Chris Brown

[Monkcaster_Rover]

Iain Hume & Billy Paynter never shy'd away from the task at hand either.

[Bentley Bullet]

Players with attitudes that enable them to succeed possess the most important quality, in my humble opinion.

[i_ateallthepies]

DF over estimated his second string players at the end of last season that’s why we missed out on the title.
If he had funds yet signed potential then again it shows that he over estimated the players and under estimated the league.

True enough Steve, though I rather think DF over estimated himself in believing he could bring in a fistful of youngsters and mould them into a fighting force with the attributes of mature players.

[steve@dcfd]

DF over estimated his second string players at the end of last season that’s why we missed out on the title.
If he had funds yet signed potential then again it shows that he over estimated the players and under estimated the league.

True enough Steve, though I rather think DF over estimated himself in believing he could bring in a fistful of youngsters and mould them into a fighting force with the attributes of mature players.

That could be true if he had the funds but we don’t know if he could have signed better or not.

[steve@dcfd]

I agree billy,
I'm not sure the quality of the players were far superior, Syers, keegan, furman, paynter, mcoombe, jones, weren't players that you could say had quality but they certainly had an attitude that enabled us to succeed that season

It was not quality that took that team over the line it was attitude, strength of mind and body and being bloody minded to hold on to what they had. They wanted promotion and this might be radical probably more than the club.
If you want quality to have go back to 2007/2008 team. Who would walk this league.

[vaya]

I agree billy,
I'm not sure the quality of the players were far superior, Syers, keegan, furman, paynter, mcoombe, jones, weren't players that you could say had quality but they certainly had an attitude that enabled us to succeed that season

It was not quality that took that team over the line it was attitude, strength of mind and body and being bloody minded to hold on to what they had. They wanted promotion and this might be radical probably more than the club.
If you want quality to have go back to 2007/2008 team. Who would walk this league.

Although they didn't walk the league at the time.

[steve@dcfd]

I agree billy,
I'm not sure the quality of the players were far superior, Syers, keegan, furman, paynter, mcoombe, jones, weren't players that you could say had quality but they certainly had an attitude that enabled us to succeed that season

It was not quality that took that team over the line it was attitude, strength of mind and body and being bloody minded to hold on to what they had. They wanted promotion and this might be radical probably more than the club.
If you want quality to have go back to 2007/2008 team. Who would walk this league.

Although they didn't walk the league at the time.

The league then was better than it is now but that’s just my opinion.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Steve.

That "players wanted promotion more than the club in 12/13" claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

We had what has to be our biggest ever Tier 3 loss that year. Turnover was £5.2m. Cost of Sales (predominantly wages) was £8.3m. The operating loss, which the Directors covered, was £4.5m.

Yet they provided funds to bring in Quinn, McCombe, Jones, Syers, Cotterill, Hume and Paynter. That doesn't sound like a Board that didn't want promotion.

[dickos1]

I agree billy,
I'm not sure the quality of the players were far superior, Syers, keegan, furman, paynter, mcoombe, jones, weren't players that you could say had quality but they certainly had an attitude that enabled us to succeed that season

It was not quality that took that team over the line it was attitude, strength of mind and body and being bloody minded to hold on to what they had. They wanted promotion and this might be radical probably more than the club.
If you want quality to have go back to 2007/2008 team. Who would walk this league.

You're agreeing with me

[pib]

RE: the 2013/14 season and fine margins.

If Dickov hadn't spat his dummy out with all his forwards and played an inexperienced (and ultimately not good enough) Alex Peterson up front on his own against a poor Millwall side at home, we might have taken 2 extra points and stayed up.

Or maybe if we hadn't appointed the useless f*cker as Manager in the first place...

[Chris Black come back]

Steve.

That "players wanted promotion more than the club in 12/13" claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

We had what has to be our biggest ever Tier 3 loss that year. Turnover was £5.2m. Cost of Sales (predominantly wages) was £8.3m. The operating loss, which the Directors covered, was £4.5m.

