Quote Originally Posted by Coney View Post
Emery needs to change the style of play that the players are used to. He also needs to learn the PL game and how his ideas fit into it - he will also need to adapt his initial ideas in the light of experience. Some things will work, some won't. I am expecting a few iffy games here and there.

Three games is not enough to judge him on. He tried pressing with the fullbacks and got found out. If he learns from that and changes some of the tactics to cover it, that is perfectly fine and a good sign.

I think anyone saying he is no good at this stage is being very premature. He might be crap he might be very clever and just what we need. But 2 games against established top sides and one trying out a tactic with the fullbacks is not enough to judge him on.

Some impatient people might expect a quick improvement over Wenger (think about that - look at how high we were under Wenger even in his worst years and be grateful) but nothing is going to happen overnight.

I would rather we built up over a season and then bought some more players where needed than have a great couple of months of superficial success followed by a crash and burn.

I think we need to wait till later in the year - beginning of December before we start to make serious judgements.
I kind of agree with a lot of what you say. I know I definitely agree that 3 games isn't enough to say if a manager is world class or not.

However I think my problem is I really expected to see us being something "different" this season; I mean that "difference" could either make us better or worse; but we would be different and everyone would be able to see it and point to the "difference". You can see how different Sarri's Chelsea look from what we saw last year already.

But besides the new substitution regime it all seems pretty much the same here. Our attacking style remains the same and our defending, even with the pressing and playing two deep lying midfielders, remains the same. Do we say it's the personnel? Can our players not be coached to play in a different way? Or do we need to do a Pep and change 80% of them to suit the coach?

Let me go straight to what I think. I believe Emery is just making it up as he goes along i.e. he's not prepared. Their isn't a style or a vision he has for this team yet and thats why it seems not much has changed in style and the same personel keep starting.

Now this necessarily is not a bad thing, Pep did this with Rijkard's Barca in his first season and was quite successful- then he introduced extreme tippy tappy seasons later.

But it is disappointing to me personally, because I got tired of our style long ago and wanted to see us different. Of the 6 halves of football we've had this season I got the most pleasure from our 2nd half performance against Chelsea where we had little possession, sat deep and looked unfamiliarly comfortable doing so. Yes Chelsea eventually scored but we looked prime for the counter and I felt we could get them back. I felt we had finally seen something different, something of Emery in that half, but then we play West Ham and its pretty much all the same.

So I'm not writing the manager off yet, it just it seems like all he wants to do is fine tune us instead of going for the overhaul.