We should just stop hiring charletans.
Now, Poch lovers cover your ears.
He's an example of why managers typically don't like 10 years at clubs any more. Poch came in and brought in high pressing before Pep. Maybe not invented it, but was ahead of the curve. Fast forward 4 seasons and other teams had well and truly caught on, and Pep came over and showed us how it was really done. There was no Plan B for Poch then, so as much as we might forget, we watched some very miserable football in the last 2 seasons-ish of Poch, and he started doing little tweaks that didn't work (diamond etc), and had no plan B mid game. If we started bad a match, we ended bad.
For me, Ange turned up to the PL with a style that has probably never had to resist the fast, relentless pressing we have in the PL. If he was a decade sooner, he might have dominated. But he isn't - so its like playing chess with out of date opening that people have already figure out how to counter. If you can't tweak and adapt, you're screwed. In his case, he outwardly advertised that he had no plan B ("we won't change", "it's who we are"). Nice soundbites for the fans, but leaving your opponents with no doubts is hardly going to end well.
People will play the "Levy card" with it, but the answer is to find someone who can look at the current squad and make a functional XI out of them. That's not absurd to expect, and arguably what made Redknapp so successful here.
That's also the reason why I can't look past Thomas Frank. He's adapted the team from an attacking dominant Championship to being a pragmatic PL side that succeeded where Kompany's Burnley did not. He has lost (arguably) the best players each year and adapted more. This last season he adapted them again. We really shouldn't be looking for a manager with a Plan A or B, but simply a manager with the ability to put a good side out with the aim to win the match with the players available. I don't think that automatically means sacrificing style either - he's had near 40 PL goals between two of his forwards.
The only adjusting Ange did was to revert to a style I can only describe as reminiscent of the end of the Mourinho or Conte era - players defending for their lives against an onslaught. Again, I don't want to discredit him, but we didn't win the Europa convincingly. Not that it will matter in time, but it didn't serve as some crescendo of progress, but rather a death rattle of a team that promised to be exciting, relentless, and daring
