Devil's Advocate

If you watch the highlights you'll realise the players running back to stop Donny attacks look like 6 year olds all clumped together trying to get the ball.
It's so disorganised at the back, maybe a consequence of losing players like waterfall, there's no leaders out there.

As a manager of a sales team myself, albeit not of a football team.

I have some sympathy with Artell, he has inherited the he majority of this squad, he spends a lot of time and effort coaching them, advising them and likely demonstrating to them how he wants them to play.

During those exercises I’m sure they all implement the training and repeatedly execute it. All talking a good game and being enthused about it.

Then comes Saturday, they cross the white line and fail, they don’t complete the most simple of passes, they don’t get stuck in, the majority run around clueless, many choose to not put in the effort or look up to the fight.

As a manager this is highly frustrating, I believe people who do not do as they are told either don’t understand or they have chosen not to follow the instruction.

Having selected the players following the weeks training/coaching I suspect those players have demonstrating they know what to do and can do it,

Therefore in conclusion they have chosen not to on the Saturday or simply are not good enough to implement this against an opposition with its own game plan and desire to stop us playing.

For me I cannot judge Artel until more of the players are of his own choosing and some of these players that are “not fit to wear the shirt” have moved on.

Quoted from Northy81

As a manager of a sales team myself, albeit not of a football team.

Interesting comparison. You will know that you measure a team through input and output measures. When the outputs are poor you focus on the inputs and you give poor performers very specific measures to signpost what good performance looks like. You also make it clear what the consequences are for not delivering on the input measures. You drive better outputs through delivering inputs.

I don’t see the team delivering anywhere at the moment. Is Artell giving them clarity of inputs and what the consequences of poor performance are? (For the individuals, the consequences for the club are obvious).

For poor performance you also move from a management style of coach and delegate to direct, making it clear what they have to do and how to do it. The lack of organisation on the pitch suggests this is needed.

The players don't know their jobs, it's an organisational and managerial issue.
We need to pick the right team, the players need to know their jobs and then do them.

I think it's clear that the players don't believe in the manager and his methods. They look confused and don't trust the system, which reflects on the pitch as they are second guessing everything, and being too slow in their thoughts and actions.

They are doing the dreaded get rid and let someone else pick up the slack routine that struggling teams fall into. They don't want the ball.

Then we inevitably go behind and things just spiral out of control from there. At that point, we become desperate to get back in the game, and the opposition just bide their time and pick us off. Stockport could have had 5 or 6 last week, but they just spent the second half keeping us at arms length, and using all their subs.

It's become the equivalent of a big man putting his hand on a small mans head while he desperately swings punches at thin air.

Quoted from BrMarin

We were also unfortunate in that they had 4 shots on target and scored 5 goals.

They also hit the post to be fair.

Plus the o.g. came when their right back was left unmarked and we were outnumbered at the back.

It's not unfortunate to lose goals when we play like that. It's inevitable.

We,ve replaced glennon and mullarkey and we still leak goals, showing how exposed our defence is.

Quoted from ex-merseymariner

They also hit the post to be fair.

Plus the o.g. came when their right back was left unmarked and we were outnumbered at the back.

It's not unfortunate to lose goals when we play like that. It's inevitable.

We,ve replaced glennon and mullarkey and we still leak goals, showing how exposed our defence is.

We replaced them with defenders that their current club's fans said were decent going forwards but not defensively. So we replaced them with the opposite of what we needed. We'd apparently been looking at these players in the summer, so we can't blame the manager ignoring the recruitment expert anymore