As you’ve all said, only time will tell (if he gets it).
I was happy we got him as I’d been following Napoli for a couple of seasons while he was there so it was exciting to see if he could replicate that here, but I knew he’d need time and possibly different personnel in one or two positions, which isn’t necessarily things he’ll get at this club. Maybe things actually seeming to click well early on will count against him as elsewhere his teams have started slow then improved and gone from strength to strength. I think if you bring in a manager like Sarri, you have to give him at least two seasons before judging him or else you might as well not bother.
I look at Guardiola’s first season at City and I wonder if it’d had been at Chelsea, whether he’d have gone at the end of it; he got so much stick about stubbornness and not understanding the English game, but he had his beliefs and he stuck to them, and look what’s happened.
Now I know Sarri’s not Pep, and our squad isn’t City’s, but it does show how these types of coaches operate and you have to buy into it for it work. But I suppose it’s easier to buy into it with managers who’ve already got the medals to back up their beliefs, and that’s one thing that will probably count against Sarri until/unless he wins something.
I’ve always preferred pragmatists like Mourinho over fundamentalist/romantics and I do wonder if making slight compromises and changes against the top six or seven in this first season would be wise, until we get to the point where we’re confident enough to be able to go to these places and go toe-to-toe. But his argument will be, how can you improve how you play in that system if you don’t play the system through thick and thin first. I’ll take some short term pain for longer term gain, but I don’t know if the board or most fans would.
I am a bit surprised at how negative things seem to be, especially after how things went last season (it’s not like we’ve come into this as title contenders, we were lucky to finish 5th last year). We’ve only lost one game going into December, and that against a very good team a lot further along than we are, and yes it was an atrocious performance which doesn’t help the mood, but we’ve had too many individuals have nightmare games over the past three season or more to put this solely onto the manager. It felt like Saturday was coming admittedly but it certainly shouldn’t be panic buttons and toys out of the pram time.