All seems a bit caretakerish.

You mean the one we sacrificed a probable European place for last season?

I do feel sorry for Puel in some ways and think you are right about the general feeling. It was stirred up by the media who pretty much immediately started to creating waves about when he would be axed. And I guess, logically speaking, ever manager eventually goes, but with Puel it seems this was focused on very early and therefore has become the focus over what he can actually do whilst he is here.

However, there are things that he hasn’t helped himself with which have already been discussed quite recently so I won’t go over all of them again.

I’m not sure anyone truly knows his plan, which of course would make fans uneasy but this is compounded by the fact that if it is what we currently are seeing/logically predicting based on his comments, style, changes etc - then a)fans are going to look at what he did successfully when he first came in and wonder...why? B)consider if, actually, even if it is achieved i)how successful can it be in comparison to what we had before ii)how successful can it be in comparison to what he did when he first arrived iii)in practise, how successful can it really be given our club size and pulling-power for the quality of players needed for it to work.

I’m not sure he can win now, stick with it and there isn’t currently any sign of it working well enough and quickly enough to keep us achieving at the level the owners would want in the interim whilst waiting for this ‘plan to transpire.

Change things to steady the ship in the interim and the. Revert back to trying to change (and for me, it is change not evolution at the moment) and reactions will be twice as bad.

The best scenario would be to revert to 4411 to make the most of the additions we have made to the squad and in the short term, hope we haven’t lost the muscle memory of this formation (although to be fair to be Puel, the formation itself isn’t that much different, more the tactics) and long term long to incorporate and evolve from this (like he seemingly was trying to do for the first month of his tenure.
Alternatively, look at 352 but this has its own possible problems

I really just don’t get why he doesn’t play 4411 considering what he wants to do???

I know this has been debated to death on other threads, but I firmly believe that Puel is suffering from ‘building for the future’ paralysis. We often hear these phrases from managers or captains in all sports: ‘moving in the right direction’, ‘building for the future’, ‘long term vision’, ‘bringing through youth’ etc. etc. The problem with this approach is the destination might ultimately be unobtainable.

Take the England national football team. They are often trying to promote a style of football where players retain possession, pass the ball effectively and allow skillful players to thrive. As soon as they come up against decent opposition, however, their opponents do it better than them. Until we have a system in this country that promotes skill and possession all the way from grass roots this will never change. The manager, therefore, is left with this dilemma of whether to play this way with inferior players or try a style that makes the absolute most out of the attributes of the available personnel (power, pace, height – or whatever it is). Leicester City did this with ruthless effect in winning the league in 2015/16.

Despite a summer of recruitment Puel is still struggling to impose a style that suits the players we have. You could argue that this is a short term thing, but will we ever be able to attract players with the ability in possession that can be attracted by the likes of Man City? Not without significant investment. That’s if you even make the leap to believe that Puel is the right manager with the skill and vision to build this team in the first place.

So do we change it now and make the most of the ability of the players we have? We should have enough quality to be in and around positions 7-10 already. Or should we continue down the path we’re on with a destination that is unclear and with players who might never have the quality to get us there. If they did they might well be poached by a top six club anyway and then you’re back to ‘building’.

Puel’s dilemma is that in building for the long term he might well neglect the short term. Managers who do that very rarely get the chance to discover whether their long term plans would have ever worked anyway.

But what I find completely bizarre though, is that he has the opportunity to instil some of this now, and even more frustrating is that those options link to some of the main points we had when talking about the next stage of progression prior to Puel - therefore these two factors combined should mean progression is far more apparent and organic... yet it isn’t, and it isn’t!

I get that there be some subtle nuasances that Puel is trying to implement that may take much longer than 30ish games.

But one of his clear, much obvious goals, is pace and attacking support from the full backs. Let’s specifically look at right back. There is a strong argument that Simpson should still be in the squad currently but, to be fair, we said that one of our targets (perhaps a less imperative one in comparison to others) was to obtain a right back who can provide more threat going forward. This has been achieved with the purchase of Ricardo. Yes, he has looked shaky at the back, but the perfect scenario,within reason, has arisen in some ways:
We have a right back who gets forward and looks decent when he does...but at the same time is vulnerable at the back.
We have a right winger who can provide quality balls in but perhaps doesn’t have the pace and dribbling ability...yet is accomplished when defending (when this isn’t the main emphasis on his game).

