists for the leather skinned 2020 version of Jimmy Quinn queuing up to clutch at the tiny amount of straws they can find.

He made a squad of full internationals look inferior to divisional whipping boys Sheff W not once but twice! Not even the original Jimmy Quinn would have done that. Butt of all the dressing room jokes, clueless in the media and sacked by his own best mate it got that bad behind the scenes.

But no, the few people that that laid their hat on him because they had heard of him and he’d played for us keep banging the drum he’d have been the next Pep if we’d just given him the Birmingham game to play Shane long his fantastic new signing...
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Oh dear, back to the vein attempts at humour by putting people in little boxes. Oh they’ve disagreed with me I must put them altogether and label them. I’ve really missed that. So churlish.

Ignore facts like I didn’t actually back Tindall’s appointment, but because I don’t think he was as bad as Paul Groves you have to assume I thought he was the next messiah.
 
Neil Dawson said:
We do have the best squad in this division, nothing will tell me otherwise. We have played the top two Del mentions thrice and they have taken the grand total of one point off us. Even if we lose to Norwich on Saturday it will be 4 points out of 12 all taken on their own patches.
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We have one of the best squads in the division, there’s no doubt about that. But to state it’s better than Norwich’s because we beat them earlier in the season is a flawed argument. When we played them they were missing Buendia, Cantwell, Hanley and 3-4 others. They’d drawn the previous week at home to Preston and lost the following week at home to Derby. We played them at the right time.

Our squad is top 3 and we should have been challenging for automatic, but we don’t categorically have the divisions best squad.
 
Neil Dawson said:
Comedy gold! The few apologists for the leather skinned 2020 version of Jimmy Quinn queuing up to clutch at the tiny amount of straws they can find.

He made a squad of full internationals look inferior to divisional whipping boys Sheff W not once but twice! Not even the original Jimmy Quinn would have done that. Butt of all the dressing room jokes, clueless in the media and sacked by his own best mate it got that bad behind the scenes.

But no, the few people that that laid their hat on him because they had heard of him and he’d played for us keep banging the drum he’d have been the next Pep if we’d just given him the Birmingham game to play Shane long his fantastic new signing...
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sacked by his own best mate ????
 
Neil Dawson said:
Stan doesn’t start in our best team... you dropping Danjuma? No, didn’t think so.

No keeper is an uptick on Begovic.

Troost Ekong and Sierralta are not better than Cook and CCV.

Massina is a better left back than Kelly and Rico and Sarr and Pedro I’d have ahead of Brooks and Solanke. That’s it.

There is a reason they took one point out of six against us and thought Gosling would improve them you know Del.
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I agree with SDD that it is hard to compare for people not fully knowledgable of the Watford team - I only watch the AFCB games. It would be interesting if the question was also phrased as how many of AFCB's team would get into the Watford side. You might get two different answers to essentially the same question, particularly if you use phrases such as 'not better'. For example, Cook and CCV may also not be better than Ekong and Sierralta.

I'd imagine many more people would be agreeing if you said 'there aren't any squads significantly better than ours' or 'we've one of the best squads' rather than 'we've got the best squad' which is far more bullish. I'd agree with the first set based on my limited knowledge, but couldn't on the second comment because I'd have to be convinced I wasn't missing some up and coming star at any of the top 6. Do we think Watford / Norwich / Brentford fans were worried about Danjuma at the start of the season? We could have been equally ignorant of other players.

Watford have conceded 27 goals and we have conceded 40 goals, which suggest you would take their back 4 and keeper. If Bachmann is keeping Foster out of the side then he obviously is good too. For balance, we have scored more 66 vs 59 so may be playing in a more attacking style.

It's also hard to accurately judge a manager's ability when other factors intervene. I'd have felt confident at the start of the season that I could have steered Liverpool to a top 4 finish this year (by leaving everything to the assistants) but currently they are 6th. I'd be a madman to suggest that I was a better manager than Klopp, so using the same logic I'm reluctant to compare across the managers when they have different injuries, send-off, bad decisions etc.

I'm not sure how many points were taken in individual games is that important, as shocks happen, and by this logic Shef W has a much better squad than we do having taken 6 points from us.

I believe we can win every game we play, so I'm enjoying the Championship, and being exiled iFollow has been brilliant. Obviously I'd had wanted to win the league, but if we finish top 6, we haven't significantly underperformed in my eyes. IIRC, the bookies had Norwich and Brentford as favourites then Watford then us, and 442 had us down to finish 11th after the turmoil of the Summer.

