Hiring The Xisco. Luck Or Genius?

No my comment on "lack of football knowledge" was not about disagreeing, or agreeing with me. It was about not being able to see the inherent qualities in our squad that was clear and proven, instead seemingly basing their judgements only on results/performances.

 

I think they got lucky, but I'm sure a lot went on behind the scenes that meant it was calculated luck. But surely even those higher up had no idea quite how successful it would be. Swansea and Brentford both capitulated and second, if not first, was theirs to lose

 

I guess if we see it a pure good luck then all the poor managerial signings must surely be seen a just bad luck. And that no thought goes into it and therefore is a random spin of the wheel.

 

Id say there is a lot of luck both ways involved with managerial appointments. Mazzari, Silva and Ivic all felt like good appointments at the time to me but didn’t work out for a variety of reasons and circumstances. The only one that made no sense at all was QSF (second time).

Xisco was a cheap available option, and it worked out very well. Probably a combination of luck and judgement.

 

It was 'genius' out of the 2 votes available.

(I) Many on here (not me) thought he was a 'joke appointment and would not be up to the job'.

(II) Xisco got players to try and play more offensive from what they were playing.

(iii) Players played for him and got the results necessary for promotion.


He had some luck with the Deeney injury, but you need some luck as a manager, it is part of the success.

Saying it was lucky makes no sense to me, that means Arsenal getting Wenger and him going unbeaten was luck, or Man U getting Ferguson and them winning all of them trophies was luck, or Liverpool getting Klopp and them winning the league last year easily was luck. It ain't, those in charge deserve the credit for getting them in the first place otherwise the success/goals may not have been achieved.

 

I'm going with the theory of the broken clock being right twice a day

However decision making since mid season has slightly improved, so I'm willing to consider its perhaps to do with the change in technical director

 

I thik the offensive thing is a bit of a red herring. Ivic was overly defensive, ridiculously so. How many mangers would’ve taken our squad and played 5 at the back in the championship? Probably none. You can argue that Munoz not being ivic was skill, but being more offensive than Ivic was hardly a master stroke than only Munoz was capable of deploying.

 

Nothing red herring about it tbh. Ivic was more cautious amd Munoz less so. Therefore he was more offensive. Doesnt matter what a different manager would do as we didnt have a different manager.

Overall it was a good appointment by the folk in charge as the promotion goal was achieved.

 

Gino isn’t thick. At the very least, wants our club to do well financially. We needed to go up or face financial ruin.

He placed all of his faith in a young manager with little first team experience. I’ve mentioned this in another thread, but the randomness of his appointment made me more confident: clearly the guy had something special. And so it proved.

 

Playing offensively was more than just telling his players to do so.

He had to change the culture in the club, improve the mindset of the players so that they felt confident in attacking, to take players on, to be more mobile, find space and enjoy their game.

 

The culture change, according to most reports seemed to come from the players themselves after the Coventry game, rather than Munoz himself. My main point though was that it wasn’t exactly rocket science for Munoz to come in and be a more attack minded coach than Ivic, that would’ve been a prerequisite for any manager coming after him.

 

Are you talking about the oft repeated claims by Troost Ekong that he saved the day? He organised a players meeting, the like of which happen at every club at one time or another? So what? The question is would they have done under Ivic?

Culture change can't happen unless it's driven and facilitated from the top. But good managers/coaches don't shout about their successes anyway (so you wouldn't publicly hear about it. They allow their team to take the credit, even if it wasn't theirs to take.

 

Muñoz played the hand he was dealt very well and for that he deserves enormous credit. As he also does for turning the whole club into a feelgood place.

I strongly believe that had Ivic had the balanced squad he'd asked for, we'd have started the season 4-3-3 and would've been interesting to see if a proper comparison between what his version and Xisco's would've looked like.

Who knows what would have happened if Deeney hadn't got injured and whether Xisco would've had the balls to drop him. But the switch to a 4-3-3 with no Deeney was being called for by most of the people on here so it certainly wasn't a tactical masterstroke.

 

I don’t think I’ve heard WTE say it himself, but it was widely reported at the time clear the air talks were held between the players after the stinker against Coventry, and that he was the catalyst. They said up to that point there had been a very negative atmosphere between them all, with them all jumping down each other’s throats rather than supporting each other. From that point they made a choice to be supportive of each other and the results speak themselves. It’s interesting that up to that point Munoz had pretty much stuck with the status quo, picking Deeney, playing 4-4-2, results had been poor and performances no better. Why did he allow such a negative attitude to remain amongst the players for so many games?

 

What do you mean "allow"? It doesn't just happen instantly with a wave of a magic wand, particularly when there are some poisonous senior and powerful characters in a team who may be quick to home in on early mistakes to justify their accusations of a new manager being young and inexperienced, for example.

It takes a little time, and in my experience in team management, if an incoming manager comes in riding roughshod over those characters jt can do more harm than good. Far better to encourage the team to sort the situation out themselves. If the right values and mindset is encouraged, then the team members soon realise that the bad apples amongst them are wrong and need to be ignored.

