[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

It's not about passing it along the ground (which we should aim to do, and have done effectively at times even under Pulis) so much as it's about our defence always needing our midfield to support them in order to not concede a hatful of goals. All of our last five managers have lapsed into doing this eventually; were they all boring, negative footballing ideologues, or did they each come to recognise that there were fundamental flaws with the players at their disposal which could only be countered by pulling men behind the ball en masse?

I could accept the possibility of one or two managers being naturally cautious, conservative types, but five of them? Including Pepe "ten men in the opponent's half" Mel? That's an awful lot of professional footballing tacticians to get the same thing wrong... unless, of course, they didn't get it wrong at all.