Yet they provided funds to bring in Quinn, McCombe, Jones, Syers, Cotterill, Hume and Paynter. That doesn't sound like a Board that didn't want promotion.

I think from memory perhaps it was silent majority at the time making the point that the accounts that year (which ran from 1 June 2012 to 30 June 2013) had lots of residual costs attributed to the wage bill (which under standard contracts runs to 30 June each season) from The Experiment and as a result inflated the overall bill in the accounts while actually not delivering the same sum to the playing squad for the 12/13 season.

Granted, this was not quite the cost-saving exercise that JR sold us at the time.

[Chris Black come back]

RE: the 2013/14 season and fine margins.

If Dickov hadn't spat his dummy out with all his forwards and played an inexperienced (and ultimately not good enough) Alex Peterson up front on his own against a poor Millwall side at home, we might have taken 2 extra points and stayed up.

Or maybe if we hadn't appointed the useless f*cker as Manager in the first place...

I am no defender of Dickov at all but like SOD, these guys had never managed a single second in the Championship previously in their entire lives and were guiding a club that should have been bottom or second bottom on resources, to safety or almost safety in case of Dickov.

Got to credit that. Mind you that full season under Dickov in League One was beyond painful. Proper dreadful football and Paul Keegan was our creative outlet.

[BillyStubbsTears]

CBCB.

That may be so. But, as I said, the Board sanctioned the signing of 6 or 7 seasoned pros, mainly from the higher reaches of L1 or from the Championship. Why would a Board that didn't want promotion do that?

It's an easy accusation to make that Bramall & Watson haven't really wanted success for the club. It's made regularly on here. But it's not really supported by the evidence.

[Chris Black come back]

Exactly right. Both of the families and also JR in past have handed over money right, left and centre. It is our managers in recent years who have by and large let them down that is the gripe of many.

Case in point with Ferguson and Evina.

Ferguson arrived in October 2015. In January 2016 he gives Cedric a new 2.5 year deal. After Colchester game in April 2016 he barely plays him again and he is basically banished from the club and where we end up paying a good chunk of his wages I imagine. This is just madness and a total waste of money, whatever you think of Cedric as a footballer.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Pib

Sometimes managers have to make a point. We were in shocking form prior to that Millwall match. We'd lost 4 on the bounce, culminating in that appalling performance against Ipswich the week before. We'd picked up 8 points from 12 games. We picked up 15 from the next 12. Would have been more if we'd not been cheated at QPR.

Lord knows I've no axe to grind for Dickov. And there's no question he f**ked it up in the last few weeks. But some of the criticism of him that season was simply ridiculous. We had probably the second lowest wage bill in the division.  We had the worst injury problems of any season whilst I've been watching the club. And we still ended up one shocking refereeing decision in the 95th minute of the last match of the season away from staying up.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Couldn't agree more CBCB.

[selby]

  Dean Saunders was asked about leadership on talksport one morning,He said at Doncaster I had a captain called Rob Jones,and he wanted as much out of the game as he could before he retired.
  He said that Jones and McCombe thaught that one of our other players were not pulling their weight,and when he went into the dressing room at half time they had him pinned to the wall.
   He openly said that he did not have to say a lot in that dressing room because it was full of leaders.

[anne honemous]

There was a spine of mesterliness in that side that we're sorely lacking at the moment. Jones, Keegan/Furman and Brown through the middle were all up for a physical battle.

I couldn't agree more. Just one player from those you mention would make a big difference in toughening up our team right now.

[Akinfenwa]

Regarding the 2013/14 season, survival should have been do-able. Remember, Clark's Birmingham finished 21st with 44 points which still the lowest any 21st placed team had finished with in the 2nd tier this millennium. They were shit and we let them off the hook.

I'm convinced that a half-decent manager could've got that team over the line that season. Small teams can stay up with momentum on side at least for a season or two, Nigel Clough managed it with Burton last season, Rotherham before that and a number of other examples in the past. I felt like away from home in particular we just weren't very smartly set up to stay in games and play on the counter, was it 2 wins and 12 goals scored all season? Really poor. And Dickov was backed to be able to bring in a number of good players in January (or so we thought), and while we had an initial bounce in form at home the away form remained abject throughout.

