LoyalRoyal22 Bri is a ledge. lay off. who cares about what subs he made? everyone was shit, confidence has gone, nobody could have changed it with any sort of substitions
But this is exactly the kind of attitude that prompted me to make the original post - I'm not having a go at Brian, but we have to accept that the sun doesn't necessarily shine out of his backside, and it does appear that, at this moment in time, he is pretty clueless about what he needs to change to get things moving....
He made a bit of a fuss about the change to 5 subs, and, to be honest, I think this has thrown him as much as anything - his approach to substitutions pretty much seems to have been to replace like-for-like (or in the case of yesterday and a few other occasions to maintain the shape of the team and move players around), yet he seems to have a complete blind spot to "having a Plan B"; changing the shape of the team and trying something different. I can't think of any occasion when moving Jobi to the middle has worked, yet he's tried it on a number of occasions - as far as yesterday goes, one can only guess at why he made the substitutions he made, but:
1) If Griffin was injured, then why didn't he just make a straight replacement with Cummings?
2) Maybe he felt HRK offered a better option on the left than Jobi, in which case, why not take Jobi off as a straight swap?
3) Perhaps he felt that having Jobi and HRK on would offer more attacking threat - well, given that moving Jobi to the middle rarely seems to work, I'd prefer to see HRK in the middle to be honest - or even pull Le Fondre off (he was obviously ineffective yesterday) and put HRK up front?
It just strikes me that the substitutions yesterday could be a sign that he's a bit confused in his own mind about why things are going wrong, and more importantly, what he needs to do to fix it....
The players are suffering a lack of confidence yes, but I'm wondering if they're beginning to feel they're on a "rudderless ship" and are starting to doubt Brian themselves - I've had a number of jobs in the past where I've felt much the same about my boss, and the only solution has been either for me to move on (transfer requests from Howard and Williams?) or for a new boss....the guys in question have been nice enough, but they just lost the plot when it came to running their businesses and once that happens the company's only going one way while the status quo is maintained....
I'm not actually suggesting that Brian needs to go, it just worries me that the root of the problem could be that he's starting to show that he does have limitations after all, and that's rubbing off on the players...since he's been here he's hardly put a foot wrong, and when the boss is brimming with confidence the team will often follow and vice versa.......now we've started so poorly it could turn into a vicious circle if we're not careful....