I guess the main discussion is whether Tindall harmed our chances of going up or helped them. I doubt the two opposing 'sides' will ever agree.
 
Neil Dawson said:
Stan doesn’t start in our best team... you dropping Danjuma? No, didn’t think so.

No keeper is an uptick on Begovic.

Troost Ekong and Sierralta are not better than Cook and CCV.

Massina is a better left back than Kelly and Rico and Sarr and Pedro I’d have ahead of Brooks and Solanke. That’s it.

There is a reason they took one point out of six against us and thought Gosling would improve them you know Del.
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It's you who have made the assertion that we have the best squad in the league Neil and 'not better' doesn't really fit your assertion does it.

I've got Brooks/Stan as one position. Danjuma is one of the 50/50 choices along with our midfield three.

You're back to your old tricks - using dodgy selective 'evidence' to prove an unnecessarily polarised point. Nobody here that I can see has said they particularly rated Tindall, they've just said he wasn't the worst manager ever people like you and Waz try to paint him as.

Why did you gloss over it when people pointed out the massive flaw in your 'evidence' namely that the two narrow shithoused home victories over Watford and Norwich are apparently proof that we have a better squad (two different managers, two narrow shithoused wins) if this was true why didn't we win against everyone else we have a better squad against? Is the Watford win down to Woodgate and the Norwich win down the the squad?
 
Surely it comes down to how a manager plays the cards he's dealt, i.e. how well or badly he manages the various resources at his disposal.

It's like the discussion that football fans often have, "Who was the greatest ever manager ?" Was it Ferguson, or was it maybe Brian Clough ?

You could argue that under Ferguson Man Utd actually underperformed on the European stage. They never dominated the Champions League, as they should have done given their status and resources, in the way that AC Milan or Real Madrid have done. Took him over 10 years to win the Champions League.

On the other hand, look at what Clough achieved within 5 years at Forest, a slumbering medium-sized club with little history. Took a team struggling at the foot of Div 2, and without massive investment, took them to Division 1 champions and then European champions - twice !

Of course, there's no definitive answer to this, different eras and all that - but that's why we love talking about football.

For my part, I'd say Clough. I simply don't believe that ANYBODY else could have done what he did.

And so far as AFCB is concerned, I'd say Groves was the worst ever. Benson's teams were awful, but he had no money, no squad, the club was on its knees. Whereas Groves had a richly talented squad and made a complete hash of it.
 
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Matt Stevenson said:
I agree with SDD that it is hard to compare for people not fully knowledgable of the Watford team - I only watch the AFCB games. It would be interesting if the question was also phrased as how many of AFCB's team would get into the Watford side. You might get two different answers to essentially the same question, particularly if you use phrases such as 'not better'. For example, Cook and CCV may also not be better than Ekong and Sierralta.

I'd imagine many more people would be agreeing if you said 'there aren't any squads significantly better than ours' or 'we've one of the best squads' rather than 'we've got the best squad' which is far more bullish. I'd agree with the first set based on my limited knowledge, but couldn't on the second comment because I'd have to be convinced I wasn't missing some up and coming star at any of the top 6. Do we think Watford / Norwich / Brentford fans were worried about Danjuma at the start of the season? We could have been equally ignorant of other players.

Watford have conceded 27 goals and we have conceded 40 goals, which suggest you would take their back 4 and keeper. If Bachmann is keeping Foster out of the side then he obviously is good too. For balance, we have scored more 66 vs 59 so may be playing in a more attacking style.

It's also hard to accurately judge a manager's ability when other factors intervene. I'd have felt confident at the start of the season that I could have steered Liverpool to a top 4 finish this year (by leaving everything to the assistants) but currently they are 6th. I'd be a madman to suggest that I was a better manager than Klopp, so using the same logic I'm reluctant to compare across the managers when they have different injuries, send-off, bad decisions etc.

I'm not sure how many points were taken in individual games is that important, as shocks happen, and by this logic Shef W has a much better squad than we do having taken 6 points from us.

I believe we can win every game we play, so I'm enjoying the Championship, and being exiled iFollow has been brilliant. Obviously I'd had wanted to win the league, but if we finish top 6, we haven't significantly underperformed in my eyes. IIRC, the bookies had Norwich and Brentford as favourites then Watford then us, and 442 had us down to finish 11th after the turmoil of the Summer.

I guess the main discussion is whether Tindall harmed our chances of going up or helped them. I doubt the two opposing 'sides' will ever agree.
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Spot on this, and more reasonable than Neil and I tend to be when arguing.