My main problem with the Dickov appointment was that it was completely undeserved based on his career at Oldham. He had no track record of success and did nothing that indicated that he ought to have been given a chance to manage in the second tier, except of course from knocking Liverpool out of the FA Cup on TV and happening to live in Cheshire and being an acquaintance of John Ryan. It showed and ended up costing us the massive opportunity we had to stay up that year IMO.

Dickov's whole legacy speaks for itself for me really. Somehow failed to improve the team with every transfer window, often making us worse. Inheriting the League 1 champions and left us in the League 1 relegation zone just over two years later.

I admit that I maybe a tad biased though as I never liked the bloke. Came across as a silver tongued chancer to me.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Akinfenwa.

I don't disagree with anything you say there.

But I keep coming back to the fact that we had horrendous injury problems that season. Dickov had to deal with us losing our three out of four of our first choice defence to injury by November. Buiilding another defence then seeing every member of that one also get injured.

You need a bit of luck as a manager. He got none that season. We'd have stayed up comfortably if Turnbull or Jones or Quinn or Husband or Khumalo hadn't succumbed to long term injuries, and we could have spent our budget on a couple of more creative players instead of constantly filling in injury gaps.

[Bentley Bullet]

This is getting too often for comfort, but again I agree entirely with BST!

[BillyStubbsTears]

BB
You know it makes sense. Come into the tent.

[Bentley Bullet]

Well, I must admit you've made more sense since your resurrection, but I ain't coming in that bloody tent!

[anne honemous]

I also prefer not to blame injuries for relegation in 2013-14.

In 2010-11 when we nose dived down the league table at an alarming rate and only just scraped to survival, SO'D had to contend with an equally as bad injury crisis to the extent that we could barely name a complete subs bench on occasions, and regularly had to fill it with Brad Grayson, Jordan Bradshaw and other youth team players.

SOD's squad could just about cobble together the odd point here and there, such as in the 1-1 draw at Norwich on a bloody cold Tuesday night, or the draws right at the tail end of the season against Palace, Barnsley and then Leicester, when we needed to throw ourselves over the safety line. Even when we threw away points in 2010-11, such as at Sheffield United in the 2-2 draw, we still actually managed to not get beat.

Dickov's team, on the other hand, didn't have that in them and we lacked any serious firepower, which always made it feel like we had a mountain to climb whenever we went a goal behind.

My own personal conclusion as to why we got relegated in 2013-14 is because of poor management, inadequate recruitment throughout the season and a lack of intelligent tactical nous on the manager's part - particularly away from home.

As said elsewhere, it was a golden opportunity to stay up and we (or more the manager with his bad decision making) completely squandered it.

[The Red Baron]

I met Dickov. An amiable chap and much more pleasant than I expected based on his reputation as a player. He didn't strike me as though he would make the tough decisions needed for the job.

He was also far too loyal to his coaching staff, one member of which was particularly clueless. Amazingly this person still works in football.

[pib]

Pib

Sometimes managers have to make a point. We were in shocking form prior to that Millwall match. We'd lost 4 on the bounce, culminating in that appalling performance against Ipswich the week before. We'd picked up 8 points from 12 games. We picked up 15 from the next 12. Would have been more if we'd not been cheated at QPR.

Lord knows I've no axe to grind for Dickov. And there's no question he f**ked it up in the last few weeks. But some of the criticism of him that season was simply ridiculous. We had probably the second lowest wage bill in the division.  We had the worst injury problems of any season whilst I've been watching the club. And we still ended up one shocking refereeing decision in the 95th minute of the last match of the season away from staying up.

Sometimes managers need to make a point, sometimes they need to realise they’re facing a relegation rival at home (which was crucial as we couldn’t win away that season) and play their best side.

