General Manager Sack Watch

[SirAndyOfCrosby]

Very interesting situation at Swansea.

I would not be at all suprised to see them in the final relegation shake up in April. Their appointment is of paramount importance. From our perspective, here's hoping they take a punt on a Rooney or Terry type, or a foreign national that hasn't managed in the league.

Absolutely. Reminds me of Hull last season. All 'we should be mounting a promotion push' without properly recognising the peril of their situation.

Exactly the sort of club that slips through the trap door if, as you say, they make a mess of the next appointment.

It's all good for us I think, can see it being very similar to last season with (assuming Wednesday gone) as many as 6 or even 7 sides still in danger with a couple of games of the season to go.

 

[Foley]

Sheehan sacked by Swansea.

Of the current bottom 8 that's now 4 who've sacked their managers this season.

Our turn soon

Have you listened to the Dub? You presumably disagree strongly with Jerome, Ben, George and Robyn.

 

[holdsteady]

Absolutely!- and if you look at the current 'elite' managers, I think they have all (apart from Guardiola and Arteta) had lengthy stints earlier in their careers where they worked in the lower leagues, and were often with a smaller club for a number of years. As you said, Manning has now screwed his career by job-hopping. Exactly what Appleton did- and Ferguson warned him (Appleton) about this repeatedly...

Other than Eddie Howe, who actually left Bournemouth for Burnley at one point so did exactly what people are on here are criticizing, how many managers of elite clubs have come from the lower leagues? To turn down actual hard cash in your bank in the hope it will lead to a big job further down the line is brave/foolish, certainly for English lower league managers, its incredibly rare they get a look in nowadays.

 

[WE Yellow]

Very interesting situation at Swansea.

I would not be at all suprised to see them in the final relegation shake up in April. Their appointment is of paramount importance. From our perspective, here's hoping they take a punt on a Rooney or Terry type, or a foreign national that hasn't managed in the league.

Lot of quality in their side, Galbraith and Vipotnik in particular are two of the best performing players in the league this season.

From reading online, seems like the biggest gripe from their fanbase was style of play and there's a lot of potential in their squad. A positive forward thinking manager could get a lot out of them you'd think, so like you I hope they go for a left field appointment.

 

[Orkney Islands Yellow]

Who are Swansea and Boro going to hire when there's no better than Rowett according to some?

 

[SirAndyOfCrosby]

Who are Swansea and Boro going to hire when there's no better than Rowett according to some?

The argument of 'there's no better than Rowett' is based on a bottom half club, struggling.

Middlesbrough are not in a relegation fight. And Swansea don't think they should be (which is why their situation is precarious). The latter could go for a safe bet like Rowett and guarantee themselves 14th, or they could gamble on having the quality of squad that a new 'sexy' manager could turn into a top 6 side.

It's risky. Hull thought they could last season with Selles and almost paid the price. Luton were so confident in their squad they too went with a young and relatively inexperienced manager and went down - who would argue against Rowett, this time last season, getting that Luton squad (led by Carlton Morris) to mid-table?

It's all about perspective. And that applies to us as much as anyone else. For what it's worth, I believe there are better managers out there, that we could get, that would get more out of this squad. I also believe there are a whole lot more who would completely f*ck it up the wall.

Tread carefully. The weaker the squad, the greater the risk.

 

[Steve Gilbert]

Who are Swansea and Boro going to hire when there's no better than Rowett according to some?

Who said there is no better than Rowett? Clearly there are better championship managers than Rowett. I’m not sure there are many better though at getting the most out of a bottom half championship side with a budget that doesn’t match the majority of the league and keeping them up.

 

[unification]

Absolutely. Reminds me of Hull last season. All 'we should be mounting a promotion push' without properly recognising the peril of their situation.

Exactly the sort of club that slips through the trap door if, as you say, they make a mess of the next appointment.

It's all good for us I think, can see it being very similar to last season with (assuming Wednesday gone) as many as 6 or even 7 sides still in danger with a couple of games of the season to go.

You'd forgive yourself a smirk if it occurred as it would be very likely that Cardiff would be going past them. All those last-game songs when we played them at their neighbour's expense would sound pretty hollow.

