I wrote last week that the key narrative of the Hughes management is that it is the antithesis of Eriksson's. He has cast himself as the man to overturn and reverse all of the supposed laziness, complacency, weaknesses physical and mental which SGE brought to the club. All the incoherence and malfunction we've suffered on the pitch recently has been due to the impact of these changes.
Quotes carried in this morning's Independent further demonstrate this tendency. Hughes says that the side he inherited had a culture which was "nowhere near where it needed to be" to succeed in the Premier League. Our successful start last season (we were third or fourth at this point in the season) was something that "everyone in football knew wasn't going to be sustainable".
There were lots of problems with the Eriksson era: the last few months were as bad as the first few months of this season. And if Hughes feels he has to destroy much of the Eriksson system to succeed, that is entirely his decision to make. But at some point Hughes will have to offer us something constructive and positive, rather than this endless purge of all vestiges of the Eriksson era. Because at the moment I'd take a successful but unsustainable start over 18 points in 18 games quite willingly.
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