If you go back to pre-Poch, we had Jan Vertonghen who was so mashed in his confidence, he looked as bad as Gary Doherty. He was labelled as "shit," with a shit attitude etc.
Then we brought in a competent manager and we got our Super Jan, now regarded as one of the best CB's we've had in decades.
At this moment in time, I'm convinced that what happened to him is currently happening to the majority of our team. They have no confidence in their manager, and this is translating into their own self confidence. They're mashed ATM and need that change to a manager who will bring all that back.
I see all these posts saying our players are mentally fragile, yet I dare anyone on here to claim that after close to 2 seasons of having your faith and confidence virtually obliterated, you wouldn't also be approaching every game without a high degree of trepidation. When losing becomes the norm, no matter how mentally strong you may be, the expectation of some form of disaster is right there with you, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, as that fear and hesitancy essentially makes your worst fears come true.
That team needs a manager to come in who, right off the bat, they look at and their first thought is "he'll fix this, he knows what he's doing."
That, for me, is the initial manager bounce, stop the rot and build up that belief in him and themselves from thereon.
We thought we'd get that with Frank, fixing our defensive frailties, and the initial signs were that he did. However, his ultra conservative approach has just eroded that, then the errors started creeping back in, which made him even more timid in his approach, and now we see a team that are at an all time low confidence wise.