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Strachan / McLeish


dezmondo

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I think it's now fair to say that both previous managers weren't quite as bad as a lot of folk thought. 

Strachan 

I personally thought his time was up as he had his chance and failed. Now I'm beginning to think I was wrong. There's no way we would be any worse off than we are now, and most likely we would be in a better position with the advantage of continuity. We were performing better than we are now, we had a fair bit of momentum and Strachan himself admitted he had seen the err of his ways in the middle of his tenure - by overthinking and complicating his lineups. 

McLeish 

I said at the time and I stand by it, he simply wasn't as bad as most people thought or would have you believe. Bottom line - if McLeish had been in charge last night, this board and social media etc would have been going into meltdown today! The guy got pillered from day one and wasn't given a fair crack in my opinion. He had 6 competitive matches in charges and won 4. Israel away wasn't as bad as everyone thought and was a typical albeit not acceptable loss that most Scotland managers have suffered. Kazakhstan was a disaster, so essentially he was bagged for one bad loss - despite having a group of players not turning up (I know the players not turning up is an issue itself that doesn't reflect well on the manager). I'm not saying he definitely shouldn't have been sacked but it would maybe have helped if he got the support and patience that Clarke appears to be getting. My point simply is I don't think we're currently any better off. I'm not convinced that team last night would have fared any better against Kazakhstan away - despite Clarke having a better pool of players to choose from. 

I'm in no way against Clarke and will support him and hope he does well. I just think think the players continue to get off lightly with their abject performances, the grass isn't always greener on the other side when it comes to our managers, and our problems run far deeper than just our choice of manager. 

Edited by dezmondo
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McLeish and his two wee mates were rightly sacked. They were grossly incompetent. The truth about what really went on behind the scenes with them in charge will come out in a few years when things have settled down.

If Strachan had brought Callum McGregor, Ryan Fraser and Stuart Armstrong into the team much earlier then he did. Trusted a young Andy Robertson more rather than leaving him on the bench. And never had that obsession with fitting Barry Bannan into the team - then he might still have remained Scotland manager to the present day !

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McLeish second spell was a disaster pure and simple. Not saying if Clarke had been in charge the team would be above Russia now but Kazhakstan was beyond words. In a funny way though he'd have still contributed if the team actually qualifies by winning the nations group but to me the mood and mindset was all wrong.

Strachan was a typical Scottish reign really.

He took over in the 2014 qualifiers in a similar situation to Clarke now and got some home and away win to Croatia which must be the highest ranked nation beaten in last 10 years? Also unlucky in being 1 up to Wales and then I think Snodgrass handled on the line and got sent off. With the resultant penalty scored that massively swung it for Wales. Still finished above Wales despite losing to them home and away.

2016 qualifiers we know were so frustrating. Did the hard work v ROI and then blew up with the annual surrender in Tiblisi. I had no issue with him staying on for the 2018 qualifiers.

2018 he could've been sacked after Lithuania and Slovakia but then the team rallied, he started selecting the right players in the right positions and were actually looking pretty decent by end of the group but typically left things a game too late to turn things round.

The worst was Levein anyway. Like giving a fan from the terraces the job for two years. Plenty of running around and getting stuck in but tactical sophistication....nah too much like hard work.

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I think it just comes down to not being good enough.You can be unlucky once or twice but we have consistently misfired at moments of potential greatness, with an element of comedy gold thrown in for good measure.

 

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McLeish might have won 4 of 6 but all 6 games were against lower ranked teams and we should have been looking to win 6 of 6.  Some of his bizarre methods are already starting to come out but there is a lot more to come.

Strachan was largely good but remember him playing Fraser at right-back? Strachan was looking really poor until Scott Brown returned to the team. I think Rodgers had a big impact on the team by playing 7 Scots for Celtic who Strachan was able to build the team around whilst they had the unbeaten in donestic games season. 

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3 hours ago, PASTA Mick said:

McLeish might have won 4 of 6 but all 6 games were against lower ranked teams and we should have been looking to win 6 of 6.  Some of his bizarre methods are already starting to come out but there is a lot more to come.

Strachan was largely good but remember him playing Fraser at right-back? Strachan was looking really poor until Scott Brown returned to the team. I think Rodgers had a big impact on the team by playing 7 Scots for Celtic who Strachan was able to build the team around whilst they had the unbeaten in donestic games season. 

When was the last time we won 6 out of 6 games?;)

 

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In getting who we think is the right boss the onus is now on the players to perform, no excuses. No great talent in midfield though so just miss it out and play two up front. Fed up us trying to play like Barcelona, we are not able to do that.

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On 9/7/2019 at 5:26 PM, dezmondo said:

I think it's now fair to say that both previous managers weren't quite as bad as a lot of folk thought. 

