Poll: OCUK Team of the season; The Manager!

Team of the season - Manager

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MissChief

MissChief

MissChief

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The team is all but complete, but we now need someone to manage them.

Try to pick a manager who has done more than expected of them. Someone who has exceeded expectations or 'managed' the team to a position far higher than they have any right to be.

Again my thanks to the mods.

1. Mourinho
2. Wenger
3. Van Gaal
4. Pearson
5. Koeman
6. Hughes
7. Pellegrini
8. Monk
9. Allardyce
10. Pardew
 
Pardew, Monk or Hughes are the only candidates I would even consider. Pardew with everything against him including the fan base still did comfortably well for Newcastle in the first half of the season and his work with Palace has been fantastic.

Hughes has done a ridiculous job, turning an overly defensive side into a side that actually plays football is a hard job when replacing most of the team... when you have most of the same team and have spent sub 10mil total across two seasons that is pretty phenomenal. Not only has he improved their style dramatically they have done better in both seasons than they had managed before under a manager who spent massively more every year(20mil a lone the year Pulis left).

Monk, spent more and didn't change Swansea's style but still impressed. Swansea improved points and league position and he seemed a capable manager with a team willing to adapt and exploit tactics of opposition, change the starting line up to go after certain teams.

Too much of Koeman's credit is coming from simply the lowered expectations of an already solid team losing what people thought were key players. For me they only lost one key player in Lallana and they spent more than enough to replace him. Pretty much Liverpool and Utd WAY overspent on the players they got off Southampton. He still did well and he bought well, but Southampton were a really good team when Poch left and the changes aren't as fundamental as people think, keeping Schneiderlin was key to that though. Losing the central mid rock would have meant bigger and more significant changes.

Chelsea were poor as they limped out of Europe, did buy okay but I still think Drogba and Remy as back up is remarkably weak for a top side. They had the best squad and won the league comfortably without impressing for most of the season. Wenger did nothing special, LVG I think had a very impressive season as he had to turn around the team completely and had a nightmarish injury crisis to start with. Strong season, not brilliant, didn't buy particularly well but who were his choices is questionable. Almost everyone in the team improved over the season, they moved up the table and got into the CL. Job done, just not spectacularly.

Any manager that sucked for half the season or more didn't do well. Fat Sam, Pearson, awful, Pearson for well over half the season and Fat Sam for the second half of the season.
 
Mark Hughes for me, got stoke playing some great stuff, given all the top teams a scare or outright played them off the park and picked up a record number of points for them.
 
drunkenmaster said:
Any manager that sucked for half the season or more didn't do well. Fat Sam, Pearson, awful, Pearson for well over half the season and Fat Sam for the second half of the season.
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I may be slightly biased here but that's very harsh on Pearson. A team should be judged across the whole season, and on that basis Leicester were the 14th best team in the league. That is far higher than was expected, indeed they were most people's favourites for one of the relegation places.
 
Koeman. Picked up the pieces of a team that had just lost a chairman, manager and nearly half the first team, bought incredibly sensibly, got decent signings in that all came without superstar price tags and managed them to the teams highest ever premier league placing, highest points total, almost equal best defensive record and within a sniff of European football and picked up two manager of the month awards for only the second time in the clubs premier league history.

Monk also did well IMO, though club bias sways me to Koeman, given he rescued my club at a point when we could have been lumbered with someone useless who sent us plummeting again.
 
Koeman for me, was tipped to go down following the clear out from the previous season and the bunch of "nobodies" that came in.
 
Koeman for me too. Drunkenmaster said they only really lost Lallana that was a key player. Lambert, Shaw, Lovern & Chambers were also key players for Southampton, they may not have done that well at their new clubs, but they were and would have been key players for Southampton.

And yes, Koeman spent quite a bit on Pelle, Tadic, Forster,Mane & Long, but they still made a transfer profit of over £32 million.

They finished 7th and were brilliant to watch most of the season.
 
No Martinez? Come on that's unfair he was just unlucky.

Jose for me, the mans a god. Roman needs to have a word with himself. If he hadn't have fallen out with him they would probably have only lost the title once or twice in all the years they messed about with other managers.
 
planty said:
I may be slightly biased here but that's very harsh on Pearson. A team should be judged across the whole season, and on that basis Leicester were the 14th best team in the league. That is far higher than was expected, indeed they were most people's favourites for one of the relegation places.
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14th best and spent a decent(but not huge) amount, and 14th by way of teams below them being horrifically awful as opposed to Leicester being good.

They also picked up a lot of those points against teams who had somewhat given up. We see it every year, teams get safe but end up too far behind for europa league spots and they stop playing. Newcastle, West Ham, Southampton and to a degree Swansea.

Sunderland, QPR, Villa, Hull and Newcastle for the second half of the season had dire managers who made woeful teams that couldn't play football.

Pearson getting 14th with the utter tripe below them in the league is a testament to how bad those teams were not how well Pearson did. They won 4 of the first 29 games then came across teams in the run in with nothing to play for and got very very lucky.

There is a big difference between Pearson not being as terrible as the utterly terrible managers who screwed up the seasons of the teams below them and Pearson actually being good let alone manager of the year. Pearson was absolutely better than some truly awful managers, but that doesn't make him manager of the year, it made him some small amount better than complete incompetence.
 
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