Yet more lazy rhetoric which is aimed at every single manager.
The manager is held accountable, and if we continue on our current trajectory he'll lose his job. But it won't be because of substitutions, that's for sure.
Games are won and lost with lots of underlying factors at play. Blaming subs is just the easiest to run with, much like the old 'he's no Plan B' and 'he doesn't know his best team'. All impressively dumb takes to try and simplify something pretty complicated.
I’d finish it here, because this has gone well beyond a disagreement about substitutions and we are probably boring half the forum membership.
In this exchange alone, alternative views have been dismissed as “nonsensical”, “lazy pseudo-analysis”, “lazy rhetoric” and “impressively dumb takes”.
Elsewhere today you’ve distinguished the “reasonable fans” from others and described the Charlton away end as a “horror”. That fits a wider pattern of talking down to supporters, whether they disagree with your analysis or are actually stood in the stands watching the team.
Your opinion is perfectly valid. It isn’t automatically the intelligent one while everybody disagreeing is emotional, simplistic, lazy or stupid.
And the Alex Neil fixation is becoming almost parody. Today alone a criticism from Sheffield United supporters somehow became “like what Norwich fans said about Alex Neil”, then Heckingbottom not acknowledging the away end was defended with “AN very rarely did after a defeat too”. Going further back, you even argued that the people who really appreciated Neil were those who travelled home and away, as though supporters who disagreed simply hadn’t understood what they were watching.
Neil was neither the uniquely persecuted football genius nor the benchmark against which every subsequent PNE argument needs measuring.
And to correct the straw man one final time, I have never said matches are lost because somebody made a substitution. I’ve criticised Heckingbottom’s in-game management, tactical reactions, shape changes and substitutions as part of that. Last night was one example. We controlled the game, Watford changed the contest and we failed to regain control. Plenty of supporters independently reached exactly the same conclusion. Even on the Hecky thread today, other posters specifically identified his inability to adapt during games as the major concern.
You can produce increasingly complicated explanations for why the manager isn't responsible for individual errors, finishing, the opposition's substitutions, player quality or whatever the latest issue is. Eventually though, the manager has to be responsible for the performance of the team he manages.
And ultimately all the attempts to portray criticism as unsophisticated run into the numbers.
Currently has Heckingbottom at around a 27% win rate and 1.18 points per game across 96 PNE matches. This season PNE are 1 win, 0 draws and 5 defeats, with 6 scored, 12 conceded and no clean sheets. Most importantly, after six Championship games we are 24th, bottom of the league, with three points.
At some stage you can stop explaining why everybody else’s analysis is apparently too simplistic and look at the table.
