Manager/Coach Des Buckingham

I think this needed to happen. I don’t want us to die a slow death. We are in a very dangerous state right now across the board.
 
Sheik djibouti said:
The chuckle brothers have form when it comes to changing managers. They will do all they can to contemplate their navels for as long as possible, because at this moment in time, what happens on the pitch is an absolute sideshow for them. Getting the stadium PP and construction is the only show in town, whilst moving us to a "more sustainable business" and a universe where we are all "customers" and "fan activations" are sexy is the next biggest priority. Football and on the field entertainment are some way behind that I'm afraid.

I reckon we're in a holding pattern until further notice, especially now safety is guaranteed. I will be surprised if anything happens quickly on the footballing side. And even if it did, would you trust them to make the right decision??
Click to expand...
And this is the truth of it all, sadly. So long as the club has a bean counter as CEO and a more or less absent board, footballing decision making of this magnitude will get postponed. We saw it with Robinson. The mere thought of how the balance sheet will look after sacking one manager and attracting the services of another will have twitchy bottoms running for cover.
The only hope is that the marketing side show some disquiet at dropping attendances and slow season ticket sales. The latter, of course, won't happen until it's clear we won't get promoted (don't laugh, they're all still buttocks clenched that it will save their reputations) Once mathmatically impossible, the penny will drop, literally, and pricing next season will look a lot less attractive.
 
Yes looking forward, to the customers paying 50 quid a game, to pay back the stadium. If it gets approved....
 
Sheik djibouti said:
I think there's also a massive part of those decent players being thought of as decent on a reputation from history, which has not matched up with the reality of where they are now recovering from serious injuries.

I'm looking at you Jay Matete. He was the much vaunted steel and drive we needed iat the base of our midfield, but so far he's made Jamie Hanson look like a Championship standard player.

We've got the shadow of what he once was. Is that down to Buckingham? Maybe partly, but we're still seemingly addicted to signing players with a great reputation, based on a history before serious injuries took their toll, in the hope they can get fit and rediscover it here. Not all that dissimilar to Robinson in that respect.
Click to expand...
If you look at the squad as a whole, every player other than Harris has regressed under Des.

Is it possible Matete's injury has hampered his performances? Sure. Is it possible the way he's being managed and told to play is making that regression look worse than it is? There's fairly strong evidence to suggest that's also true when you look at the players around him.

Players 100% have to take some of the responsibility, but there's no doubting there's a clear and obvious downturn in almost everyone's performances under Des.
 
sadoldsod1778 said:
Let's face it most of the players just aren't good enough simple. It's not just the manager.
Click to expand...
I just can’t get onboard with the idea that the players are not good enough. We were second under Manning, 1 point behind Pompey when he left. If that isn’t good enough I don’t know what is. We used to be built on solid foundations, conceding hardly any chances and controlling games in the middle. Since Des has arrived we have abandoned that completely. The defensive structure is all over the place, for me that’s a tactical issue and therefore lays at Des’s door. We are often second to the ball nowadays and that’s a motivational issue, Des’s job is squeeze that 5/10% extra out of the players, those fine margins are often the difference in games. The other huge problem is we struggle to press with any effectiveness, there’s no cohesion to it anymore, we don’t set traps like we used too & if we do manage to win the ball back in a dangerous area most of the time we don’t recognise the space and transition quickly, instead we slow the tempo down and go backwards. Again this is an issue which stems from Des’s identity and style. The only thing I can be critical of the players for is letting their heads go down last night but I can hardly blame them when it’s clear they don’t trust the managers ability to turn this around.
 
Brahma said:
89% of those polled, want him sacked....! :oops:

Maybe I am well and truly delusional. I don't half feel sorry for the man and what's he having to deal with.
Click to expand...
I feel sorry for him too. He seems a decent bloke and always looks knackered. I'm also worried for him about where he'll go if we do sack him. Any club taking him on would view it as a huge risk.

That's not a reason to keep him though. If he gets sacked he'll get one hell of a payout, and hopefully some much needed sleep.

What we've seen since he's arrived is levels below what should be expected.
 
Brahma said:
89% of those polled, want him sacked....! :oops:

Maybe I am well and truly delusional. I don't half feel sorry for the man and what's he having to deal with.
Click to expand...
I feel sorry for him, too, he’s clearly a decent bloke who’s desperate to succeed. But it’s a brutal business and there’s nothing encouraging to cling on to that justifies his continuing employment.

