General Hearts Related Pish

[CritchSmile]

There's no reason he can't go on to be a successful head coach in the future, but he can only blame his own shortcomings for his failure, you will not be backed more than Levein and Budge did. The article acts as if he was some victim of circumstance.

Oh and Boyd isn't a "journeyman striker" as much as he is an utter dick. Glaring lack of research from what's supposed to be the gold standard of newspaper publishing.

[Shteve]

I still remain by what I said that he'll be successful in football but it won't be as a manager.

Brave call.

[CritchSmile]

Brave call.

[Drederick Shanktum]

The New York Times calling kris Boyd a journeyman striker

[Del-icious]

Brave call.

Lots of folk, including people on here were saying that was him done and he'll be remembered for being a failure.

He won't go on to be a manager or head coach, he will go back to being successful as an assistant manager or a development role. Can't think of any teams that would give him a managerial role based on what happened here.

[CritchSmile]

Scored more top flight goals in Scotland than Henrik Larsson.

[Shteve]

The obligatory.

[Herzog]

Can anyone copy and paste it please as I can't see it.

EDINBURGH, Scotland — When the second goal went in, Ian Cathro felt a shift. Cathro, the Heart of Midlothian coach, had not given up on the game: His team was down by only 2-1 to visiting Dunfermline in their Scottish League Cup match, with much of the second half to play. There was still more than enough time to draw level, perhaps even go on to win.
But the 31-year-old Cathro could sense enough of a change in the “ambience” to know that saving face would not save his skin. He had been in his job for only eight months. Right from the start, the pressure had been such that at points, he joked, he thought his “first name was Under Fire: Under Fire Ian.”
He had tried to block it out, to get on with his work, but he was not blind to it. He knew it well enough to realize that second goal, he said, meant “the fires had been lit.”
He was right. Two days later, Hearts' director of football, Craig Levein, called Cathro into his office. The two had known each other for more than a decade. Levein had, for some time, been a sort of patron and mentor to Cathro. Now, though, the men had to have a “short, unpleasant conversation.” A few hours later, Hearts issued the stock statement, full of platitudes, documenting the dismissal as a “difficult decision, made reluctantly.”
Continue reading the main story


Other than the timing — Dunfermline's cup game was on July 29, meaning Cathro had been fired before the league season started — it all seemed entirely routine.
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Cathro on the touchline during a Scottish Premiership match between Hearts and Celtic in April. His lack of a playing career of his own was fodder for critics. Credit Ian MacNicol/Getty Images
In Scotland, as in every league, managers are fired with numbing regularity. Until the start of November, Scotland's clubs were dismissing one a week: 13 weeks of the season, 13 managers gone. In a country with only 42 teams across its four divisions, it was quite a rate, but hardly unusual. In 2015, UEFA examined 60 leagues across the continent and found that in 44 of them, more than half the clubs changed managers at some point in the season.
It is a brief, brutal profession, and especially so for newcomers: In England, from 60 percent to 70 percent of first-time managers never get another head job: One strike and, more often than not, you are out. Craig Shakespeare, who started the season as Leicester City manager but has now accepted a return to life as an assistant, can attest to that. So Cathro was, on the surface, just a statistic, no different from dozens of others in his position in Britain and hundreds more across Europe.
Except that, in one key respect, he was different. From the moment Hearts appointed Cathro in December 2016, he found himself, unwittingly but not entirely unexpectedly, in the middle of a culture war. Cathro was Scottish soccer's great experiment.
His significance lay in his background. In much of Europe, the notion that a coach does not have to have been a player is uncontroversial: Maurizio Sarri, a career coach, leads Serie A with Napoli; Germany's Bundesliga has a whole phalanx of bright young managers with no playing experience, led by Hoffenheim's Julian Nagelsmann; Portugal has produced, in recent years, not only José Mourinho but Andre Villas-Boas, both of whom found life rather easier on the touchline than the field.
In Scotland, as in England, however, a playing career is still considered a prerequisite, and Cathro did not have one. All he had was more than a decade of elite coaching experience, starting as a teenager in his native Dundee, in Portugal, Spain and then, with Newcastle, in the Premier League and the Championship.
To some that was his appeal: a native Nagelsmann, an outsider who might be able to shake up the moribund world of Scottish soccer. To others, it was his fatal flaw. How could he expect to command if he had never served?
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Hoffenheim's Julian Nagelsmann is among a group of young coaches in Germany's Bundesliga. Unlike their counterparts in Britain, Nagelsmann and others seem to have won praise for bringing new ideas to the game. Credit Martin Meissner/Associated Press
Kris Boyd, a journeyman striker, witheringly described Cathro as one of the modern breed of coaches who simply “open their laptop” to plan a session. Stephen Craigan, a former player and now a television analyst, scoffed at the idea that Cathro was a “football pioneer.” “He is not Thomas Edison,” Craigan said. “He didn't invent the light bulb.”
That Cathro had never made any such claim did not seem to matter. “The negativity was a reaction to the positivity,” he said. “They were reacting to the idea I was some sort of genius kid. There was a false sense of me considering myself something.”
He knew, of course, that there would be a “mixed reaction” to his appointment, the sort he would not have received had he “played for a second division team for 10 years,” but he rejected outright how he was framed. Cathro never considered himself an outsider.

