Vote: Curle In or Curle Out

I was following the Chelsea/Leicester game on the bbc website whilst sat waiting for my flight home from my holidays when I read a post that amused me from a disgruntled Chelsea supporter. He/she was bemoaning Lampards tactical nous and in particular, his choice to adopt zonal marking!

For me, that is something I cant get my head around. Zonal marking. And its costing us at the minute. It reminds me of the time when JE (RIP) elected to play Rico and Revell as a forward partnership, whilst persisting with that crazy wing back system for the first few games of the season he got sacked in. JE proved himself once again to be an excellent manager after his departure here, taking Orient back into the football league at the first attempt.

For now, I'm firmly in the Curle In, 'camp'. He earned a good crack of it steadying the ship last season, and finally stopping the rot which had well and truly set in aka Chesterfield. The football wasn't pretty, but I swatted that away given the resources he had at his disposal.

He then spent the summer bringing in some decent players, but strangely kept playing 'past it' trialist's including Tyson and that useless bod from Milton Keynes in the friendlies at the expense of Morais; 3 games in, he's back in the match day squad. Ditto, Billy Waters. That made no sense to me at the time, and still doesn't.

We are now leaking goals, not in open play (our defensive line is pretty solid), but from set pieces.

KC needs to go back to basics, like he did on his arrival. We now have better players and I believe the football will come good, but the team needs to start winning again and quickly. Get Bunney involved, another curious situation that again makes little sense. Played as a centre back throughout the pre-season, then omitted from the first team, despite us not having any other decent left sided midfield option.

He needs to stop over thinking things, just stick his best 11 players on the pitch in their favoured positions (we have more than enough fit players to do that); man mark at corners/set pieces; stop putting players publicly up for sale (a buyer will be made aware due to the involvement of agents and its considerably more dignified), and mix things up a bit in the final third. Again, we have the players who we can hoof the ball up to, but we also have players who we can pass the ball to as well!!). We are too predicable at the minute.

Finally, though, and for balance. We are 3 league games into the season. Its still too early to properly gauge what we think our tactics actually are; any football team can appear to be direct in just a few hours of football, when in reality its more down to confidence, lack of synergy with team mates etc.

We also need to learn from whats happened to us during the last few years. The obvious candidate that will be discussed to death if KC does get the bullet anytime soon would be Sol Campbell. Lets say he comes in, gets us promoted...you can be absolutely 100% sure that he will be off to a higher level club, just like Chris Wilder did. And just like Colin Calderwood did. And just like JFH did after some success at Burton. We then start back at the beginning again! At least if KC was to do well here, we'd more than likely continue the journey together given his age/cv/profile etc.

People talk about the fact he's never got a team promoted. Well Graham Carr only got one football league promoted during his career. Kevin Wilson/Broadhurst likewise. Colin Calderwood did manage eventually to take Forest up after he left here, but only back to their 'natural level'. Ian Atkins had one promotion.

There is no reason why, if he evolves his tactics and tweaks the squad a little in the next couple of weeks, he cant be successful and get his one and only promotion to date here in Northampton. He's come close a few times before. His record isn't great, but its not terrible either. I question whether we would get better. Rob Page, JFH were both useless. I thought the same about JE, but either side of his stay here he was a successful manager. He does need to win a game quick though, otherwise the knifes will be out when we play Bradford next weekened. We need a win either tonight or on Saturday to avoid a likely toxic atmosphere. But that, as they say, is football.