Have Notts made the same mistake?

i dont think so, the comments about the opening games shows that teams have to play well together and the issue with salfrod was the lack of us attacking. i think martin paterson will be fine, but he needs to get players wanting to restart play much quicker.

we need that energy that at any moment we are good enough to score.

Sorry @liampie I beg to differ

""The identity of the football club is ingrained in it," added Robinson, who played under Roberto Martinez, the manager who coined the 'Swansea Way' term to describe the club's ethos on style of play.

"You have to adhere to it, to possession-based football - and [Duff] never gathered that."

Nor did it appear that he wanted to.

On his arrival in Wales, Duff praised predecessor Martin, but admitted he saw the game "slightly" differently and spoke of adding physicality and pace, to be more progressive.

"I still want to play good football, still want to entertain the fans, I just want to be a bit more high octane," he said at the time.

Seasoned Swansea watchers not only struggled to see that, they struggled to see what the game plan was from week to week. The consensus was there was no discernible feature of the team, nothing to make the side stand out or encourage hope."

As a disciple of Duff, has MP abandoned possession based football. On Saturday's evidence, yes

The words of Duff when he arrived at Swansea are eerily very similar to what MP has said on arrival at Notts, it’s almost as if he’s wrote it down and used it.

I think the owners will have drilled into him they way they want to play and the committee will soon let him know if he drifts away from that in the after game meetings, I’d like to be a fly on the wall.

It's too early to tell. I think Saturday was more a case of us failing to implement it. From about the 70th minute onwards we did revert to something that looked like Maynardball. The fact that that was a vast improvement tells you all you need to know.

I think it's legitimate to tweak and adapt our approach to the division we're in. We saw that last season with the return of the occasional long ball and direct corners. What we shouldn't do is completely turn everything upside down as we really weren't far off last season.

The end goal of playing professional Association Football is to score more goals than your opponent by moving the ball by any means towards your opponent's goal & getting the ball over the goal line.

Teams don't get points for playing pretty entertaining football. It's the team that employs the best tactics & shape to counter how the other team has lined up.

It doesn't matter how you win football matches so long as you win, Salford won because tactically they were much better than Notts, didn't make any mistakes at the back, & took their chances.

Did Salford play pretty & entertaining football? No, I don't think they did, but they won & earned the 3 points. This isn't the first time Notts have secumbed to these tactics. We've seen it all before last season & the season before. Lessons need to be learnt.

But #Notts should already be aware of that and set up accordingly ( like knowing they will be a high press). Karl Robinson was "in the ear" of the 4th Official all match long

The only real thing that has changed is the club's stance on loan signings; in prior seasons, it was seen as a top-up and not something to resort to in order to make up the team. Notts has made comments about wanting to own their players, as that is a long-term investment. Sometimes you have to step out of your routines to find something different. I do think we so far are heavily reliant on the loan players who have arrived, but I do understand at the same time that they each can bring a quality that we might not otherwise be able to afford.

@DangerousSausage is correct that it's too early to say, but I don't think we are giving up on possession-based football.

Under Williams, Notts focused largely on attacking football at the cost of defending, to the point good teams like Wrexham knew how to put themselves through with long balls behind our back three. This is something teams are still using against us, but we have improved much since then.

With Maynard, we had it drilled into us that losing the ball wasn't something that should happen, and with the improved defense, passing backwards was always the answer. Teams caught on to how predictable this became and would press us into making mistakes. Maynard gave us structure with one hand, but took away the creativity that came from being unpredictable with the other.

Now with Paterson, we are trying to play positive forward where the aim isn't to pass back 99% of the time the opposition team pulls ranks. We are willing to play passes behind the back line for players to run into, and whilst there is an element of "Championship" football to this, I don't believe it should be the approach for League Two. If it's refined, worked on, and improved to fit League Two, we could be a lot more ruthless when the squad is all caught up with each other.

We have been poor with set pieces long before Paterson, so I am inclined to think he might try to work on this.

The second goal was bad judgement to pass back to the keeper with no pressure to do it. Something that comes from the past three managers, with Ian Burchnall liking us to use the keeper to force the play forward.

Re-watch the highlights; Salford predicted and gambled that the ball was going to end up with Roos.

They started to position themselves around that, so it could be argued that they were fully aware and forced it to happen. The moment Roos decided to pass, one Salford player took to restricting the back pass to Platt, and another started running well before Norburn had even started jogging. A quick look before the pass over your shoulder would have made you realised you needed to sprint, but it was poor from all involved.

