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Just been watching Sky this morning and all of the interviews shown were in the same manner as Paul Cooks. All the managers interviewed praise the opposition, not a single one ran down their opponents, but what we saw was only what Sky and the press want to show. They obviously don't show the entire press conference and only a selected highlight, and this is possibly the same with Paul Cook. I certainly don't read much into his pre match interviews as I am sure he will be saying something entirely different in the dressing room.

It will be interesting to watch the Liverpool v Man City game this weekend given the spat between Guardiola and Klopp and see which team are most wound up by the comments.
Agree with almost all of that TB.
Not advocating that Cook slags the opposition rather he should focus more on ourselves.
Where we differ is I don't take notice of anything Cook says ever not just pre match ?
 
I totally agree that anything said by PC in public should be taken with a pinch of salt. The same goes for politicians, no one wants to show their hand to the opposition. The only thing that matters is what he tells the players on the training ground and before kick off and we will never be privy to that, unless Grip can get his dog adopted as the club mascot.
 
I think the reality is Cook does it to try and give himself a ready made excuse for losing. If you tell everyone the opposition are amazing when you lose you can say 'see I told you what a good team they were' ike he did in todays post match. Then you can say it's an unforgiving league and generally try and sell the idea everyone in this league is a cut above so it's not his fault we keep losing.
 
Right. I've finally calmed down enough to be objective and post without it simply being an angry rant.

Today was the worst we've played in as long as I can remember. That's not an exaggeration. It's a fact. Warren Joyce would've been embarrassed by that shit show. It made the performances under Joyce look like Guardiola had masterminded them.

The truth is that we showed absolutely nothing good in any department. Toothless in attack, disorganised and dominated in midfield, and keystone cops defending. There was no skill on show. There was no enthusiasm. There were no tactics. The team selection was completely baffling. We didn't have anything. With the exception of (again) Joe Williams and Antonee Robinson, the players all had awful games, and even those two were only semi-passable today.

Given that we've seen decent performances from most of the squad at some point during the season, we know the quality is there when they do play well.

The common denominator is the manager. It's him who picked Jacobs in the starting lineup. On the basis of last week, I'm not surprised that that alone would decimate the confidence and enthusiasm of a lot of the players. Let's face it, if you were in that squad and Jacobs got a starting place ahead of you, you'd be pissed off. What do Pilks, Windass and the others who were overlooked have to do if Jacobs is picked ahead of them? The same can be said for Fox not getting on ahead of Kipre now he's fit. Without a leader, our defence is dreadful. Dunkley needs Fox or Mulgrew to tell him what to do... He's a solid enough defender but he's not a leader or organiser. Kipre is young, I think he has potential, but he's not ready for this level. Needs a season on loan in L1 imho.

It's abysmal management to think players will keep any sort of enthusiasm when the manager habitually overlooks better players in favour of 'favourites', despite them being proven to not be up to this level of football. They're professional footballers and they know about football. The team knows who should be in the squad. So do the fans. The only person who doesn't is the manager, who's completely lost the plot and based on what we saw today, also lost the dressing room, because there didn't even seem to be any fight in them today.

What possible justification is there for keeping Cook on? We were riding our home form, and that was surely the only straw that kept him in a job, since our away form is nothing short of shameful. Today, we were at home. Our fortress, apparently. Yet we got absolutely tonked by a pretty average Championship side. We made them look like Barcelona. That has to be the last straw. Surely. Cook's position is entirely untenable after that, and he HAS to go. Enough excuses, enough 'unforgiving league' bullshit... We've spent a lot of money by our standards and the players we have are better than the embarrassing performances we're seeing. However expensive it is to sack Cook, it's cheaper than the inevitable relegation which is absolutely nailed on if he stays.

I don't care who we hire. No-one could do a worse job than Cook is doing. No-one.
 
I think the reality is Cook does it to try and give himself a ready made excuse for losing. If you tell everyone the opposition are amazing when you lose you can say 'see I told you what a good team they were' ike he did in todays post match. Then you can say it's an unforgiving league and generally try and sell the idea everyone in this league is a cut above so it's not his fault we keep losing.
Not sure I agree with you here KDZ. As a reporter going into each pre-match presser one of your inevitable questions is ‘what do you make of the opposition’. There’s only so much you can write about your team so you want to get a bit of insight into how the manager will approach the opposition. If you watch the poor lad from WISH each week its one of his standard questions. As OLFE says Cook is only ever going to say nice things about the opposition it’s what he does and why he is seen as such a good bloke in football circles. Plus as OLFE points out you don’t want to give the opposition any extra incentive with negative comments about them. Cook doesn’t like these media duties you can tell by his body language and he doesn’t like giving anything away regarding his team selection. This is probably another reason why we keep getting the sound bites about the opposition, because he would rather talk about them than discuss what he may be planning for the game itself. The pre match and post match interviews are a pointless from our point of view in terms of gaining insight
 
Not sure I agree with you here KDZ. As a reporter going into each pre-match presser one of your inevitable questions is ‘what do you make of the opposition’. There’s only so much you can write about your team so you want to get a bit of insight into how the manager will approach the opposition. If you watch the poor lad from WISH each week its one of his standard questions. As OLFE says Cook is only ever going to say nice things about the opposition it’s what he does and why he is seen as such a good bloke in football circles. Plus as OLFE points out you don’t want to give the opposition any extra incentive with negative comments about them. Cook doesn’t like these media duties you can tell by his body language and he doesn’t like giving anything away regarding his team selection. This is probably another reason why we keep getting the sound bites about the opposition, because he would rather talk about them than discuss what he may be planning for the game itself. The pre match and post match interviews are a pointless from our point of view in terms of gaining insight

Not disagreeing with that but I think he goes so overboard it always sounds like he is deliberetly pushing the oppositions quality to prepare excuses rather than paying lip service as part of standard press confrence.

No one is expecting him to critasise the opposition but his praise of them is never measured he's pretty much waxing lyrical about them.

Our previous few managers never disrespected the opposition but non of them seemed to talk about every opposition team like they were Barca. I think Cook does it to try and premptivly take pressure off himself.