Josh Sargent enjoyed a rapid start to the 2022-23 English Football League Championship campaign and now with a new manager in David Wagner taking over at the club, Sargent will be eager to rack up the goals once again at Norwich City.
Wagner took part in his introductory press conference on Monday, just one day after the Canaries suffered a 1-0 FA Cup loss to Blackburn Rovers at Carrow Road. The former Huddersfield Town, Schalke, and Young Boys manager returns to England with hopes of leading the Canaries back to the English Premier League.
Sargent has mainly featured as a winger during his time at Norwich City, leading the team with nine goals in 24 league outings so far this season. However, the 22-year-old is closing in on two months without a goal for the club, which has also contributed to Norwich City’s drop in the league standings.
Teemu Pukki has mainly starred as Norwich City’s main striker during his time with the club, but with Sargent featuring as a younger offensive option in the squad, Wagner is hoping to get the best out of the American forward during the second half of the season.
“Obviously. I know him very well from Germany,” Wagner said when asked about Sargent. “For me, he’s a central striker. It isn’t his best position to help out on the wing. This is where he can help out, yes, but this is not the position I think where his strengths are.
“He played last season and this season and did not too bad so far, but he is a young guy and I’m really looking forward to work with him,” Wagner added.
Norwich City has dropped to 11th in the league standings after only winning one of its last seven matches in all competitions. Dean Smith’s firing led to Wagner’s hiring last week, bringing in an experienced figure to a club desperately needing a spark this winter.
The Canaries have only scored one goal or fewer in each of their last seven matches, a theme that both Wagner and Sargent will hope changes in the coming weeks. Norwich City’s busy schedule continues on Saturday at 10th place Preston North End before winnable matches against Coventry City and Birmingham City also take place this month.
Wagner’s hiring could provide not only Norwich City with a major boost, but also to Sargent who is aiming to get back to his best for the club.
Is leading a team that hasn’t been in the top division since 1972 up a big accomplishment? Yes! Is keeping that team up! Yes! Is David Wagner an elite manager? No, that’s why he’s at Norwich not Aston Villa. Does he know enough from his 30+ years in professional soccer that Sargent is a better CF than winger? Yes, but can most people who watch soccer figure that out? Also yes. I’m not sure how Wagner will do, I wasn’t interested in him as a potential USMNT manager, but that the only father he’s known was just his adoptive father doesn’t seem all that relevant to anything. One’s nationality being nurture not nature. They just lost Aaron Ramsey back to Villa which hurts and Cantwell might finally be on the way out so the attack isn’t as strong as it was 2 weeks ago.
wagner generally has a losing record as a coach and is overrated because of the leagues he has been hired into before losing and getting relegated out of them. i would take nothing he says as gospel. i’d also be concerned that if he’s put back in the 9 box he is not necessarily started over pukki.
worth noting on the need to tinker is that while norwich dumped their coach out of dissatisfaction — their prerogative — the existing team is +3 GD, midtable, 10 wins. it’s not a relegation battler justified in trying everything. you should monitor whether tinkering makes it better or worse.
So having a losing record means you are a liar or don’t know what you are talking about?
What is Wagner’s winning % ?
You have to factor draws in there with a soccer manager. I’m not impressed by Wagner’s record but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he is talking about . Wagner is not a top flight manager but the point is having a losing record does not tell the whole story .
Dean Smith, the guy Wagner replaced has a career winning % as a head coach of 35.45.
Jogi Loew, as a head coach had a career winning % of 36.42 before he took Germany over.
David Moyes’ is 42.42.
Bielsa’s is 45.45
you don’t have to be a liar to be WRONG. in his first 3 coaching jobs he had more losses than wins for BD2 (how do you lose with dortmund reserves?), huddersfield, and schalke. huddersfield he launched towards relegation before being fired. schalke he had a 16 game losing streak in his one full season. you really want to explore % wins?
he did have a winning record for young boys but if you look behind that at all, he took a 1st place team in UCL and before he was fired made it into a 3rd place team playing in europa conference.
my point re norwich is this isn’t some relegation firing where i trust the new coach to fart around and try to fix it, and don’t want continuity. this was a team as good as 2nd earlier in the season, which in real numbers sits 3 points — a win — off promotion playoff slots. they had dropped down to 11th but compared to a relegation team their needs are not so much whirlwind drama as a visit to the mechanic to restore whatever they were doing back in the fall. in the fall josh was productive and playing everywhere, wide and middle.
i think half the reason people latch onto david is he’s “american” except he was born in germany, played his career there, started coaching there, and had a grand total of 8 caps for the awful 1998 cycle team, not even making the world cup squad. i would like for more americans to get hired abroad to coach there but he’s getting hired by UK owners as a european coach, and when he’s getting hired in germany or switzerland they surely think of him as a a german coach who speaks the language. matarazzo at least was born here and went to columbia before deciding to build a career over there. marsch, etc.
