Graza wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2019 1:24 am
Results wise, pretty much a rerun of Moyes' last managerial stint, now where was that...
False equivalencies though. Moyes' 33 in 27 came in one season, with no pre-season, having not signed a player and having to deal with three out of four star signings that weren't performing, not being allowed to sign anybody, having the board underbid for decent targets and ending up with Hugill as a panic buy because somebody at Preston told Moyes he was a nice, hard-working lad.
Pellegrini's 32 in 27 came across two seasons, both of which came with a full-preseason, spending over 100m on players (some of which signed by his hand-picked chief scout), not improving obvious key positions that needed improving, not building on what he was handed, forcing the chairman to sign his number one target at any cost as his equivalent of Van Halen's bowl of M&Ms with no brown ones in it, leaving no money to sign a central midfielder two seasons despite selling one each summer.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think Pellegrini has actually done anything wrong. Pellegrini was Pellegrini, the guy who has been playing classical South American, tippy-tappy, back-to-front, playmaker/goalscorer-driven football as manager for 30 years. A guy who is a cog in a machine, who needs the vision to come from other people. He did what he's always done, which is why he was great at Villareal with Riquelme and got a tune out of Malaga with Santi Cazorla and had that first brilliant season with David Silva at Man City. We don't have those players and we don't have the technical staff at board level who can bring the vision. By appointing him, David Sullivan was trying to both hide from reality and appeal to the star-f***** community of West Ham fans who only watch West Ham and want big names. He can placate them with a Pellegrini because they have no idea of nuance either.
And we need to be honest. West Ham in the summer of 2018 were in crisis. It needed to be a five-window fix; plug up the obvious holes in the team, find obvious replacements for older members of the squad, then find players who can kick the club up a notch. That was going to take 2 1/2 to 3 years with a manager of vision who actually knows how to do that sort of thing but completely impossible with somebody like Pellegrini.