“I have still been on the inside,” he said. “I was there after a big victory in the semifinals of the Portuguese Cup, and I was there when there was a halftime scrap beginning in the Premier League. I did not kick a ball and I did not throw a punch, but I was part of the work. I had felt it.”
He is adamant he never felt his message was not getting through to his players. The charge that he could not communicate — that he was reclusive, aloof, only comfortable in front of his laptop — stemmed from a “preconceived image of me that some people had decided on without looking at my work,” he said. “It was not even close to the truth.”
He “never felt a barrier” with the players at Hearts because of his background. “They believed in it, even though we never had the validation of results.” Tony Watt, a striker who left the club soon after Cathro arrived, said the coach “knew how to get inside someone's head.” Cathro said another player told him he had been contacted by a journalist asking “what this kid was like, as though I had fallen from the moon.”

Cathro knew the “sideshow” of his appointment made some at Hearts feel uncomfortable, but he always felt he could overcome the resistance, and quiet the criticism, with time. “My feeling was to dismiss everything, wash it away, in the belief that it would stop if I won,” he said.
He did not win, though, or at least he did not win enough. Looking back, Cathro highlights his third game in charge as the crucial one: Hearts led by 2-0 at halftime, and he felt “the whole thing was alive, we were confident, tall, this is going to be good,” but somehow his team contrived to lose, 3-2. “That was the night everything should have stopped,” Cathro said. “But it became the night the fire grew.”
The doubts, from then on, simply grew louder; the flames licked higher. “It created a climate that was difficult for everybody,” he said. Hearts finished fifth in Scotland's Premier League, some 60 points behind the perennial champion Celtic.
By late July, Cathro sensed decisions had been made. Dunfermline's second goal simply validated them. Scotland's great experiment seemed to be over, the modernists routed by the traditionalists, and Cathro's managerial career — statistically, at least — along with it.
That is not how he thinks his story, whatever its wider ramifications, will end. Cathro has spent the last six months analyzing everything he did at Hearts in granular detail: He has been through every training session, every game, every news conference, every interview. “It's shone light on areas I need to work on,” he said. “I've looked at each part of how I project myself to everyone who is looking.”
He has produced a blueprint of how he wants his teams to play, with and without the ball, that he has handed to every club who has expressed an interest in his services. He has put together a few videos, too. That way, he says, “they know exactly what they are buying from me, and I know my job is to deliver that.”
He will take his time over his next move; too much of his young career, he says, has been spent “in a rush.” It most likely will not be in Scotland, but there will be a next move, he is sure of that.
“I'm not a broken man or anything,” he said. “I remember saying while I was at Hearts that no matter what happened, I was not going to lose any conviction in what I believe, how I think, what I do. I haven't.” His story is not yet over, and nor is the battle of ideas that it has come to represent. Now, he feels a little older, a little wiser. Next time, it will not be such an experiment.

[Zizou]

Cheers Herzog. Nothing much in that article. Had forgotten how weird he phrased things though

[Shuto Makino]

Tbf, Boyd is a journeyman in any terms other than the SPL (even including the Scottish national team). Bear in mind that he did have a spell in the US, where he did very little IIRC.

The whole tone of that article An absolute NAP that Cathro phoned them in advance to ask for it.

[Winston Churchill]

Has the Klingon speaking laptop wee cunt got a gig putting out the cones for somebody yet?

[The Great Khali]

Tbf, Boyd is a journeyman in any terms other than the SPL (even including the Scottish national team). Bear in mind that he did have a spell in the US, where he did  very little IIRC.

The whole tone of that article An absolute NAP that Cathro phoned them in advance to ask for it.

I think you'll find he made a tremendous advert for mattresses.

[The Great Khali]

Matissees

[Walter Sobchak]

“I'm more of a protein shake guy.”

Are ye aye.