Tindall ultimately lost his way and had to go. Some may argue that he would have turned it around with the new signings and players coming back from injury but I have my doubts - there was an all-too-familiar lack of confidence around the team that didn't look like it was going to change with him in charge.

The big worry I had with Tindall's appointment was that this was going to happen straight away and that he wouldn't be able to motivate the players because they saw him as a number 2. If we'd have started the season playing like we did just before JT got sacked I'd have agree with Neil and Waz - worst manager we'd ever had is harsh but there certainly would have been nothing positive to say.

As it happened he did motivate the team successfully for a time. They weren't Howe's 2015 side but they had their moments and got the results. This isn't "worst manager we've ever had" territory by any stretch even if ultimately he wasn't good enough.
 
I was OK with Tindall's appointment at the start of the season given the circumstances, but when he went, it was the right decision as he'd clearly lost the dressing room. Once that happens, the only way is down.
It was obviously a panicked move given the lack of a coherent way forward with a replacement, and once Woodgate was appointed permanently, I assumed that a slow downward trend to finish about 10th would ensue.

The difference between Woodgate at Boro and here is that at Boro (from all accounts) he did not have the luxury of getting his own backroom team in. Here, he has, and over time he has us playing properly as a team for the first time this season. Even in the early weeks, despite our good results, it still felt like we had a collection of (good) individuals.

Is he the right long term choice? Still not sure.
 
I'd imagine that there would be a 50/50 split between our first 11 and Watfords tbf.....i'd take their back 4 plus Sarr......probably a toss up between Solanke and Pedro.
 
Jim_AFCB said:
I was OK with Tindall's appointment at the start of the season given the circumstances, but when he went, it was the right decision as he'd clearly lost the dressing room. Once that happens, the only way is down.
It was obviously a panicked move given the lack of a coherent way forward with a replacement, and once Woodgate was appointed permanently, I assumed that a slow downward trend to finish about 10th would ensue.

The difference between Woodgate at Boro and here is that at Boro (from all accounts) he did not have the luxury of getting his own backroom team in. Here, he has, and over time he has us playing properly as a team for the first time this season. Even in the early weeks, despite our good results, it still felt like we had a collection of (good) individuals.

Is he the right long term choice? Still not sure.
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Didn't he bring in Robbie Keane as his no.2?
 
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Neil Dawson said:
Stan doesn’t start in our best team... you dropping Danjuma? No, didn’t think so.

No keeper is an uptick on Begovic.

Troost Ekong and Sierralta are not better than Cook and CCV.

Massina is a better left back than Kelly and Rico and Sarr and Pedro I’d have ahead of Brooks and Solanke. That’s it.

There is a reason they took one point out of six against us and thought Gosling would improve them you know Del.
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In fairness based on this season, Solanke gets in Watford's side and C C-V.
 
Topfarrier said:
I'd imagine that there would be a 50/50 split between our first 11 and Watfords tbf.....i'd take their back 4 plus Sarr......probably a toss up between Solanke and Pedro.
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You of all people wouldn't pick Pedro over Solanke? I'm a big Dom fan but I don't think that's a toss up.
 
SlowDownDerek said:
It's you who have made the assertion that we have the best squad in the league Neil and 'not better' doesn't really fit your assertion does it.

I've got Brooks/Stan as one position. Danjuma is one of the 50/50 choices along with our midfield three.

You're back to your old tricks - using dodgy selective 'evidence' to prove an unnecessarily polarised point. Nobody here that I can see has said they particularly rated Tindall, they've just said he wasn't the worst manager ever people like you and Waz try to paint him as.

Why did you gloss over it when people pointed out the massive flaw in your 'evidence' namely that the two narrow shithoused home victories over Watford and Norwich are apparently proof that we have a better squad (two different managers, two narrow shithoused wins) if this was true why didn't we win against everyone else we have a better squad against? Is the Watford win down to Woodgate and the Norwich win down the the squad?
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There are too many subjective things here so it can only be an opinion. I think Lerma, Pearson Wilshere and Billing are better players individually and collectively than Zinkernagel, Hughes, Chalobah and Gosling. You don’t. I can hardly tell you to change your mind, I just completely disagree with you. I watch a load of championship football as I’m sure we all do and I believe we have the strongest squad in this league followed by Norwich then Watford.

The head to heads are more relevant than when we play other sides because they are a direct comparison.

Any win or defeat are a combo of manager and team, luck and refereeing decisions. These things balance over a number of games though.
 
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