Lastly, if players have acted in the way that’s been mentioned, I want them out. There’s no place for them, either.
 
MustardYellow said:
I feel sorry for him too. He seems a decent bloke and always looks knackered. I'm also worried for him about where he'll go if we do sack him. Any club taking him on would view it as a huge risk.

That's not a reason to keep him though. If he gets sacked he'll get one hell of a payout, and hopefully some much needed sleep.

What we've seen since he's arrived is levels below what should be expected.
Click to expand...
He would go straight back to India.
 
Orkney Islands Yellow said:
Did the board fail to back him? He was supported in the window? Is it the boards fault the preferred assistant feel through? Perhaps we should question why no one appears to want to be his assistant?
Click to expand...

This is precisely my view. I remember it, we were told his choice of assistant was virtually done, Des said as much. That tells me that the financial package was agreed as you’d think that was one of the earlier obstacles you clear in a recruitment process. Suddenly there’s a change of heart and he’s not coming. Why is this being pinned on the board ? There is absolutely no evidence to suggest it’s a board related issue. It looks to me like a classic slept on it and thought ‘no thanks’.

DB has been really well backed in January, you’re right. OK, one or two arrive with injuries or fitness issues but is that the boards fault ?
 
Having slept on it, here’s hope I stand on things.

DB as a candidate to follow LM makes a lot of sense. Young, progressive, a series of increasingly difficult and increasingly good jobs behind him. Educated within CFG, 10 years as a coach at OUFC including six of those four years when we were an EFL side plus a more recent six-month spell at Stoke City U23s. The downside was that we didn’t truly know the level he had been working at in the ISL but bearing in mind players like Ryan Williams and Adam Le Fondre were playing in that league, we had a hint of an idea. All managers come with pros and cons – LM joined us having been the man at the helm for MK Dons’ relegation after all. I don’t prescribe to @Orkney Islands Yellow theory that he is a ‘fraud’. He has a body of work to fall back on. Someone like Pep Clotet didn’t – it was failure after failure with short term spells at basket case clubs disguising his own shortcomings. He is a fraud and I don’t believe DB is. Nor do I think that his lack of EFL experience is fatal either. Lincoln have hired some futsal coach and are going along well with a much worse team than us, for example.

DB said so many of the right things and often still does. He said he wanted to continue what LM had done here – superb. I made the Atkins-to-Rix analogy earlier in the thread. Out went Atkins with his pragmatic 5-3-2 and in came Rix who overnight tried to make a bunch of League 2 cloggers play like Vialli’s Chelsea in a 4-4-2. It completely derailed the team. I expected the transition from LM to DB to have some teething difficulties, especially with the injury crisis he inherited, but the transition has been anything but smooth.

On the pitch, however, if DB was supposed to be Manning 2.0, it is like we’ve gone back to a beta version. The style is Manning-esque but the play is so ponderous and played in such a low gear that we go nowhere with it. Needless triangular passing out of defence where after seven passes we are back where we started or, very obviously after last night, inviting a heap of trouble from a high press and ending up losing the ball or it goes out of play. DB is playing the LM way but with the brakes on. I didn’t think LM’s team was particularly interesting or exciting (a mirror image of him), but DB’s team is the same without the winning result at the end.

The most worrying thing was that the team gave up last night. They didn’t believe that their approach would lead to anything and went to pieces. They had no Plan B to turn to even with the shape change and looked powerless to stop the onslaught. I wouldn’t say he has ‘lost the dressing room’ overall but last night he did. The approach from the first minute didn’t work and the players did nothing to sort it out amongst themselves.

Where does this leave us? This has to be DB’s ‘Appleton’s Cambridge’ moment where everything changes. Be brutal and freeze out the quitters and losers (and there were some of those last night) and regroup for the summer. Failing that, it will be curtains. It’s hard to make any sort of case for DB after it but since he will be here until the end of the season at least, we have to support the team until then. DB and the players did not make a good case for that at all last night. It was horrendous for all concerned.
 
IsleofWightYellow said:
They were the second best team in the league this season and winning constantly before Manning left (and the game after), and looked good doing it…
Click to expand...

Yes, we've seen then perform well over a short period.

We've seen them perform poorly over a much greater one. Several times in many cases.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Northstandboy
Manager/Coach Buckingham - Indian Fans
Replies
10
Views
2K
NorthWestOx
N
Back
Top Bottom