I believe there are better managers out there, that we could get, that would get more out of this squad. I also believe there are a whole lot more who would completely f*ck it up the wall.

Tread carefully. The weaker the squad, the greater the risk.

Exactly. If you could guarantee that whoever we brought in would improve our points total more so that GR, we'd be saying farewell to the incumbent this afternoon.

What we need right now is not just someone who knows the Championship but someone who knows how to operate in this part of the Championship. So much has been said about the budget and what we can and can't spend, but we are one of the smaller ones in the division. We have the second smallest ground, limited revenue streams and have been away from it for the longest (aside from Wrexham who are a monied exception). Of course its's going to be tough. Even being 21st is three places higher than where pundits expect us to be.

We have a manager who knows what do with that kind of budget to get what he can from the team. It's a results game though so some wins and draws will have to come up from somewhere. I also maintain that this job is even harder for Rowett than the Birmingham, Millwall and Derby gigs were for him too. Stick with him and it is our best chance of staying up. Change and its a roll of a dice.

 

[The Voice Of Reason]

Norwich are much bigger than Bristol City and he’s from there and supported them as a kid. I’d imagine an extra £250,000 a year in the pay packet too. I can totally understand him going there. I’m amazed people can’t see the pull of going home to a better job with better prospects, especially given the support he’d have of his wider family still being there too given the family tragedy he suffered.

Nope. He just goes for the cash as a chairman I'd be worried making him an offer

 

[The Voice Of Reason]

You'd forgive yourself a smirk if it occurred as it would be very likely that Cardiff would be going past them. All those last-game songs when we played them at their neighbour's expense would sound pretty hollow.



Exactly. If you could guarantee that whoever we brought in would improve our points total more so that GR, we'd be saying farewell to the incumbent this afternoon.

What we need right now is not just someone who knows the Championship but someone who knows how to operate in this part of the Championship. So much has been said about the budget and what we can and can't spend, but we are one of the smaller ones in the division. We have the second smallest ground, limited revenue streams and have been away from it for the longest (aside from Wrexham who are a monied exception). Of course its's going to be tough. Even being 21st is three places higher than where pundits expect us to be.

We have a manager who knows what do with that kind of budget to get what he can from the team. It's a results game though so some wins and draws will have to come up from somewhere. I also maintain that this job is even harder for Rowett than the Birmingham, Millwall and Derby gigs were for him too. Stick with him and it is our best chance of staying up. Change and its a roll of a dice.

Why would we get rid of!!! MADNESS!!!

He's doing well for a low budget and bar 1 game we haven't lost by loads in the league

 

[Wallop]

Absolutely!- and if you look at the current 'elite' managers, I think they have all (apart from Guardiola and Arteta) had lengthy stints earlier in their careers where they worked in the lower leagues, and were often with a smaller club for a number of years. As you said, Manning has now screwed his career by job-hopping. Exactly what Appleton did- and Ferguson warned him (Appleton) about this repeatedly...

I take your point but I bet he gets a gig at a L1 club soon. In the meantime, he can sit back and look at his very sizeable bank balance. Nice work if you can get it.

 

[Wallop]

Who said there is no better than Rowett? Clearly there are better championship managers than Rowett. I’m not sure there are many better though at getting the most out of a bottom half championship side with a budget that doesn’t match the majority of the league and keeping them up.

Indeed - and which out of work Championship-Level Managers with the skills necessary to get a song out of our team would be queuing at our door if we did sack Rowett?

 

[NorthWestOx]

That's 3 out of next 4 opponents looking for managers.
Kieran McKenna getting nervous?

 

[Made-in-Jericho]

That's 3 out of next 4 opponents looking for managers.
Kieran McKenna getting nervous?

With our luck each one of them will have a ‘new manager bounce’.

 

[OX14]

Why would we get rid of!!! MADNESS!!!

He's doing well for a low budget and bar 1 game we haven't lost by loads in the league

No. He done well last season keeping us up but this season his ppg is worse than what Buckingham achieved last season at the same stage.

