October 18th • 10/46 • 0-1 (L)
"Manning, you're a cunt. Manning, Manning, you're a cunt"
"Sacked in the morning, you're getting sacked in the morning"
"Manning ball is fucking shit, Manning ball is fucking shit"
In the Liam Manning Derby™, you'd be hard pressed to know which set of fans these chants came from.
Following the defeat to Ipswich and the end of the 16 year unbeaten run, Norwich have now lost a record-setting sixth home game in a row, against none other than Liam Manning's old side. Things are... bad.
The first half was genuinely dire. Slow, no movement, no energy. Passing sideways and backwards with no real sense of having any idea what about to do. After Bristol scored, even the Barclay started joining in with "you're getting sacked in the morning". There were also shouts for Knapper to go, and a strong chorus of booing at full time. The fanbase seems to have had enough.
I was going to do a post about sacking managers but never got round to it, so may as well do it now.
I don't usually like when managers get sacked, especially when they've not been at a club long. Take Postecoglou getting sacked from Forest today after 39 days, following his sacking from Spurs last season despite a European trophy. The blame can't always lay with a manager when there's 11 players on the pitch who are underperforming.
The problem I keep coming back to is that Manning has only been in charge for 2 months. If he's sacked, the concern is what happens in two or three months, mid-December/January, and we're in exactly the same position. Or worse, an even worse position. Then what do you do? The precedent would be that they would have to be sacked too, as you can't keep them after the same period with the same level of performance Manning was sacked for. But then we'd be on the third manager of the season and the fourth in a year, which would be embarrassing and on the same level as Watford. I feel like you have to wring every last drop out of the coaching team and be absolutely sure before making a change at this stage.
But saying that, I can't see a way back. 8 points from a possible 30 is just not acceptable after the spend in the summer. It's relegation form. The argument for cutting your losses and making a change sooner rather than later and giving someone else as much time to turn it around as possible has a lot going for it. I still partly feel that going too soon may backfire if things don't improve, but at this point I don't think it's going to with this coaching team. There's only so many times I can listen to Manning talk about needing to get the basics right in every post match interview without wondering why it isn't implied that the level of players we signed know the basics of playing football, but also that he still hasn't been able to instil that in them by now. I've also seen several Bristol City fans say he won't change and were happy he left. The only saving grace is that we've only lost each home league game by one goal, which is frustrating and on paper makes it sound like we could have got something out of them, but having watched all of them the truth is that we didn't deserve to get anything out of half of them at all, and that's a problem.
There's been people saying Johannes Hoff Thorup should never have been sacked, and some saying that was justified as while last season started well, the drop off was noticeable. He was supposedly not aware top 6 was the goal last season, which kind of makes no sense as surely that's the obvious goal for most clubs, especially bigger Championship clubs like Norwich, but he was also sold on a 3 year plan, so maybe he was under the impression top 6 was the 3 year goal. Either way, I feel like sacking JHT is a symptom of the Tinderfication of football. If it's not working out, just throw the manager away and go and get a new one. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and this time it clearly hasn't. Would JHT have done better with this squad? Would half of the signings in the summer have come in under him? We'll never know. But the football in the first half of last season was good, and I don't believe it was impossible that that could have returned after a good summer window.
A lot of the blame will have to land at the feet of sporting director Ben Knapper. It's his first time with the position and a lot of the fans around me, and elsewhere from what I've read, feel like he's out of his depth and is ultimately responsible for the current situation. And on paper he is, he signed the players and hired Manning. In fact he said Manning was his first, second and third choice. Well, I'd be interested to know who the fourth choice was. But everyone has to take some blame.
It's difficult to know what's next. The January window is agonisingly far away, but adding even more new players after a lot of churn over the summer, with the excuse of "a new squad needs time to gel" already starting to wear thin, may just make things worse. I can't help but feel that however poor the results and performances have been, that stability might be necessary in the long run. But I would also be astonished if the current situation gets turned around with Manning still in the dugout.