Torn. Stylistically I was never going to enjoy his football, we've possibly made some small advances of late (ignoring today) but we're still not remotely at the level of the first half of last season. Tbf most of these signings aren't his, recruitment has been disjointed (being polite) and I do suspect there is a dysfunctional culture at the club which makes his job far harder.
I also don't think that sacking managers regularly is anything but an expensive waste of time. So unless a top manager suddenly fancies getting us our 3rd star then barring disasters we suck it up and hope he can improve things until Christmas next year.
Very similar to me. I don’t think it helps that I’m struggling to warm to Hughton generally.
Sometimes after an awful result and performance (even if it makes zero difference to players or performance on the pitch), you just want the manager to come out and call it what it was just so there’s comfort in the fact that they recognize how dreadful and unacceptable it was as much as the fans do.
Billy Davies was quite good at that - his sides away from home during a spell were dreadful but I felt like he called a spade a spade, which does give fans confidence that they at least recognize the problem.
I’m not necessarily advocating Hughton slating all his players, but I’ve never listened to him after a game and thought “yep, he gets it - he’s the guy to turn this around”. His post match comments might and probably are totally irrelevant to how he coaches his teams and the results on the pitch, but as a fan it’s all we have to go off when performances are as bad as they are today, and it’s difficult not to feel like he’s just a bit of a Dougie Freedman and not right for us.
Like you, I hate the idea of sacking yet another manager and was desperate for Lamouchi to keep his job after the stoke game to give him time to build on what was generally a positive season.
I was also a huge fan of Hughton - disgracefully under appreciated for what he did for Brighton and thought he’d be perfect for us.
However there’s not a single thing to cling to in his 3 or so months in charge - we look a worse outfit in every department and you can’t really blame it on a poor squad.
Completely agree he hasn’t signed his own players and no doubt that’s a huge factor, but equally everybody knows that if you were to draft this team up on paper pre season for whichever football club, you’d be putting it top 6 at least.
That doesn’t mean he should have us flying, because we know football does not work like that, but I’d expect us to have the foundations of an identity and at least get a bit of a tune from these players, because regardless of whether you can create an entire squad of your own, a mangers job is to get the best out of what he has and what he has is not bad at all. The reason managers create their own pedigree is through their ability to over perform against the circumstances they’ve been presented, and Hughton has in my opinion done the absolute opposite.
On reflection, he needs to stay and do his thing in the summer, but he should not be exempt from blame, nor should job security be a given if he doesn’t pull us away from danger in the coming weeks.