Not losing by more than one goal won't keep us up if we don't pick wins in other games.

 

[tonyw]

You seem to be forgetting why we have professions and careers. Why should people in football be any different to the rest of us in wanting to better themselves financially ? Football is an incredibly precarious profession. Manning might now never go higher than L1 or L2 - a decent income but not a life changing one. By going to Norwich on an hefty contract and collecting a very sizeable pay out, certainly in excess of £2-3m he’s probably set himself up for a good while, if not for life. The option ? Stay at Bristol on a dwindling contract, risk the sack and then where next ? Probably back to L1 or L2 with little more than a couple of years very good salary behind him. You, me and the rest support Oxford United, managers don’t have that affinity, it’s our leisure time but for them it’s nothing more than their 9 to 5 job and with one eye on their next career step.

You and Holdsteady are missing one of the key points here, which is that the Norwich job was a much, much harder one than the job he was already in.

At Brizzle, he'd had a year to pull together a squad of players that fit his style of play, that knew him and were clearly playing for him, and he'd got them playing some good football in the second half of the season. A few more additions over the summer, and it was a relatively easy job to have them up near the playoffs again.

But Norwich? Here's a side that had the second worst defense in the whole of the Championship last season and which had just lost two of their best three attacking players in Sainz and Nunez. They had a great Championship striker in Sargent, and not a whole lot else. They brought in twenty new players over the summer, and have clearly made a horrible mess of it. Total rebuilds are really tough.

It's a simple, rational calculation for me that a jump up in club size and paycheck from Bristol City to Norwich just shouldn't have been worth that level of risk.

If the irrational, personal pull of working in his home town was what did it for him......fair enough.

And I think exactly the same is true for Edwards. Leaving a stable situation at Boro, with a good squad that's playing well for him to join a Wolves side that looks utterly adrift. Unless they've given him some sort of guarantee that he's going to be given a full year even if they get relegated, from the outside it looks nuts.


The list of managers that have done a great job at one club, only to completely fail to translate that to performance at another, is absurdly long. So if it was me, I would only ever make the leap if the corresponding jump in the status of the club I was joining made it worthwhile.

 

[tonyw]

Other than Eddie Howe, who actually left Bournemouth for Burnley at one point so did exactly what people are on here are criticizing, how many managers of elite clubs have come from the lower leagues? To turn down actual hard cash in your bank in the hope it will lead to a big job further down the line is brave/foolish, certainly for English lower league managers, its incredibly rare they get a look in nowadays.

Eddie Howe moved from a Bournemouth side that had just got promoted from League Two to League One, to a Burnley side that had just dropped out of the Premier League.
I don't think anyone is arguing against managers taking that sort of upwards leap - just the sideways jumps that seem so much more commonplace nowadays.

Another example would be Frank at Spurs. Spent very nearly a decade building up Brentford, and turned down numerous other offers.

 

[dickwalton1964]

You and Holdsteady are missing one of the key points here, which is that the Norwich job was a much, much harder one than the job he was already in.

At Brizzle, he'd had a year to pull together a squad of players that fit his style of play, that knew him and were clearly playing for him, and he'd got them playing some good football in the second half of the season. A few more additions over the summer, and it was a relatively easy job to have them up near the playoffs again.

But Norwich? Here's a side that had the second worst defense in the whole of the Championship last season and which had just lost two of their best three attacking players in Sainz and Nunez. They had a great Championship striker in Sargent, and not a whole lot else. They brought in twenty new players over the summer, and have clearly made a horrible mess of it. Total rebuilds are really tough.

It's a simple, rational calculation for me that a jump up in club size and paycheck from Bristol City to Norwich just shouldn't have been worth that level of risk.

If the irrational, personal pull of working in his home town was what did it for him......fair enough.

And I think exactly the same is true for Edwards. Leaving a stable situation at Boro, with a good squad that's playing well for him to join a Wolves side that looks utterly adrift. Unless they've given him some sort of guarantee that he's going to be given a full year even if they get relegated, from the outside it looks nuts.


