What is wrong with us?

Good post, I said something similar on the last match thread.

In my opinion you have to look at the constants throughout that time starting from the top up.

I don't include Wael as he owns us and employs people to run the club on his behalf.

I hear you LJG, I do know that GC was a 'Whiley old goat' and I respect that. The weird thing is that he was able to do the same thing with Mansfield.

My hunch is two players:

Jakola
JCH

I reckon (and please some get the stats to prove me right or wrong) that GC had more minutes out of these two players than any other manager.

I didn't say there was anything wrong with the results but to say many of the wins under GC were well deserved off the back off a good performance then we will have to agree to disagree.

I guess it depends on what you consider a good performance.

Being hard to score against and relying on your fitness to score late on in the game is a pretty tried and tested recipe for success.

It's not pretty but I think if that's the game plan and execution is successful I don't think that can be called a bad performance.

There are a couple of things that are linked to each other that may explain why our form ever since Coughlan left has been so dreadful.

The first is the decision made to tighten the purse strings in order to reduce the debt the club was racking up. Now the intention was really good, we were losing money at an unsustainable rate towards the end of DC’s time at the club and if we wanted to achieve a brighter future we needed to do something about it.

However the way this was executed was just completely wrong. I think we naively hoped that if we could develop players and sell them for a profit, we could mostly still afford to spend a fair bit on the playing budget.

Hence the investment in Garner, his back room staff and a large playing squad of mostly young players from Championship or Premier League academies with a few marquee signings such as Ehmer and Westbrooke to mitigate the obvious loss of proven quality as we dismantled the squad that had achieved success under DC and GC.

The trouble is the supposed ‘marquee’ signings completely flopped. Ehmer proved to be disinterested and poor defensively when we needed him, Westbrooke struggled to impose himself and Hanlan struggled to fill the boots of JCH. These younger players, the likes of Daly, Ayunga, Harries, Liddle, Koiki ect were then left in a squad with very little goalscoring threat, experience, lacking direction from the top down.

This leads me on to the replacement or lack of replacement of JCH. Getting over a million for JCH and then thinking we could just cheap out on 3 players all under the age of 25 none of which had ever scored goals consistently in the football league in their careers before, has to be one of the worst decisions the club has made in recent memory.

Even worse was the decision not rectify this in January. We had a whole month, just to roll the dice and try something new with the squad, in a way similar to Burton and we completely squandered it, instead getting an average right back in Williams and an average keeper in Day.

The consistent narrative really is we’ve lacked someone with a brain in the footballing department over the last 18 months to step in where the managers making an obvious mistake and say ‘hey look, perhaps we should not do that’

Finally the fitness and injuries we’ve racked up, I’d say is another thing to add to the what’s wrong at Bristol Rovers points tally. Every matchday squad there seems to be 3 or 4 players at least on the injury bench and this has carried over to this season. The problem is that when this has happened, we’ve had sufficient depth to make replacements but not sufficient quality.

Why does Wael always avoid the flack, surely he employs the likes of Starnes and Gorringe, who both seem incapable of organising anything without it going wrong.

With respective Pucklgas, feel free to JB bashing on the Mansfield thread or the Carboa cup thread (I have quite a bit, it is deserved).

However, this thread is about trying to understand why so many managers in the last couple of years have delivered groundhog day. It cannot be one manager as the majority have done it.

I was happy with GC , got the best out of what we had but do not think it would have lasted, it is not true to say he did the same at Mansfield, he failed there and was sacked.

The biggest problem is a lack of unity at the club.

1) We have a supporters club that does nothing to unify the support and only seeks to undermine to satisfy its own agenda. 

2) We have a passionate owner that can't run a bath. Harsh but only Rovers could clear debts and get relegated.

3) We have a manager that will always divide moral opinion.

4) We have lost a lot of football matches and been extremely poor which in turn has got most supporters at their wits end with the club.

5) We have a leadership team that is not clear in its way forward and constantly firefighting.

6) We play at a football stadium that is way out of date and resembles a mish mash of terraces and stands. Not a problem when the football on the pitch is decent.

7) We have a very ageing fan base that tends to be more cynical.   

For me the root cause is a lack of unity.