We’re currently four places better off than when he took over nearly three years ago. We’ve had some good days since, and some bad days since. Some great results, some terrible ones. Some brilliant runs, some shocking ones. It’s a constant rollercoaster pretty much every season. There is very little flat track, just lots of dips and climbs. You’re likely to be in both the top and bottom four at some point in the same season with him. That’s just how it seems to be. Sometimes it’s really fun and sometimes it’s pretty unbearable, and you never know which one it’ll be from one week to the next. We started last season badly (as per) yet were second on January 1, but then we toppled right down the table into early February before going on another run and bobbing all the way back up into the playoffs, at the exact moment the world shut down and the league was sealed off. He is a manager who will win five on the spin and then lose five on the spin, and vice versa, and you just have to wait and see where that leaves you when it matters.
After more than ten years of managing his CV is not littered with much in the way of genuine achievements, but quite a lot of moments that stick in the mind. When you actually step back and look at where things were at the start versus where they were at the end, across all of his jobs to date, he’s just a pretty normal League One manager. He’ll manage you in League One and he’ll probably leave you right around where he picked you up, but you will have some jollies and a laugh or two along the way, some great days and nights and see the odd brilliant player rock up for a bit. It depends what you want and what you class as success. Some people just want a fun ride and others want tangible progress. So far he can deliver the former but the latter is missing, and that isn’t a criticism but a statement of fact. He had a great couple of years during his stint at MK but couldn’t sustain or rebuild it, and Charlton fans will tell you he was too stubborn to get it right which is why Bowyer took the same group of players and immediately flung them up the table, despite the fact he was so inexperienced that he didn’t even have his coaching badges when he first took them on. Robinson is not a bad manager, he is an okay one who will provide you with the odd moment of brilliance and the odd calamity. He is a League One manager in the same way that you look at certain players and go, “They’re at this level for a reason - if they could be on top of their game regularly they wouldn’t be here.” That can apply to managers and coaches just as much as players. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Ultimately he left MK several places worse off than when he took over after more than 6 years. They had one promotion in that time, of course, and a couple of great cup moments, but the end point was ultimately no better than the start point. That’s all you can judge people on - did they leave the club better off than when they found us? Appleton did. Wilder did. Robinson is yet to be able to say that, despite moments of positivity and a lot of bravado. After MK he underachieved at Charlton and moved them about four league places in the space of 16 months, which was still around mid-table, and then Bowyer flicked a switch and off they went like a rocket. He will tell you that happened because of what he built before then; people who were actually there will tell you it was no fun and that he was the one preventing the rocket from taking off. I do remember seeing a team with Napa as a lone striker for most of the game, and the likes of Smith-Brown and Buckley-Ricketts on the pitch, go to Charlton with no manager and turn them over after falling behind twice. Like I say, you’ll rarely get flat track.
I think he’s a very lucky man to be on his third contract here, and to have 3.5 years on his current one. He’s had more contracts than he’s had full years of service despite our current position and our initial position being incredibly similar, and the public a**e wiggling towards Blackpool last season wasn’t his finest moment. Especially as when that kicked off we had just spent all of January slipping down the table and were in a funk. That ended up being quite a humbling experience for him because he rightly took a few slaps the more he seemed to welcome the talk and enjoy talking about the speculation, and he quite literally held his hands up before one of the final home games in front of a crowd, when he walked onto the pitch before kick off and put his hands up towards the stands as if to say, “Sorry, my bad.” He also has a nasty habit of throwing other people to the mob when things aren’t going well, despite spending the rest of the time preaching mental health and talking about players being human beings who need compassion and support etc. He’s done it multiple times during his time in our dugout and it’s not the most attractive quality. He’s certainly always got something to say, for better or worse. Ultimately I think he’s quite an insecure man who wants to be loved, and that when he feels people don’t like him or are actively fed up with him he panics, which is why during bad patches you get these jibber jabber interviews and these moments of deflection in the form of naming and shaming. They come across as attempts to take the heat off himself, because he feels cornered, but in the process he clatters others and seems to start talking in circles and contradicting himself. That is merely an observation and I don’t think it’s unfair - it’s all on the record so it’s hard to argue. Sometimes he comes across as a bit of a calculated populist, and sometimes he comes across as someone who is merely flawed and wants to do his best, and who wants people’s approval. It’s probably a bit of both and somewhere in the middle as a result.
I don’t think ‘either side’ can really claim a win in terms of those who think he’s brilliant and those who don’t. We are where we are, which is basically where we were right at the beginning of his tenure. We’ve been up to the top, we’ve been sat on the bottom, and we have been everywhere in between along the way. Up and down, back and forth, side to side, round and round... at the end of it all we haven’t really moved more than a few inches. I think he’s done very well out of us and that we’ve done okay out of him. But it’s certainly been eventful, and there’s something to be said for that at times.
Some people like him and some merely tolerate him, but I like to think we all want him to succeed because if he does then the club benefits. I would gleefully take a man who I think is a plonker getting Oxford United promoted over a man I think is a terrific bloke achieving nothing.