It was very similar to Crowley last season at their ground, although I still believe that it was a foul.

Great topic.

My answer is no, it hasn't been abandoned. But it's certainly been adulterated over time since the high-water mark of Luke Williams' ultra possession based approach.

I think it's been slipping away in many different ways. To take one example, the recruitment of centre midfielders. Palmer and Bostock were signed because they fitted the approach. They were the engine room of our promotion and quick sprint to the top of L2. After their injuries, it's never been the same again since. And then comes the ideas of introducing grit, not being so nice and being more difficult to play against.. It looks like Norburn was signed fitting this mould rather than the criteria used when we signed Bostock and Palmer.

I'm still shocked by how Norburn played against Salford. Palmer was doing all those things to make space to receive the ball - second nature for a midfielder who knows exactly how we have to play. In contrast, Norburn passively let himself be marked out of the game in the press. But was he ever in a possession-based team at Shrewsbury or Blackpool? I don't know. Maybe not. Many lower league footballers expect the Goalies and defenders to go long rather than look for their holding midfielders. And we all know what happened on the one main occasion we tried to pass to him. Overall, he didn't play anything like a No. 6 in a possession-based team playing at home.

The last CM a bit similar to that, someone who didn't always show for the ball, was Michael Doyle. He was a Hardy/Ardley signing before the Bros and Montague arrived. And I don't think he was playing a pure possession-based approach all those years at Sheff Utd & Coventry. We only really got going in the NL when the likes of MP were given control of the engine room.

The point I'm trying to make is that our identity can be eroded in many different ways. One of those would be recruiting different types of midfielders, or for any key position. We swapped Baldwin and Cameron for sturdier defenders, but are they better ball players? No. I'm not saying one approach is right or wrong. But we have been drifting into an identity crisis IMO.....by keeping the original philosophy / footballing principles as a kind of mission statement, while moving away from it bit by bit with every compromise and adaptation to the league were in.

@theAnticlough said, "The point I'm trying to make is that our identity can be eroded in many different ways. One of those would be recruiting different types of midfielders, or for any key position".

The owners definitely believe in possession based football, there is no doubt about that, but I do see a subtle change in the programming for their football radar analysis system regarding the type of players Notts are looking for.

I think back to the difference of approach between Williams & Maynard. Luke being attack minded, Stuart more defence minded. Now Martin wants to be more physical.

There has to be a fine balance between attack, defence, now physicality. Martin has to get all three right now. I think Martin has enough players for him to decide who fits best across the side especially in midfield. I hope it doesn't take him too long.

Definitely @Robbie, I really like MP. Let's hope there's a winning formula somewhere in the squad for him to find.

Those adaptations though....

You could say 'a subtle change in the programming for their football radar analysis system'

or

the start of a kind of flip-flopping Trew did with his manager appointments, swinging from one side of the options to the other. We're supposed to have an attacking, ball-playing, possession-based approach. But let in a few goals - go more defensive. Get beat a few times by some bruisers - get tougher, recruit more physical players.

How the season plays out will provide the answers. Have the club been really smart in recalibrating their data model? Or have they just confused themselves? Hoping and praying for the former, obviously.

I think sometimes you can get hung-up on style of football, if you want to be possession-based or defensive and direct you can, you just have to have the coach and players that are capable of doing it. It’s more about how effective you put into practice your chosen style. If say under Paterson we have less possession and play more direct, but get results will anyone really care?

That said I still think the possession-based style is there, it was very evident against Newport, particularly first half. Salford just did really well to stifle us and our movement and general sloppiness on the ball didn’t help us.

On @theAnticlough point about Norburn I agree he’s not had a great start but he’s possibly been thrown in too early. He missed a lot of the pre-season and so perhaps he's not quite up to speed. Very early days but right now it’s got to be Palmer and Iorpenda in the middle and that will help us to play the progressive possession-based style. Norburn played under Steve Bruce at Blackpool and that definitely wasn’t possession based, by when he went to Wigan on loan he would've played a more possession-based style under Ryan Lowe.

I think adding a more physical and quick players benefits a possession-based side too, Dennis, Cotter, Iorpenda & Bennetts all look pacey. Possession based doesn’t always mean 5 yard tippy-tappy balls, you can still play direct balls and be possession based, you just need players actually making the runs so they can get onto the ball before the opposition!

I do think we’ve gone a bit wild with the recruitment though, that to me suggests we are not 100% sure about who or what we want. I wouldn’t have said at the end of last season we needed lots of changes, just some good replacements for the players we lost.