Rubén Sellés vs Cats

Or why, for now, I'd stick with the human...

Sam Parry

Put the unacceptable results and performances to one side…

What am I talking about? Definitely don’t do that. Even our lowest expectations are being hollowed out right now, but I still contend that nobody at Sheffield United Football Club does well out of the blame game.

Three types of people take the blame in a football club: owners, managers and players. We’ve had reason to pin successes on managers. In Wilder and, to a lesser extent, Paul Heckingbottom, we’ve employed leaders who “get” the club. But we’re in a new world now, and if you voted for Prexit (Prince Exit) then this was always going to happen. And by this, I mean a new manager.

Now, I think it’s worthwhile pitting our current leader against the humble feline. In our podcast, I’ve mentioned the below quote a few times; it’s a fun provocation I heard George Elek from NTT20.COM talking about a while back:

“If you were to change all the managers in the league for cats, at the end of the season there will still be one champion and three will get relegated. Does that mean the cat who is champion is fantastic and the three who got relegated are sh*t?” — Pierre van Hooijdonk

Replace the cat with a dog with a hamster with a Labubu, it’s a plain fact. If all 24 Championship clubs were led by inanimate objects, teams would still win, draw and lose: results would still happen, and the league would end how it ends. In such a scenario, the cat playing with twine who led their club to 1st will be judged better than the cat catching mice who led their club to 24th.

And this is where the comparison stings — if a cat could do no worse a job, what exactly are we getting from Sellés? As it stands, few would argue that he is outperforming this nascent feline competitor. Still, in a bid for positivity, I don’t think performances can drop any further. It is more likely, I think, that we’ll perform better, not worse, over the next four league games.

As such, the question I’m asking right now, after the latest horror performance, is not: how much worse can this get? Because if it gets any worse, it’s going to end in a sacking. Football’s ruthless; it would be inevitable. There’s not really any point in debating the worst-case scenario. Instead, the question that remains is, how much better can it get?

That is the real concern with Sellés. As it stands, we are a weaker side than last season. Naturally, some regression is expected - if Wilder had the same squad Sellés has, nobody would be expecting him to achieve 92 points either. But let’s imagine a scenario where the quality of the playing squad is improved to somewhere like parity. Will Sellés then add more value to performances than the humble cat? I still retain faith — and a whole lotta hope — that he could.

Nothing right now indicates that happening, unless, like Mr Optimist here, you believe we’ve already hit rock bottom. We have to cling onto those 20 minutes in the first half against Bristol City and hope that we can rediscover that thin example of attacking fervour and spread it more thickly on matches. With defensive reinforcements, ideally at CM and CB, we’re entitled to improve at the back. And therefore, I think Sellés is more than entitled to show us what an improved Blades side, under his management, might look like.

It’s for those reasons I’d be giving the manager until at least 5 games after the end of the transfer window. And if he can’t show us what we need to see, just give it to Kitty until the end of the season.