Time to worry?

Tim's optimism isn't shared by everyone. Dai seats out his worries.

I’ve been reading and watching and listening a lot to the views of people, far more intelligent than me on the managerial situation at NUFC at the moment but there are three things nagging at me and as I sit in a quiet Welsh seaside town, with a pint and a packet of porkies, I want to share them with you.

Firstly, Eddie Howe’s departure is very odd to me. If he did want to walk in February, why did the ownership team keep him on and allow this situation to fester when it became clear toward the end of the season, it wasn’t a good one?

I really feel the owners and directors have pushed Eddie too hard, taken advantage of the fact he is an honourable bloke and it’s had a negative impact on everything at the club in terms of the playing staff. They didn’t want to deal with a big mid season fallout and possibly weren’t prepared in regards to a replacement. Their inability to act on a situation which was clearly going wrong is hugely concerning especially when you consider all the comings and goings at boardroom level.

It screams to me that they’re an organisation which doesn’t know where it’s going. Whatever you think of Howe or if he should have left or not, the bigger problems remain unresolved even if the new fella is the next Pep.

My second issue is the new fella. Jaissle seems to have got everyone giddy by being a so called disciple of Ralf Rangnick. Being influenced by someone and even helped by someone as you develop your career is obviously important. Valuable in fact. But I have a cautionary tale. As is tradition for any regular readers of my pieces, we are going to have a brief sidestep into Welsh football.

Craig Bellamy took over the Welsh job after having a successful time being Vincent Kompany’s number two. Having relegated Burnley he failed upward to Bayern Munich and has them playing great football with some real quality players.

When Bellamy took the Cymru job he promised the same high energy football and he wanted to dominate possession. After a promising 0-0 draw with 10 man Turkey in his opening game as manager, he stated “this is the worst we will play under me”.

Sadly, this wasn’t true. A failed World Cup qualifying campaign punctuated by poor defending a bad decision making (by Bellamy) saw Wales miss out to Bosnia in the playoff semi final on penalties. His high point was a 7-1 victory over North Macedonia where Wales were admittedly excellent, but at last check North Macedonia haven’t exactly been pulling up trees.

I want to be clear that I’m not comparing Rangnick and Kompany, but more to say that you can have best intentions to play a certain way but you need three things. The ability to translate what you want to your players, and the right players to suit your style. Most importantly the ability to adapt when it’s not going the way you want it to. Bellamy, and to an extent Eddie Howe, were not good at the latter. It’s important.

Has the new guy got the ability to translate what he wants to happen? In an Austrian league winning machine - yes. The Asian Champions League - yes. Both of those thing seem a far cry to me from managing a Newcastle team who’ve sold all their best players and have replaced them with youngsters. In the Premier League. Yes, there’s time to go in the transfer window, but that means we can still lose players as well as sign them. I’m worried.

Now it seems your man is fine with adapting to in-game situations but I feel that’s easier to do in Austria rather than the Premier League. That lack of absolute top level experience worries me. I know many will point to Brighton as a club who keep replacing their manager with an up and coming younger man, but with all due respect to Brighton, we are a bigger and better and frankly more demanding club than them.

Whilst the “new plan” may be to buy young and sell for a profit, I’m not sure that will work for us and the manager has to hit the ground running and achieve in that setup. I think that’s asking a huge amount for a man who has never been close to this level before or at a club of our size.

The final thing here is those players. Building a cohesive team playing a high energy game is not easy, and perhaps the young players we have can do this literally in terms of their athletic capabilities, but to step up to a Premier League league level with limited experience whilst playing a high energy game is not easy. Assuming Bruno is gone, and Lewis Hall being far from happy, we could be starting the season way behind where we were and we finished 12th.

I think the club and ownership group have a lot to answer for here. Whilst many will (rightly) point to PSR and other limitations it doesn’t excuse their haphazard approach to an already complex situation. Simply placing a new manager in charge really doesn’t solve the problems.

With that being said, and this stands for Howe too, I don’t think the players we have are good enough. We’ve sold established European level players and replaced them with youngsters. However talented those people are, putting them all in the fire at the time and expecting results puts the players themselves and the new manager in a very challenging position. Add to that, others being past their sell by date or simply not good enough (add your own guesses as to who is covered here…) and we are in a perilous position.

If I’m being entirely honest, I’d shake hands on finishing 14th right now. Anyone who thinks different to me, I wish I had your optimism and I’d love nothing more than to be wrong. But replacing the first man to win a trophy for this club for decades with someone who’s never won anything in the top divisions, and hoping that him liking a manager (Rangnick) who has won the German Cup and the German equivalent of the Championship will make him transformational, strikes me as optimistic in the extreme. I think NUFC fans need to prep themselves for a hard year and a tough watch. Fingers crossed I’m wrong come May 2027.

Dai Rees