Discontent has rumbled on within the support for a number of weeks now. Eddie Howe wasn’t given the England job, which has helped avoid some of the noise, but the weekend defeat to Brighton has led to even more criticism of the head coach.
The current league position of 8th after eight matches is far from a disaster, but the next two league matches are against Chelsea and Arsenal. It is conceivable that we lose both of those matches. If that does happen, there will be a lot more focus on Howe’s job security. This is only heightened by the presence of Paul Mitchell. Although the pair are reportedly on better terms now, the previous conflict will have done little to secure the current head coach in the eyes of the sporting director.
It does feel too early to be seriously discussing a managerial change. Howe has done an excellent job for the last two seasons. The top four finish speaks for itself, but last season’s 7th placed finish was impressive in its own right. When you take all of the contributing factors into consideration, we overachieved and were very unfortunate to miss out on European qualification.
However, one of the ‘positives’ of missing out on Europe was that we would have fewer matches in the 2024/25 campaign and that should translate to a higher league finish. We are well placed after eight matches, but Aston Villa have already grown a five-point gap to us. If the next two don’t go our way, we could have a huge mountain to climb in order to compete for the Champions League places.
Critics of Howe will point to the players he has available to him this season. The injury reason is no longer there, but performances continue to look muddled.
To me, as a Howe supporter, things do look like they have been allowed to grow stale. If a Premier League club doesn’t sign first team players in a transfer window, they stand still. And in this league, standing still is going backwards. The frustrating thing to me is that we aren’t a million…
Source link : https://www.nufcblog.co.uk/2024/10/22/eddie-howe-could-this-the-start-of-a-long-goodbye/
Author : Jake Jackman
Publish date : 2024-10-22 15:01:30
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