sancho_panza

Putting St Johnstone's thrilling 2020-21 season to one side, the basic point you were trying to make is that it's somehow not particularly important that Rodriguez made the final of the Asian Champions League (which they may yet win) and won two domestic trophies in the two seasons he was at Urawa Reds by making a silly comparison with Callum Davidson. Of course those results matter and you didn't mention them in your first comment so I did. Overall, his record in Japan across six years is pretty good - he got a small side promoted, improved Urawa Reds in his first season by 17 points, won two trophies with them, made the final of Asia's biggest club competition, won manager of the year in his first season, and even in his second season they weren't any worse off than before he arrived. It's not Jose Mourinho circa 2004 but it's a better recent track record than practically everyone else we're being linked with. If there is somebody with a better record that gets linked to us then I'll happily back them instead. Makes complete sense, the guy who's managed over 400 games is just as much of a blind punt as the guy who's managed 4 games in his career but happens to be Scottish.

It's the biggest club competition in Asia and you're comparing it to St Johnstone winning a League Cup final against Livingston. If he'd managed anywhere else I wouldn't have a clue about him to be honest but I used to live in Osaka and went to J League games fairly regularly. I don't follow it much now but I know the standard is substantially better than what people think it is. Your posts basically give the impression you think we should only be looking at managers who have had major success there like Ange. The reality is that managers like that simply wouldn't be interested in coming here. His record is also better than you're portraying it as. He got promoted with Tokushima Vortis, who aren't a big side and have mainly been in the lower leagues. With Urawa Reds, they were 10th the year before he arrived. They finished 6th in his first season (17 points better off) and won the main cup competition (he also won manager of the year). The following year they went into the Champions League and made the final but their league form went back to about where it was before he arrived. That's far more good than bad. If there's a better realistic candidate then I'm all ears but all the other candidates we seem to be getting linked with are either just blind punts (Robson, etc.), past it (Strachan, Lambert, Lennon), or not actually interested in the first place (Wilder, etc.)

If you want to compare getting to the final of (and potentially winning) one of the biggest club football tournaments in the world to beating Livingston and Hibs then sure. The league he's managed in is hardly irrelevant. If he'd managed a side to sixth in the Premier League and won the FA Cup then we'd all be excited. Sixth in the Cymru Premier less so. The reality is the J League is a really good standard and getting a manager who'd done better than this to come to Aberdeen is pretty delusional - Ange had won the title there and wouldn't have touched us with a barge pole before he went to Celtic.

He also made the Champions League final (which hasn't been played yet) and won Japan's main cup competition. The J League is miles better than Scotland quality wise so I can't really understand why we should be scoffing at someone who's had moderate success there when we've been appointing the likes of Goodwin (less success in a worse league), Glass (no real experience) and Robson (no experience whatsoever).

To me this is just a function of chairmen generally having no idea how to judge managers. Most of them use a trial and error approach and are led by results alone. If a monkey throwing darts at a club calendar was getting results then he'd probably be viewed as a genius regardless of his methods. Despite that, I think it is possible to judge a manager properly. It's not an exact science but there are certain traits most good managers tend to have - e.g. they often talk in specifics (player X needs to do this) whereas bad managers are overly general (battle, don't switch off, etc. - meaningless phrases that convey no actual information). You would also likely be better served looking at their track record of decision-making (i.e. did individual decisions in previous jobs make logical sense) rather than overall results, which can be skewed in the short-term by things that had nothing to do with the manager. Obviously it's a lot harder than this in practice, but considering most clubs are still using the throwing spaghetti at a wall approach to hiring a manager, I'm not sure we'd have to be that smart to do better.

Not sure what the logic is in waiting until the 83rd minute to make a substitution when we've played virtually the entire game with ten men.

And a defensive-minded manager can still have the team scoring goals (see McInnes in the good years). That doesn't mean much. The reality is we have the worst defensive record in the league and the expected goals against numbers suggest we're lucky not to have conceded more. Goodwin didn't just fail to make us solid, he didn't even attempt it in the first place. We went into the season at least one centre back short, our full backs are a rotating cast of players whose best attributes are going forward, and outside of games against the Old Firm his tactics simply exacerbated our defensive weaknesses. One of the main reasons we had success under McInnes is that we had a period of boredom under Craig Brown that laid the foundations for it. We're just as much of a shambles now as we were when Brown arrived in my opinion, the only difference is we have more points in the bag from earlier in the season and aren't bottom of the league.