The perfect scenario would be to play Albrighton in front of Ricardo. This allows their strengths to compliments each other, ticks a box for some progression we wanted to see as fans and ticks a big box for Puel in terms of keenness to get full backs up the flanks.

Yet....he opts to not show much confidence in Albrighton, opts to not even play a right winger and opts to ask a full back to play high up like a winger in a formation without three at the back or someone naturally to cover him (thus, emphasising a weakness that is perhaps already currently apparent potentially when he does have a player supporting let alone without one!). And why? Because he wants to have three behind Vardy, which not only isn’t proving to be effective/or no where near effective enough to justify the Grand Canyon sized hole it’s leaving at RB, it is also contributing to the limitation of another area of our attack.

Why!? He has the option right in front of him to implement a clear part of his long term plan but is choosing to contradict it with his formation choice. And this is happening in several other areas.

This is what continues to frustrate me - not that he is choosing to do something in a different way to what I would/want...but rather, he is deciding what he wants to do but then choosing a complemently different formation to hinder or make it near impossible!

We won’t change anytime soon KTF.

In Puel’s latest interview he’s stated that the formation is correct, but the execution is wrong.

How long he can stick to his guns is a big question. To me he looks too stubborn to balance the short term success with long term ambition. For me, your medium term solution is perfect as he evolves the style.

Instead, he’s now saying that this is the way we will play, even if the players we have aren’t good enough.

That’s a recipe for failure if I ever saw one.

His interviews are starting to make less sense each time.

He has basically said, he doesn’t want to change the formation at the back - one can only assume he means to a 3-5-2 because he doesn’t want to compromise our options in attack....sorry, what in the name of all that is holy will be compromised!? The wing backs are already bloody playing as wing backs but as full backs so that would make more sense, and playing 3 behind Vardy is exactly what has stifled our attack! Only having say Gray and Maddison, rather than Gray Maddison and Ghezzal isn’t going to negatively affect anything!

And even if he doesn’t want to play 352 and keep the four at the back to have ‘more attacking options’, try 4-4-1 bloody 1.
He doesn’t seem to be getting that this current tactic is exposing our full backs AND limiting our attack!!

It wouldn’t surprise me if he brought Amartey back in and probably moved Ricardo forward....again, which you could at least half understand....if he was moving him forward into a RW position - not as part of a 3 behind a striker!

Ktf
think you have the problem identified correctly for a few.positions
This is what we would expect a manager to do, thus getting results and keep heading in the right direction until he recruits those players he want
I would call this progression and we could see what he's trying to achieve and get behind him/team more,,,,
Mersey
This is what he's doing and he should now the squad well enough to know it's short comings for his formation & style of play,
If he carries on & won't adopt temporally
Then his life expectancy is likened to a red shirt on an away mission with capt kirk

But even if some how he got by keeping this formation/tactics - I still don’t see, when it is performing as well as it can do with even the best players we could get in a 4231, that it would be better than a 4411 or 352 with the best players we could get !? (See my formation thread above)

It’s like someone saying, I’m going back to my painting analogy(!), they don’t have the resources to give you to make a beautiful, expansive oil canvas....other artists could, but they have more natural talent and will always be more famous.

However, you could have the artistic resources to make a brilliant watercolour. It won’t be as good as the oil canvas hanging higher up in the gallery, but it won’t be far off and on some days, you will compete for the attention of those viewing both types of art.

Instead though, you opt to plough on and make the oil canvas, knowing that even with the very best resources it won’t be as good as the others, it, won’t infact, be as good as the water colour you could have done, and at the moment, looks like it may not be as good as some of the scribbles on A4 paper....in fact, your obsession to paint this oil canvas, knowing it is never going to look how you wanted, means a)you are being nom Nate’s for any artistic prizes or acknowledgements and b) even worse, could put you at risk of having your work completely removed from the gallery to a far less celebrated gallery down the road.