Sometimes managers make petulant decisions, and that was certainly one in my view. Think about everything that might have gone against us that season, survival was still in our own gift but we unfortunately put a man in charge who largely didn’t know what he was doing.

I can’t make the case for him when in so many games that season we simply failed to compete, and had an embarrassingly poor away record. Bolton away stood out in particular. They rolled us over so easily it was laughable, and there were many more like it.

[drfchound]

I also prefer not to blame injuries for relegation in 2013-14.

In 2010-11 when we nose dived down the league table at an alarming rate and only just scraped to survival, SO'D had to contend with an equally as bad injury crisis to the extent that we could barely name a complete subs bench on occasions, and regularly had to fill it with Brad Grayson, Jordan Bradshaw and other youth team players.

SOD's squad could just about cobble together the odd point here and there, such as in the 1-1 draw at Norwich on a bloody cold Tuesday night, or the draws right at the tail end of the season against Palace, Barnsley and then Leicester, when we needed to throw ourselves over the safety line. Even when we threw away points in 2010-11, such as at Sheffield United in the 2-2 draw, we still actually managed to not get beat.

Dickov's team, on the other hand, didn't have that in them and we lacked any serious firepower, which always made it feel like we had a mountain to climb whenever we went a goal behind.

My own personal conclusion as to why we got relegated in 2013-14 is because of poor management, inadequate recruitment throughout the season and a lack of intelligent tactical nous on the manager's part - particularly away from home.

As said elsewhere, it was a golden opportunity to stay up and we (or more the manager with his bad decision making) completely squandered it.

It is always amusing to read some comments.
If the poster doesn’t like, say the manager, bad results are always down to him.

If the poster is a fan of the manager then the faults are always of the players making when results are poor.

[anne honemous]

It always has to come back to the manager.

You can hold the players accountable for bad individual performances, but if recruitment is poor - in either bringing a player in or offering an existing player one contract extension too many, the manager ultimately has to be responsible for his decision making over a period of time.

Dickov's decision making, IMO, cost us safety in the Championship, and cost him his job further down the line.

Rightly so.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Anne H

Yes, O'Driscoll's squads did, at times, have injury crises. Usually short-lived ones. The only really long-term injury apocalyose he had was at the back end of 2010-11 where we really were down to the bare bones for months.

He picked up 11 points from 19 matches.

All managers struggle when there is a major injury crisis.

As for Dickov in 2013/14, he lost the following players for long periods.

Jones
Turnbull
Robinson
Husband
McCombe
Khumalo
Forrester
Quinn
Wabara
Stevens
Martin Woods.

All of those were unavailable because of injury for at least a dozen matches. Most of them far longer than that. Then the following all had 6-10 match spells out injured.

Brown
Wellens
McCullough
Tamas

I've never known a long-term injury list like that in all my years watching Donny.

This is how bad the injury crisis was. We played THIRTEEN different defenders that season. When we won L1 the year before, we fielded a total of 6 defenders. 

Only 1 defender made over 30 starts in 2013/14 (Quinn: 31).

The previous year, four had done (Spurr: 46, Jones: 43, McCombe: 33, Quinn: 37.

Dickov was constantly having to patch up his team due to long-term injuries. And they weren't down to bad conditioning. They were down to bad luck. Jones wrapped himself round a post. Khumalo wrecked his knee 4,000 miles away. Husband fell and dislocated his shoulder. Forrester claimed to be fit when he wasn't and tore a hamstring. Wabara and Wellens broke bones in tackles. Tamas broke a bone on High Street.

By rights, we should have been relegated by March. Dickov's major fault was the collapse in the last 6 games. That was inexcusable. But he does deserve some credit for having got us to the brink of survival in light of that injury crisis. Refusing to recognise that is a bit unfair.

[drfchound]

BST.

That is probably the best summing up of the problems that Dickov had to deal with that I have ever read.

I noticed that Anne didn’t suggest that our relegation to L2 and the failure to clinch the L2 title were down to DF, which kind of backs up the point I had made earlier in the thread.