I’m not a huge Wagner fan but you are kind of picking your facts. Dortmund II is a U23 club, Wagner led them to first place in their 4th division region against like aged teams. His next few seasons were in 3rd division against full professional teams using his youth team. Youth Teams often aren’t that interested in winning but instead looking more to develop talent. Also at Dortmund the best youth rarely play for BvB II. Pulisic and Reyna never suited up for them, Sancho played just 3 times for II. At Huddersfield he lead them to promotion for the first time in 40 years and stayed up one season without much investment. He was 2017 Championship manager of the year and EPL manager of the month August 2017. Schalke was unloading payroll trying stay out of bankruptcy, so although Schalke was awful under Wagner it wasn’t all his fault.
“picking my facts?” i walked you through his resume and showed it’s crap. i didn’t skip a stop. he was a bad reserve team coach, got huddersfield relegated, lost at schalke, made young boys worse. he did win the championship with huddersfield then got relegated back down. BD2 hasn’t finished lower than 9th in a league since he left.
more to the point, as with many of your criticisms of my takes on players, you miss the big picture of if the sports figure being discussed is actually any good. while you can nit pick a season or two in my analysis, he’s generally struggled as a first division manager , isn’t all that “american,” and what people want to crow about is him being an “american first division coach in europe.” here’s the deal, he’s barely american — it’s not mentioned in the BBC article when norwich hires him, huddersfield is — and it’s more like he’s hired at C because he finagled his way into A and B before that, whether he did any good, which is really the reason americans struggle to get jobs there.
not trying to be xenophobic but marsch and bradley are more “american” in a meaningful sense, have had to claw for everything, and have had some actual success. whether coaches like them can stay employed there says far more about whether americans are being hired than wagner, who is just another european mediocrity on the carousel. i mean, he wasn’t born here (AJ), he doesn’t even have a biological american parent. he is naturalized — he had an adoptive american parent, then never played here, and barely had any caps as an ok forward in a poor US cycle where we went winless at the world cup in france and he couldn’t even make the team.
this is like if people touted the iffy future coaching career of one of the dual national prospects i encourage us to try. i am all for expanding the player talent pool and getting dual nationals involved but if “american” would be in small print in a footnote with an asterix, and not even mentioned when they got hired, then it’s not really indicative of if our managers are finally getting a fair shake.
anyways, in reality he started his tenure with an FA cup game and lost to another championship club. he underwhelms me and i suspect with his attitude to sargent we’ll be discussing come summer how one or both have left or are leaving.
Mr. Imperative,
Context
I’ll take the liberty of saying that what JR means is your rant about David lacks context.
As Bill Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” .
You’re acting like Josh plays for some top flight EPL Champions League contender.
No. He doesn’t.
The context is Norwich is a pretty thrifty organization, a Championship team. And their uniform shirts look like they were used to line the bottoms of bird cages. No doubt that’s why they are called the Canaries. Josh looks stupid in Norwich kit.
They’ve been pretty good at being an EPL yo-yo team. They are a team on a tight budget. They get promoted and then carefully sell the most marketable of their promotion players for a good profit.
They don’t have a ton of money and they want to get promoted without hurting their wage structure. Think of it like flipping a house.
Wagner, with his achievements at Huddersfield ( and developing young players at BVB) just might be exactly what the Bird Droppings are looking for, someone who can get them promoted ( they already have a decent squad and a decent position) without spending obscene amounts of cash. And who maybe can keep them in the EPL for a season or two.
Wagner was Klopp’s best man not a Klopp clone. However David did bring in a bunch of bargain unknowns from all over the continent and used them to get Huddersfield promoted.
And he kept them in the EPL for one season.
The next season they went down.
David left before the final act most likely because it became apparent that Huddersfield was not going to spend one thin centavo to reinforce the squad. David getting them promoted and then keeping them up that one year was a memorable achievement.
1. BVB 2 are a development team. They don’t have a charter that says, put together the best team possible and beat the pants off of everyone. That’s not how they work.
2. Schalke were already rotten when he got there. It’s like being promoted to Captain of the Titanic after it hits the iceberg. He should never have taken that job.
3. Young Boys were in second place when he got the axe.
Are there better candidates out there for Norwich’s particular niche?
Probably but I don’t know them. And you can’t discount the fact that Norwich fans are likely very familiar with David and Huddersfield and are likely to feel good about this. A little positivity never hurts even though you know better than all of them how horribly this all will end.
I don’ know why you’re going on about David’s passport. He’s as much of an American manager as Jesse is an English manager.