Part 2: "Lost that loving Phelan"
Silva’s arrival bemused many, most notably hard-of-thinking
SKY Soccer Saturday pundits Paul Merson and Phil Thompson who mocked Silva and
the club for not appointing a manager who “knows the league”. Looking at his
nationality rather than his pedigree and spouting a small-minded opinion on
national TV came back to bite them fairly quickly as Silva made a good start by
beating Swansea in the FA Cup, Bournemouth in the Premier League and losing,
with some misfortune, at Champions elect Chelsea.
Paul Merson and Phil Thompson. I'll just leave this here. pic.twitter.com/baEZa0pR54— GeorgeWeahsCousin (@WeahsCousin) February 4, 2017
While things were starting to turn around on the pitch,
off it the club continued to bemuse everyone. Top scorer Robert Snodgrass and
Jake Livermore were sold to West Ham and WBA respectively for £10m apiece.
Selling Livermore to raise funds for the new manager wasn’t the worst decision.
Selling the most creative and deadly member of the squad most definitely was.
Despite having spent four months doing absolutely nothing at West Ham –
Snodgrass finished 2016/17 as City’s top scorer.
The £20m raised was reinvested in a much needed reshape
of the squad. Oumar Niasse (Everton), Omar Elabdellouai (Olympiakos), Lazar
Markovic (Liverpool), Andrea Ranocchia (Inter Milan) and Alfred N’Diaye
(Villareal) joined on loan with the club picking up their huge wages for five
months. Kamil Grosicki signed for about £7m from Rennes. It was a scatter-gun
approach to recruitment and severely short term thinking but it did address
most of the weaknesses in the squad.
As well as changing the personnel, Silva changed the
style of play, the mentality and made technical and tactical changes in just a
few days. His favoured formation was 4-2-3-1 with two holding midfield players
both breaking up and launching attacks and the pace of Markovic and Grosicki
was utilised in counter attacking quickly and with quality. He showed his adaptability
by also using 3-5-2 and 4-4-2 depending on the players available to him – the
injuries and suspensions were still a regular occurrence.
The team pressed higher and earlier under Silva,
particularly at home, and defenders were pushed up to close the spaces between
the lines and deny the opposition room to play. He switched to using a zonal
marking system from set pieces in light of the horrendous record of conceding
from dead balls before he arrived and it improved things immediately. He also
recognised the importance of individuals like Harry Maguire, Tom Huddlestone
and Eldin Jakupovic and they became a fixture of the team.
Silva was never able to turn around the team’s terrible
away form, though he had far tougher fixtures than Phelan, but won 8 of his
first 9 home games and gave us a real chance of staying up. The victory over Manchester
United, sadly in vain, in the second leg our first ever League Cup semi final (an
achievement that no one can take away from Mike Phelan) came courtesy of one of
the most complete performances I’ve ever seen from City. United had eleven men
behind the ball at times as The Tigers dictated the game and scored a superb winning
goal.
The home win over Middlesborough was the most thrilling
Premier League performance at the KCOM Stadium in any of our five top-flight seasons.
It was the third of Silva’s home victories that had necessitated coming from
behind – a major weakness of ours for the last decade. When City brilliantly beat
Watford in April having played for an hour with ten men and then took a rare
away point at Southampton courtesy of Jakupovic’s late penalty save it showed
that this squad had the bottle for the fight. Under pressure, they’d ground out
results and showed the nerve, and the quality, required to stay up.
Then we lost at home to already relegated Sunderland. And
that was that. Every weakness we’d ever had was exposed in a “typical City”
performance in front of a big, expectant home crowd against the worst team in
the league. We passed poorly, presence up front was non-existent, marking from
set pieces was appalling and the composure and intelligence of prior matches
was absent. By the time we played Crystal Palace away the following Sunday, we
had to win to stay up. We were battered, same failings, and then royally
hammered by Spurs at home to complete a miserable season whose moments of hope
had been temporary, cruel and, eventually, heart breaking.
Despite his copy book having been blotted in the final
few games of the season, Silva had been a massive success. He’d shown enough to
make me think that if we’d somehow escaped the drop, he could have established us
a comfortable mid-table team. In the event of relegation he had a release
clause and being the career-focused personality he is, was always going to say “Adeus”
to Hull. That was confirmed on 25th May.
The club now need to appoint his replacement in short
order. They need to make the right appointment but it can’t take all summer. We
have six loan players returning to their clubs and the likes of Harry Maguire,
Andy Robertson and Abel Hernandez have one year left on their contracts and
need to be sold while they still have good value. The rest of the squad need an
inspiring leader and the club to show ambition to get promoted to keep the
majority of them together. We can’t afford to leave buying players to the last
minute AGAIN. The squad needs 8-10 additions and they need to be found and
settled much earlier than the last few windows. This is a club that could eaily
bounce back to the Premier League. But it’s one that could very easily break up
and sink. It’s been held together by sticky tape in the shape of Steve Bruce
and Marco Silva in the last two seasons. Attention is urgently needed.
My picks:
Player of the Season: Sam Clucas
Game of the Season: Hull City 4 Middlesbrough 2 (5th
April)
Goal of the Season: Sam Clucas (vs. Watford)
Best Signing: Lazar Markovic
No comments:
Post a Comment