Post by gashead1981 on Mar 20, 2019 9:55:55 GMT
I think lots of chairman up and down the country will know the dynamics of our club as well as the limitations on DC budget wise. They will also look at his whole transfer activity and what he made on transfers as well as the ones that didn't go quite so well. The modern manager has a shelf life of about 2-2 1/2 years and DC surpassed that. That speaks volumes too.
For every Paul Hurst you will have a Dean Smith, who was Walsall manager, went to Brentford and is now in charge at Villa. Lee Johnson went from Oldham, to Barnsley to City and Alex Neil who went from a small Scottish team to Norwich, took them to the Prem and back and is now at Preston. My point is Paul Hurst's role at Ipswich cannot be used as a barometer for success or failure when you can point to others who have made a success of it. Its down to the individual and whether he can make it work at the club and you only know that for sure once he is installed.
Hurst's problem was he didn't get the right mix of proven championship players with experience together with potential non experienced championship players who perhaps couldn't cope with the step up straight away. A lot of pressure was put on the inexperienced ones too quickly and they buckled.
I'm not saying DC is a saint to the footballing world, but he is a very good manager who, in my opinion, has the potential to grow, become better and manager a bigger club at a higher level. Of course we don't know if he is able to do so unless given the opportunity.
I think the facts speak for themselves re: the wider perception of DC's reign. Success in the lower leagues and struggled to build a team at L1 level which resulted in his departure from the club. Our subsequent improvement is quite telling. Budget wise he was handed the tools to have a crack at establishing ourselves at this level and it was going the other way sadly.
In terms of the examples provided, Johnson obviously got the City gig on connections. The success of Scottish managers in this country was a contributing factor in Norwich turning to Neil. Dean Smith was doing a great job with Walsall at was earning plaudits of their style of play at the time.
All of the above were in jobs when poached and I'm struggling to think of precedents of Championship clubs appointing someone unemployed who left a previous job in a relegation battle in L1. Maybe Holloway getting the QPR job in 2001 but a lot has changed in football since that time.
The particular comparison Paul Hurst makes sense given both didn't play at the higher levels of the game and attained a significant amount of experience playing and managing in the Conference or lower. Ipswich gambled on Hurst and it clearly failed. He's the most recent example of a club who have given the chance to a lower league manager and I've no doubt it will impact on the chances of other aspiring managers.
Of course you can only know when installed but given the calibre of managers around the world interested in jobs at that level, gambling on someone who left his previous job at the level below and who's never played, coached or managed at that level would make very little sense.
The evidence is that he's got a fair bit to do before registering on the radar of Championship clubs. Clearly a very effective lower league manager but major question marks exist whether he could be a success at L1 level or higher for me.
If clubs were looking for lower league managerial talent, I'd imagine Cowley at Lincoln would be far in a way the front runner.
There was no progressive build, like Cowley has had at Lincoln. A year in the conference, a promotion push, a year in L2, now a promotion push, they are a team developing facilities alongside their rise, training ground and developing and employing analysts they had in place long before we did. Developing the facilities was something we needed to do alongside our own growth, it would have maintained the momentum.
Unless you have rich owners that can sustain the throwing money at the club to compete year on year like Bournemouth did or are a big club in the lower leagues that can afford to buy your way out of the division and then maintain that like Southampton did in the late naughties or Sunderland are doing this year then a rapid accent can be equally as damaging.
I also think DC got overly distracted by the off the field inactivity together with the political infighting in our own boardroom, and you can't blame him for that, the owners made empty promises and then a change of structure and I think in the end he became quite demoralised by it, when things started going wrong on the pitch it became a whole lot worse than perhaps it should have been. If his eye had been completely on footballing matters and maximising his budget then he perhaps wouldn't have found himself in the position he was in. I also think that if we had stuck with him, he could have turned it around, but thats my own view and not for discussion on this thread.