I don't understand the "going back to passing football". We've never actually left it. We haven't been a big boot and chase it team in ages and ages.
We've lacked direction, tempo, purpose, quality and so on, but we've always been a passing team even under Jacket to some extent. Couple that with dodgy player utilization, team selection and match management and you have a recipe for diminished returns.
We know we don't like Martin's Madness. We know we had zero patience for Duffer. Sheehan was actually getting results. I expect nothing else from Williams. Any new manager that thinks that he can come in mid-season, to a Club sitting within 2.5 wins of the playoffs, where the team has just harvested 50% of the points from the last 7 matches (4 away), and just pull a Rooney is either fucking nuts or he is Rooney. There is no patience for a period of incoherence and discordance and the dropping of points while the squad tries to figure out the latest dance steps to a completely different tune.
Williams should be focusing on increased quality and increased tempo and the tune that Sheehan has been getting out of the team can only improve or at the very least be sustained. If the new guy wants something radically different then he needs to bide his time and at the very least wait until the next preseason or introduce and evolutionary process, week by week, game by game. But, I'm not hearing that out of anybody's mouth least of all Williams. In other words, there's an intelligent way to go about this, and I am doubtful that Williams has that in mind or knows how to go about it.
Can we sustain harvesting 50% points from the final 20 games, probably unlikely, but that speaks to how well Sheehan did. 50% of the remaining points would put us at 62 points and 4 behind last season's madness. That's barely acceptable and anything less would be interpreted by me as a failure of Club management in recruiting head coaches and their staff.
If Sheehan hadn't done enough to earn a vote of confidence, the last thing I would have done is revert to a disciple of the recent past (deemed a failure) for our future. That makes no sense.
Take a cue from Darling's tone and body language in that interview. He was as effusive about Sheehan as he could be. He was far from a cup full of joy over Williams. He was basically a model of self-preserving diplomacy despite the interviewer prodding him for several leading questions to put a fucking smile on his face.