Strachan 

I personally thought his time was up as he had his chance and failed. Now I'm beginning to think I was wrong. There's no way we would be any worse off than we are now, and most likely we would be in a better position with the advantage of continuity. We were performing better than we are now, we had a fair bit of momentum and Strachan himself admitted he had seen the err of his ways in the middle of his tenure - by overthinking and complicating his lineups. 

McLeish 

I said at the time and I stand by it, he simply wasn't as bad as most people thought or would have you believe. Bottom line - if McLeish had been in charge last night, this board and social media etc would have been going into meltdown today! The guy got pillered from day one and wasn't given a fair crack in my opinion. He had 6 competitive matches in charges and won 4. Israel away wasn't as bad as everyone thought and was a typical albeit not acceptable loss that most Scotland managers have suffered. Kazakhstan was a disaster, so essentially he was bagged for one bad loss - despite having a group of players not turning up (I know the players not turning up is an issue itself that doesn't reflect well on the manager). I'm not saying he definitely shouldn't have been sacked but it would maybe have helped if he got the support and patience that Clarke appears to be getting. My point simply is I don't think we're currently any better off. I'm not convinced that team last night would have fared any better against Kazakhstan away - despite Clarke having a better pool of players to choose from. 

I'm in no way against Clarke and will support him and hope he does well. I just think think the players continue to get off lightly with their abject performances, the grass isn't always greener on the other side when it comes to our managers, and our problems run far deeper than just our choice of manager. 

My thoughts:

 

Strachan: Yeah he did in fairness turn things around but lets be honest that was mainly because Brendan Rodgers came in at Celtic and established a Scottish core with a winning mentality.  Strachan was able to harness that for the national squad and got us some decent results.  I don't ever remember him coming out and admitting he made mistakes in the outset of those qualifiers (but I may be mistaken).  After the draw in Slovenia (which wasn't a bad result, it was only a failure because we absolutely needed a win) he came out with an absolute shocker of a comment regarding genetics being our downfall.  The man is simply too arrogant to admit his own failings and essentially blamed the players for not being good enough.  It was absolutely the right decision to let him go.

McLeish: to be fair to him I have a small amount of sympathy for him because really he should not have been allowed anywhere near the job.  There's clearly some underlying issues as he simply isn't the same man he was back in the day.  You just need to look at interviews from his time at Birmingham and Aston Villa compared to his Scotland press conferences and post match interviews.  He's lost that air of confidence and authority when he speaks and struggles to find the right words when he speaks.  It's sad and I wish him all the best in the future but the simple fact is his tenure has set us back years!  The players confidence is at an all time low due to some of the horrendous performances we've put on under him.  I understand what you're saying about 4 competitive wins in 6 is a good record but in international football one bad loss is enough to derail an entire qualifying campaign, which Kazakhstan has done!  Along with the stories of incidents in the dressing rooms and players not having a scoobie what they're supposed to be doing it was right to bag him when we did.

Clarke:  We need to give him time!  His first 3 games have been against Cyprus, a stuffy hard to beat team like we once were and the top 2 seeds!  There's so much wrong with the squad just now especially defence.  For starters we need a better right back (Tierney must start there in the future once he's fit again IMO) 

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17 minutes ago, vanderark14 said:

Really? There very few managers would opt to resign instead of taking a pay out. 

That is exactly what Kevin Keegan did when he quit the England job stating it was far too big for him and In doing so he gained my respect.

Would have thought McLeish was more than adequately compensated when he was sacked by Villa - who were believed to have paid him in the region of £1m to jump ship from Birmingham - not to mention the EBT he received during his time at Rangers.

Edited by Catchart Circle
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28 minutes ago, Catchart Circle said:

That is exactly what Kevin Keegan did when he quit the England job stating it was far too big for him and In doing so he gained my respect.

Would have thought McLeish was more than adequately compensated when he was sacked by Villa - who were believed to have paid him in the region of £1m to jump ship from Birmingham - not to mention the EBT he received during his time at Rangers.

Good for kevin Keegan, I also read that gordon strachan did the same at Middlesbrough or maybe it was Southampton

Most managers or players dont give a fuck about our respect. None of them and I'm willing to bet most on here would resign when they could get the big payout.

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We’d have been beaten 0-3 (or worse) on Friday night if McLeish was still in charge. 

Friday’s result wasn’t Clarke’s fault. He set the team up correctly and we started really well. For some reason the players on the park shat themselves when we went a goal up and (probably subconsciously) sat back and tried to see out a 1-0 victory. 

Our captain having another poor performance and gifting a goal to the Russians didn’t help either. 