The list of managers that have done a great job at one club, only to completely fail to translate that to performance at another, is absurdly long. So if it was me, I would only ever make the leap if the corresponding jump in the status of the club I was joining made it worthwhile.

Joey Beauchamp ? He's lauded on here for exactly that and there's hundreds of cases of people in football unable to resist the lure of returning to their hometown club. Take Rob Edwards - Born in Telford, half hour from Molineux. Totally understandable why he wants a return to familiar territory. Manning would have got a year plus to sort out the mess and build his own side bar an unprecedented and catastrophic run that left his position untenable. Bristol City were schooled in that semi final play off by a team that didn't even make it to the PL and are now languishing in the bottom three with virtually the same squad of players - yes, by hook or by crook they got there but don't lets kid ourselves that they were only a few additions light to go that step further. It will be a huge task for Struber or any other manager to get them in the play offs again, just as it would have been for Manning to repeat the feat.

 

[Swaby39]

Sheehan sacked by Swansea.

Of the current bottom 8 that's now 4 who've sacked their managers this season.

Our turn soon

Can’t see Rowett being moved on while the ownership situation is potentially mixing up. I would think that has to conclude before anything gets done.

If a new majority owner is sniffing around, they may want a decisive say in who comes in next. Equally, they might see Rowett as the man for the job if he was properly supported, and therefore want him to remain if they took over.

I change my mind every day it feels like. Between matches I remember how much I like Rowett and how difficult his job has been made. Then I watch a match and think “this can’t be all we’re capable of”.

 

[holdsteady]

You and Holdsteady are missing one of the key points here, which is that the Norwich job was a much, much harder one than the job he was already in.

At Brizzle, he'd had a year to pull together a squad of players that fit his style of play, that knew him and were clearly playing for him, and he'd got them playing some good football in the second half of the season. A few more additions over the summer, and it was a relatively easy job to have them up near the playoffs again.

But Norwich? Here's a side that had the second worst defense in the whole of the Championship last season and which had just lost two of their best three attacking players in Sainz and Nunez. They had a great Championship striker in Sargent, and not a whole lot else. They brought in twenty new players over the summer, and have clearly made a horrible mess of it. Total rebuilds are really tough.

It's a simple, rational calculation for me that a jump up in club size and paycheck from Bristol City to Norwich just shouldn't have been worth that level of risk.

If the irrational, personal pull of working in his home town was what did it for him......fair enough.

And I think exactly the same is true for Edwards. Leaving a stable situation at Boro, with a good squad that's playing well for him to join a Wolves side that looks utterly adrift. Unless they've given him some sort of guarantee that he's going to be given a full year even if they get relegated, from the outside it looks nuts.


The list of managers that have done a great job at one club, only to completely fail to translate that to performance at another, is absurdly long. So if it was me, I would only ever make the leap if the corresponding jump in the status of the club I was joining made it worthwhile.

Do you not think Manning was in the best position to judge whether he thinks he can repeat what he did with Bristol last season or whether it was going to end up the same as his time at MK Dons? I would agree that, if he thought he had a team to go charging through the championship this season, it would have been a mistake, but I don’t think he was going to have that and they look slightly worse than last year.

So while it was a gamble to go, the lure of your home town club paying you more money against the “stability” of a championship job which could very well have ended up in a sacking in a similar timeframe is hardly putting your life savings on black, managers have understandably come to the conclusion that these jobs are short term.

 

[tonyw]

Do you not think Manning was in the best position to judge whether he thinks he can repeat what he did with Bristol last season or whether it was going to end up the same as his time at MK Dons? I would agree that, if he thought he had a team to go charging through the championship this season, it would have been a mistake, but I don’t think he was going to have that and they look slightly worse than last year.

So while it was a gamble to go, the lure of your home town club paying you more money against the “stability” of a championship job which could very well have ended up in a sacking in a similar timeframe is hardly putting your life savings on black, managers have understandably come to the conclusion that these jobs are short term.

I think the chances of Bristol City firing him this season were tiny (and they're currently one point better off than they were at this stage last season). They don't have form for it - they gave Lee Johnson more than four seasons, and Nigel Pierson got two and a half......and neither of those two managers ever got them in the playoffs. The only guy who didn't get long was Dean Holden, but he was an internal caretaker-turned-full time manager who was still at the club for half a decade.