 

I would’ve thought it would be pretty basic and easy for a new manager to come in and say ‘how about being a bit more positive towards each other’. Rather than waiting for 5/6 bad performances to elapse.

 

Yep, OK.

Dead easy, and they always listen straight away too, and everybody lives happily ever after.

In fact, may as well just send a text.

 

Fear not. ZZ has this covered with his experience in team management

 

A lot of talk about bad eggs and disruptive players etc ..... our form and morale also picked up notably after a certain Mr Capoue left ..... fingers often pointed at Deeney, but if moral is so good now and Deeney is clearly in the dressing room ergo he is not a problem ??

 

The thing is, results were good in Munoz's first five games during which we picked up 12 points, even if performances weren't always, and this masked the problems. It was only when results suffered during that supposed easy trio of games that the problems became apparent and this resulted in a changed mindset and a dramatic upturn in form, and I'm with zztop that it can't have just been Deeney being injured and a player meeting having to do with it with no input from Munoz whatsoever.

 

I think in reality there are a number of things that happened or didn’t happen that none of us really know, and will probably never know the answer to for sure. I think given our predicament, the fact we very much needed promotion and Munoz was coming in with us already off the pace, I do struggle with the concept that he was simply observing the status quo on purposes and giving himself a number of games to see how the land lay. I think the reality is he didn’t have time for that, but a number of things happened like Deeney getting injured which very much worked in his favour and the rest is history.

 

There was no sign of Deeney in the changing room celebrations after the Millwall game (although I may have missed him). Everyone else was there, subs, squad, backroom staff, coaches, but not the Club Captain. Very strange.

In his Hive interview just after the game, he said that he felt out of it, and that was probably true.

I am speculating that after effectively going on strike after the lockdown when we were battling relegation, then publicly spouting that he wanted out of the club after relegation with his "come and get me" plea to the likes of Spurs, and then making only occasional contributions on the pitch whilst publicly moaning at his players with his "stop trying to play football, just get it up to me and I'll do the rest" rant, I reckon his credibility had gone and was not a positive figure in the club just as Xisco was starting to try and put things right. I dare say that he was a negative influence citing Xisco's lack of experience. I also think that his "injury" was probably a niggling injury that needed treatment/an op, but that it's "outing" was timed to coincide with things coming to a head and him being dropped.

Thereafter he has played only a peripheral part in the changing room as his previous negativity about the coach and the way they were playing had been proved to be wrong and that is why he felt that he could not celebrate the promotion with everybody else.

 

Deeney has been at every game .... look at the embrace Xisco gives him on the pitch against after Millwall. That’s not an embrace to a trouble maker. I’m not saying he is perfect, but I do think he has probably contributed off the pitch this season. If he had been celebrating madly, done a John Terry, then everyone would hammer him, I get where he is coming from and I think he got it right. It does look as though his injuries are catching up with him and I’d be surprised if he was with us at the start of next season. I think he would want to leave Watford at the top and wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him given a free transfer in the summer to finish his career at Birmingham City.

 

I’d like to see it happen, but we’d need to pay the final year of his contract up (about £3.7m) and then he’d need to be prepared to take a very low wage at Birmingham. That depends on two things, First, Gino being prepared to do something he clearly absolutely hates doing, when instead he in fact normally offers ridiculous contract extensions so he can still earn loan fees/transfer fees from players. Second, Troy needs to personally believe his worth is more aligned with reality, rather than some misguided belief he can still cut it in the PL and therefore command a higher wage than a struggling championship team would be prepared to pay a 33 year old, with injury problems and with one goal from open play this season.

 

Based on his WD18 interview, it seems he very much thinks he can still cut it at the top level, and puts some of his poor performances this season down to playing through injury...

 

I wouldn't say that it was genius because I thought it was glaringly obvious prior to Xisco coming to Watford that we desperately needed someone to bring some positivity to the club and bring the club together with one aim. I didn't think we necessarily needed an experienced tactician as we have plenty of experience in the squad and a better team than the rest of the league, maybe with the exception of one or two teams. Therefore I kind of seen the logic behind giving him the job, even if I was unsure about his CV. Certainly wasn't lucky I think the club knew how the players were feeling under Ivic and had an idea about what kind of manager could get the the best out of an underperforming team.

 

Most matches we look comfortable, we have the least shots on goal against in the division by quite a distance.

 

I don't suppose we just picked The Kid out of a hat, so it was probably not just luck that we appointed him. We probably did some general research and picked him out a list of young managers with possible potential, and from that point of view we probably did get lucky in picking one who's potential has so far shone through, and hopefully will continue to do so.

So lets just say it was not luck and it was not genius either, lets say we took an educated guess and got lucky and leave it at that

 

Absolutely. Without the apparent culture change implemented by Xisco there would have been no environment in which the players’ meeting would’ve generated sufficient traction to have had the required result.

 

For sure. Most teams (football and otherwise) reflect the manager in some way, shape or form. If the whole team is demotivated and underperforming, there's usually a simple explanation...

Similarly, if a new manager comes in and the behavior of their reports changes, the new manager is usually the catalyst for that. This often happens by facilitating an environment where the reports feel like their input actually matters, and they feel empowered to do something.