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Strachan: I understand why he was sacked. Didn't qualify and all that. But I did always seem like a weird thing to do right at that moment, given the form of the team. Unbeaten in 7.. taking points from Slovenia home and away, Lithuania away, Slovakia at home and so close to beating England at home. Now all those games look very lose-able. And while he maybe should have thrown younger players into the starting lineup sooner, he had them around there and they'd likely have stepped up the following campaign due to retirements if nothing else. So while he wasn't perfect, we were always in with a shout and could pull off some really good results. It could have been a lot worse.. and it now is.

McLeish: Couldn't go soon enough. It was just incoherent. The constantly shifting system and call ups. It's like he was just scattergunning, hoping to find something that worked, rather than sitting down and taking a look at what we had and how that could be used. Also the performance against the Khazaks was.. just awful.. and essentially ended this campaign in the opening match. Not sorry he's gone at all.

Clarke: Too soon to judge, but Russia was the first time i was worried. The first time i thought "what on earth's he doing there?" We go 2-1 down, and he swaps McGinn for Christie (like for like position-wise) and takes Forrest off for McLean. A right forward for a defensive mid, pushing McGregor to left wing and Fraser to the right. It seems like our response to going behind in a must win game was to go more defensive. And we stayed like that until the last 10 minutes. Also all his changes seemed to just be shuffling the players within the system, there was no change of formation to try and push the issue, maybe that's a symptom of it being early days and not having had time to work on another system with the players, but you'd like to think that they could cope in a pinch. The rest of this campaign feels like it's just friendlies for us now. Build up to the playoffs. A lot of work to be done it seems.

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8 minutes ago, er yir macaroon said:

I think before Clarke is judged we ought to consider whether any manager would have got results with that back four. Until we can consistently get our best players on the park we’re going nowhere. 

As I said yesterday, clarke shouldn't be judged yet.

He has had 4 matches

Cypruse - win

Russia - loss, a tough one to take but its one match

Belgium - 2 losses. Fergie in his prime, Klopp or Guardiola wouldn't beat Belgium with that Scotland team

The one criticism I would have of clarke is the players just don't look up for it but Clarke deserves time to change this. Players should up for the challenge of these so better teams, surely they want to to test themselves against the best?

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56 minutes ago, vanderark14 said:

As I said yesterday, clarke shouldn't be judged yet.

He has had 4 matches

 

 

And yet plenty folk were prepared to write off McLeish before one of teams had even kicked a ball. We need to stop sacking managers on the basis of one or two bad results. It's very clear that our players are just not good enough. We need to start accepting that and stop putting unrealistic expectations on our managers. An international manager has very little scope to do much about the quality of our players. Any (AND ALL) our managers need to be given time to try to get the best out of the very limited talent pool available to him. Maybe we need to finish 5th in this group (although I'm fairly sure we will sneak into 4th) to convince people of how bad we have become. We are pretty close to how bad Wales were when they ended up in pot 6 for the World Cup draw. They found a few cracking players who dragged them into the top ten. We haven't found any of those sort of players yet. Maybe we never will?

 

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Strachan did okay as Scotland manager. Not great, but okay, and certainly nowhere near as bad as some folk on here made out at the time.

Strachan had some poor results, and he was perhaps overly loyal to certain players and he could be sarcastic and say daft things at press conferences and all the rest of it. But he left the job with the team unbeaten in 7 matches and a near 50% competitive win record (impressive for any boss of the Scottish national team), and with some creditable results along the way too. Aye, he made mistakes but the way he rejigged the side halfway through the World Cup qualifying campaign suggests he learned from them.

At its best Strachan's teams played a brand of football based around possession, more akin to the 'expansive' style that George Burley gurgled about (but never delivered) than the counter attacking style Scotland sides tend to play. He got lucky with Brendan Rodgers building his Celtic team around homegrown players but all international managers are reliant on the good work of club coaches to a large extent. At the time Strachan's dismissal made sense but even then I had a sneaking suspicion me might miss him.

McLeish, the second time around, was simply the wrong guy for the job. I don't know what is going on with him but it's clear something is amiss.

The atrocious result in Kazakhstan aside his competitive record, I think, was actually okay; but the poor organisation, the ridiculous number of player call-offs - something that happened only rarely under Strachan - and just the general sense of malaise around the team at the time meant he had to go.

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On 9/7/2019 at 6:27 PM, ErsatzThistle said:

McLeish and his two wee mates were rightly sacked. They were grossly incompetent. The truth about what really went on behind the scenes with them in charge will come out in a few years when things have settled down.

If Strachan had brought Callum McGregor, Ryan Fraser and Stuart Armstrong into the team much earlier then he did. Trusted a young Andy Robertson more rather than leaving him on the bench. And never had that obsession with fitting Barry Bannan into the team - then he might still have remained Scotland manager to the present day !

Add Griffiths to that list also

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