Why would you ‘leak’ something you didn’t want discussed publicly?

If Kilmarnock & ross county can attract ex-premiership managers then we should be able to as well. However, it shouldn’t need anyone with more than a wee bit of brains to get us promoted. It’s an easy job with a club that has,by far, the biggest budget in the league. We spend premiership wages & have the best facilities to work with.

However, there appears to be a rotten core inside tannadice & Utd seems to be a great career ender for up and coming managers. If there was any name that’s been linked with the job that appeared to be a safe pair of hands I’d be all for appointing them. The nearest to that would appear to be lambert, imo. Not sure he’d be interested but he’s the only guy mentioned that interests me.

However, for where we’re at and what we need, I think Jim mcinally would be a decent fit. A guy that takes no prisoners, ex players talk highly of & knows how to set a team up...

Former Dundee United, Derby, Blackburn, West Ham, Rangers and Scotland player Christian Dailly.

ALAN PATTULLO
Published: 06:00
Saturday 26 August 2017

Christian Dailly is struggling to define himself. It used to be easy. “When I was a footballer, I was just a footballer, that was it,” he says. But now, he wonders, what is he?


This isn’t the troubling confession, heard a million times, from those who’ve failed to find a place in the world since retiring from football.

Rather, it’s just the breezy admission he’s at a loss to sum up precisely what he’s doing now, since what he’s doing feels fresh and revelatory, taking in such fields as ecological dynamics – a theory focusing on the performer-environment relationship.

The fruits of his research could be coming to a football or athletics club, or any other place where the focus is sporting endeavour, near you soon.

Always a superb athlete, Dailly never ran with the crowd. He now has a first class honours degree in sports science for starters. It isn’t often you hear the word “pedagogy” fall from a former footballer’s mouth. The definition – for those, like me, who are unsure – is “the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept”.

Dailly explains: “The whole idea with coaching, and pedagogy, is that when you are advising it’s really handy to see it working but if you can quantify it as well, explain why it’s happening, that’s priceless,” he says. “I am in the process of developing a vehicle to put it out there and see how best to access the most people.”

In short he is developing a self-organising system for helping athletes monitor their development. Dailly is currently seeking funding. “But I’m mainly driving it myself.

“Watch this space,” he adds.

With curls tumbling down around his ears there’s always been something of the mad professor look about him. It’s also conveyed in the way he speaks, Dundonia

annanarab wrote:

One of the big problems is that we are fans rather than (or as well as) customers. If any commercial organisation treated its customers the way ST treats us or provided such shoddy goods or services or gave us such low value for money, they would very quickly lose their customers and go out of business. Football Clubs have this unique brand loyalty which sees them retain a sizeable portion of their customers through bad times on the pitch and bad times in the board room (the back the team not the regime mentality). Possibly if we acted more like customers than fans (and I mean generally over time) rather than as a response to ST's current regime, we might have got a chairman who appointed a proper football manager than a lackie to sell off our assets, we might have had a chairman looking after the clubs and fans interests instead of swanning of to Oz, we might have had some proper professional recruitment, player improvement, performance management leading to a team that can punch its weight and hold their own in the division above. Teks right its our fault for caring and being a fan being rather than the hard nosed customer that many of us are in life away from football. Customers are powerful and can change things. Fans are toothless.

To go back to the original thread - Donaldson has attributes, he can tackle and can win his aerial challenges. His biggest faults are lack of concentration, discipline and attitude. Given he's an expensive resource, our management team should have him in for extra sessions working on his faults so that we can either use him or sell him and our chairman should be on the backs of the management team for not doing their job and improving him and other players.

 
Excellent post; clear and well explained point of view. Thanks annanarab. If only this was how player development actually worked. Too many resources are thrown at physical development but actually working on obvious weaknesses (positioni