How good a manager was DC ?

I love DC but a lot were in the conference and if you looked at the stats from Christmas last year it would make Ray Graydon look like pep 😂😂

It's all relative. Could Trollope or Holloway have gotten us out of the conference?

One thing we can say with reasonable confidence is that DC is not yet the complete league one manager. There are question marks over his ability to sign players that can compete at this level.

I hope he goes away and proves that he can do it at another club as I really hope we see him back at Rovers in a few years.

DC is the closest any manager has come to Francis for me, the squad unity and his man management are on a par, but he has yet to achieve what Gerry has in management, i hope he does but have my doubts.
Still i look forward to the day our paths cross and i can shake his hand again and thank him.

Jesus, let it go. Clarke’s gone.
Two promotions, one top ten finish in League one, in just four and a half seasons as Rovers manager.
They are the stats which count.

Charming ! Will give myself a slap on the wrists for sharing some stats with fellow Gasheads. 

or What a load of Quantocks mate 

Touchy! You must read in an aggressive manor that’s all I will say.
😀

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It is pretty stark though that his better signings were all at conference/league one level.

One possible interpretation is that we perhaps had a bigger budget for the level we were in prior to league one so were able to attract better players than our rivals, also perhaps there is something to be said that DC's main skill- motivation, becomes less relevant the further up the league he goes because you transition from "honest pros" who are trying to make use of what talent they have vs players who have been knocking on the door of the championship for a while and need a more nuanced message than giving 100% and getting stuck in.

Correct mm. Blimey I hope we don’t have a slow descend into thinking DC wasn’t that special. I hope we don’t start to question what he did so that by the end of the season his reputation has been spoiled.
GF nor Ollie managed Rovers when we as bad as we were when DC came. As you say a different age and time. Clubs and their facilities have overtaken us in the nearly 20 years since. Yet DC managed to get us to mid table League 1, our traditional place imo, from a low starting point.
DC was special, he took over and couldn’t save us but he took us back up and achieved another promotion. He moulded a very special group of players into a strong team with great resilience. His teams usually attacked and he was never afraid to change things in the opening 30 minutes if he thought he’d got things wrong initially. He developed a very thick skin in the late summer of ‘14 when things started slowly but developed and built a winning mentality even when we didn’t play well. He created a bond with the fans that very few managers had done and certain players should say thank you to him for their careers. His man-management skills were very good as told by Lee Brown and I have no doubt he saved my club.
Was he perfect? Of course he wasn’t. He was still learning how to manage as he grew as a League 1 manager. He could do the recruitment himself with a few trusted colleagues in the Conference and League 2 but in League 1 that was an area that the club has really struggled with and last Summer we were caught out and DC has paid the price. That recruitment may have got us some good players on paper, I’m not sure they were the right characters to fit in and the parallels with 2010-11 are worryingly similar. He still needed to learn, imo, how to use the loan market better. I’m afraid his reluctance to play loans may have caused clubs to be uncertain about loaning better players who need game time. His constant changes seemed to work at times but when we weren’t playing well the changes just didn’t work.
But overall, the man saved our club. Had we not gone straight back up I fear we could be preparing to play Weston Super Mare and not Fleetwood this week. 4 years ago if someone had said “in 2018 you will be struggling to stay in League 1” we would have bitten their hands off for it to be the case. That the recent 12 months haven’t been the best is a real shame but I still feel that we should have given DC the same loyalty that he gave us in the Summer 2016.
But he’s gone now and we need to get behind whoever is appointed. I just hope we don’t let DCs legacy to be rubbed away by those who did not rate him. I appreciate that statistics and facts might show him not to be the best manager statistically but he was the most important and best manager when we really needed someone to save us. But sure others will disagree.
UTG!