From Despair To Where? Snowflake Royal YorkshireRoyal99
In principle then, it's not really that much different to Pauno replacing Bowen. A poor-ish run of results at the end of the season before, followed by a short term increase at the beginning of the season after. As I say, you do not credit the predecessor for the new manager changing the results of the club, be it short, medium or long term.
No, it's really different.
Looking at Pauno, I think you can highlight those first 7 or 8 games as anomalous to the rest of his time in charge and that's perfectly reasonable but I don't really subscribe to this whole thing of attributing results to a previous or next manager, although I'm not trying to suggest you were doing that. You have a clear start and finish point to a manager's tenure. I see no legitimate reason to play around with it.
As you say, it's nearly always done to skew the analysis to a predetermined conclusion.
Ideally we would have a set of rules.
If a manager has pre-season, then X games, there is no issue, surely?
Every game is 100% down to him. No Manager ever starts with zero players and no club history.
Conversely,
If a manager was sacked at 5 to 3 on a Saturday and another employed at 4 minutes to three, to say that the performance is down to the second manager would be BONKERS, surely?
'I''m pretty sure, way back, the consensus was "after six games it's the new guy's fault."
First season Pauno had two excellent players in Olise, and Richards. We only have to see how each of the has done since. He also had the benefit of Joao scoring goals for fun, and, for the first eight games, the Rhino-Laurent Defensive midfield was awesome.
It's a bit weird to say eight wins and a draw is ANOMALOUS. Imagine if Ince had started like that and I tried to suggest it was "anomalous".
Pauno had a few things going for him last season and THIS season he had a massive mountain to climb, embargoes, the threat of points deductions, a crippling injury list. Consider for example, how many kids he was forced to played versus how many Ince was forced to play.
Ince had a better squad than Pauno this season, categorically so, and overall, his ppg was only marginally better than Pauno's (yeah, the last three games MIGHT be an anomaly...
For me the idea that Ince could have made much of a difference between the Preston win and Birmingham is unlikely. The players had to travel from Preston, rest Sunday, at least. I suspect Ince had 1.5 training sessions, the second fairly light (Tuesday) before the game. Is that REALLY enough to turn a team around?
If you say "yes" then explain the next three games which were poor defeats.
It wouldn't be difficult to say something like, "It takes half-a-dozen training sessions to genuinely impact a team". I'm not saying it IS 6, or 5 or 7 or a week, or ten days... but is it unreasonable to say, it takes SOME time, and agree on that?