McGhee was wildly popular when he was appointed and that didn't end well. Personally, I think there's something to be said for a boring manager given the state we're in. If you look at the managers that have failed spectacularly for us (McGhee, Glass and Goodwin) it was mostly due to them not sorting out the defence. We went into seasons with inadequate cover in defensive positions, almost as a choice so we could prioritise more attacking players, and tried to play a brand of progressive football we were incapable of executing. The boring managers (Brown and McInnes) were more successful in comparison because they didn't suffer from delusions of grandeur and focused on getting the defence right.

We don't have many leaders, but I'm not sure how much that would have helped on Monday. The role of a leader on the pitch is to motivate people and make sure everyone is following instructions but you need to have a gameplan first for that to make much difference. A lot of our passages of play on Monday ended with Stewart trying to launch raking passes to nobody, McCrorie tanking it down the wing like a rampaging water buffalo, or something similarly daft that any manager worth their salt would have told them in no uncertain terms not to do. The movement from our attacking players was non-existent at times. Duncan looked lively but was trying to win the game by himself. All of this while we were supposedly trying to build from the back and dominate possession. That's the way teams play when they aren't receiving clear instructions from the manager and they're just trying to wing it. If we want to dominate games then there needs to be a coherent system/strategy in place where everyone understands their role. The leadership on the pitch stuff comes after that but it's not a substitute for it.

On the plus side this means our goalkeeping must be quite good.

Really worried by that statement. I've gone from thinking the main problem is our manager to thinking there's something quite dysfunctional about the way the entire club is being run. Even if there is some compelling financial reason to keep Goodwin for the time being, you don't put a statement out saying you're putting him on the naughty step.

He seems to have the personality of someone who would make a good manager but that doesn't count for much if he lacks tactical understanding or the ability to judge players. The one thing I've taken from all these slightly dull dressing room documentaries that have come out in recent years (All or Nothing, etc.) is that projecting authority and shouting vague motivational statements at players is far less important than the analysis/tactical side of the game. I'm not saying personalities are completely irrelevant, but it's the analysis/decisions that make a manager and Goodwin seemed completely lacking in that department.

Twenty years ago I would be grabbing a pitchfork right now but I genuinely can't be bothered. If anything I'm optimistic about what might happen when Goodwin gets sacked tomorrow morning. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I still think we have a bit of quality in the squad and a good manager could get something out of them. Goodwin was never going to do that. Must be in the discussion for worst manager in our history.

Can't disagree. We could give him time for the sake of it but I can't see anything in what Goodwin has done here to suggest he's actually up to the job. We've had one win, one draw, and six losses since the break, the latest being arguably one of the worst results since the McGhee era, but his decision-making in isolation and the way he conducts himself off the pitch seem even worse than the results to me. He wasn't even particularly great at St Mirren. He finished 9th and 7th with them (pretty much where they still are without him). It was a decent rather than exceptional job - the kind of thing umpteen other managers have done at middling clubs in Scotland over the years. We desperately need someone with a coherent plan to build a squad and I've yet to see anything from Goodwin that gives me confidence he can do that.

I also thought we played better than the two shots on target/possession statistics would suggest but I'd say across the last two games Goodwin probably got the balance right for about 45 minutes out of the 180+. The balance was almost absurdly wrong against Celtic and clearly wrong at the end of the Rangers game. You could throw in the 4-1 game at Ibrox before that which was shockingly bad. By the law of averages you're bound to get it right at some point I guess. I'd also accept the analysis would be completely different if Roos had just held on to a pretty middling shot but I judge Goodwin on his decision-making overall and there are just far too many red flags now for me to think he's actually a good manager. We look very much like a squad with some half decent players and a mediocre to poor manager that's holding everyone back rather than making them better. I actually think his limitations as a manager are making our squad look worse than it is. We have holes in the squad, which is why we're playing Richardson every week, but players like Miovski, Duk, Ramadani, Barron, McCrorie, Scales, Besuijen, Ramirez, etc. have at least some talent/pedigree that's above what most of the teams around us have. We're not getting the best out of them as a collective, all we're seeing is flashes of it in moments of individual brilliance from Duk or someone else. This is what happens with genuinely bad managers, they drag everyone down around them and you start thinking the quality of the squad is much lower than it is in reality. Good managers do the opposite and get the best out of what they have. So far Goodwin has shown little ability to do that, even if you put to one side the frankly amateurish looking alpha male stuff/obsession with culling everyone associated with the former manager.