If it was a personal decision because he wanted to move closer to home.....as I say, fine (same for Edwards). I understand. He's been through some impossibly difficult personal things, and I think we can all understand wanting to be somewhere where your family is comfortable. Sometimes that's the most important thing.


I'm just laying out why I think it was a horrible career move. Just as I pointed out at the time why I thought MApp moving to Leicester was a horrible career move. And I'm calling out why I think Edwards is also making a horrible career move too. When he has them playing in Europe in two years' time, you can bring up this thread and call me an idiot!

 

[Orkney Islands Yellow]

 

[Marston Road Yellow]

I recon we should get rid of GR and go for someone like Rooney, Gerrard, Terry or Sol Campbell a proper name manager.

 

[SSO]

Who are Swansea and Boro going to hire when there's no better than Rowett according to some?

Rowett is possibly the best we could hope for given the budget and size of our club at this level. I wanted him before the Manning appointment but could understand why he would not drop to L1 at that point.

Middlesbrough are still a decent prospect for an up and coming manager. Swansea I cannot understand the sacking because he kept them up last season and they probably won’t trouble the bottom 3 places any more than us.

There are a fair few posts going on offer at the moment and the important bit for us is that we possibly only need Swansea, Norwich or even Southampton to make that Rooney style appointment and we are only fighting off 22nd place.

 

[Steve Gilbert]

Rowett is possibly the best we could hope for given the budget and size of our club at this level. I wanted him before the Manning appointment but could understand why he would not drop to L1 at that point.

Middlesbrough are still a decent prospect for an up and coming manager. Swansea I cannot understand the sacking because he kept them up last season and they probably won’t trouble the bottom 3 places any more than us.

There are a fair few posts going on offer at the moment and the important bit for us is that we possibly only need Swansea, Norwich or even Southampton to make that Rooney style appointment and we are only fighting off 22nd place.

If Norwich don’t get this appointment right then I can see them going down without a fight. Even Wilder is struggling to get a momentum at Sheff U so it wouldn’t surprise me if they spend the season fighting the drop.
Blackburn and Pompey are both struggling and it will be interesting to see how long Mous gets at Pompey.

 

[SSO]

I recon we should get rid of GR and go for someone like Rooney, Gerrard, Terry or Sol Campbell a proper name manager.

Good fishing !

 

[SSO]

If Norwich get this appointment right then I can see them going down without a fight. Even Wilder is struggling to get a momentum at Sheff U so it wouldn’t surprise me if they spend the season fighting the drop.
Blackburn and Pompey are both struggling and it will be interesting to see how long Mous gets at Pompey.

I could even envisage GR being picked up by one of these teams and us picking up a sacked Mousinho. He has probably punched above his weight at Portsmouth and there may be a feeling there that he has reached his limit with that club.

There are enough changes going on elsewhere to suggest this time round that we don’t join the sack race. They won’t all get it right and I believe we are creating more this season than last season. The points we have picked up by comparison to this time last season doesn’t look good but I think we have a better squad and just as good a chance of beating the drop this time round.

The table with Millwall, Preston and Stoke near the top and Norwich, Southampton and Sheff Utd at the bottom is madness. It reminds me of Eric Morecambe playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order. And we still haven’t had that elusive penalty yet despite attacking more.

 

[Oxford84]

I’d have Hogg back in a heartbeat.

Like Manning, hed leave at the first opportunity

 

[90syeIlow]

I hope not. Would seem stupid to sack one of the most experienced Championship managers who constantly keeps clubs up and helps them over achieve. Even more so when we aren’t even in the bottom 3.

We are lucky that Sheff Utd and Norwich had disastrous starts, otherwise we would be in the bottom three.

 

[Made-in-Jericho]

Shef U are starting to turn the ship around so they will start to pull away. We need a couple more basket case clubs to fall into the trap and if we keep our cool and stick with stability and Rowett we will hopefully, just about, be ok.