[Herman Boyce]

There's no reason he can't go on to be a successful head coach in the future, but he can only blame his own shortcomings for his failure, you will not be backed more than Levein and Budge did. The article acts as if he was some victim of circumstance.

He was in certain respects. I argued it was a good appointment and I felt he would come good given time. It wasn't a good appointment and after how badly things went I now don't think there was ever any way back for him.

He was backed by Levein and Budge but given how much Levein has been slated for his performance as DoF I'm not sure what that actually means. He took over a ridiculously unbalanced squad in his first gig as manager with fans who were already unhappy at the running and performance of the club. He lost two key players to long term injury and had to bring in a huge number of players in January. The signings on paper were reasonably good ones which didn't work out and he can't avoid blame for that, but it's a tough ask to do that in your first job and expect it to click straight away.

I think if he's had a character in the dressing room like Berra to be his voice between the players and on the pitch it might have made some difference. Instead he had half a team of dross, players like Nicholson and Walker who's heads were turned and attitudes shite and a bunch of foreigners on short term deals who clearly decided they didn't fancy it. And his hand was forced in signing these guys a bit, because we weren't looking at players from the Scottish leagues at the time.

So all in all, a terrible appointment who did an even worse job with what he had, but circumstances did work against him. An older, more experienced coach might have done better but it was the club's decision to appoint him in those circumstances, so I'll always hold the club more responsible for the shitstorm it turned out to be than I will him.

[Del-icious]

I'm still gutted he didn't work out. Was hoping he was going to come in and completely shake things up for the good. Obviously in hindsight it was a bad appointment and Levein should've been sacked for it IMO but at the time I think the majority of hearts fans thought we were onto something great with him.

I don't understand how he just seemed to lack the basic knowledge of how to set a team up though considering his CV. Obviously a case of trying to run before you can walk and he was desperate to have us playing these complicated systems when he could barely set up a basic 442.

[Herman Boyce]

Pretty much how I feel Morph. His appointment might have worked if he'd come in to have full responsibility for the coaching side of things, but under a DoF who had responsibility for deciding how we would play until Cathro learned the ropes of being a manager.

As we all know though, Levein doesn't know how to get a team playing good football either so he was fucked regardless


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[CritchSmile]

He was in certain respects. I argued it was a good appointment and I felt he would come good given time. It wasn't a good appointment and after how badly things went I now don't think there was ever any way back for him.

He was backed by Levein and Budge but given how much Levein has been slated for his performance as DoF I'm not sure what that actually means. He took over a ridiculously unbalanced squad in his first gig as manager with fans who were already unhappy at the running and performance of the club. He lost two key players to long term injury and had to bring in a huge number of players in January. The signings on paper were reasonably good ones which didn't work out and he can't avoid blame for that, but it's a tough ask to do that in your first job and expect it to click straight away.

I think if he's had a character in the dressing room like Berra to be his voice between the players and on the pitch it might have made some difference. Instead he had half a team of dross, players like Nicholson and Walker who's heads were turned and attitudes shite and a bunch of foreigners on short term deals who clearly decided they didn't fancy it. And his hand was forced in signing these guys a bit, because we weren't looking at players from the Scottish leagues at the time.

So all in all, a terrible appointment who did an even worse job with what he had, but circumstances did work against him. An older, more experienced coach might have done better but it was the club's decision to appoint him in those circumstances, so I'll always hold the club more responsible for the shitstorm it turned out to be than I will him.

How many head coaches/managers go into a new club where everything is 100% rosy? The answer is 0. Taking over from Robbie Neilson was a much simpler job than Allardyce going into Everton, Moyes into West Ham, Clarke into Kilmarnock (and that's only the first examples off the top of my head in the last 2 months). You will struggle to find better conditions than Cathro had.

[Sterling Archer]

How many head coaches/managers go into a new club where everything is 100% rosy? The answer is 0. Taking over from Robbie Neilson was a much simpler job than Allardyce going into Everton, Moyes into West Ham, Clarke into Kilmarnock (and that's only the first examples off the top of my head in the last 2 months). You will struggle to find better conditions than Cathro had.

That's true but for a lot of those coaches the only way is up. For Cathro it was all downhill from 2nd

[CritchSmile]

That's true but for a lot of those coaches the only way is up. For Cathro it was all downhill from 2nd

We were in 2nd for a week max. Our real position that season was around 4th or 5th. He was doublely lucky that the team was high in the league and doing well - but the fans still wanted Neilson's stale football to fuck off. Fans would've take 6th position with any sign of progresssion on the field. The fans were salivating over something different from the borefest they had been served up for too long.