I got some right stick for recognising this back in January and summer 2017. Wish I could find the post now but someone called me a cretin for thinking relegation was highly likely this season with our squad.
I don't think it will have been me...been concerned about it for a similar length of time and that fear was not allayed by the summer recruitment - in fact it was excarbated by it. I did fall into the trap of making excuses for Heckingbottom though.
I earnestly believe the nail in the coffin was not retaining Roberts and Scowen. Think we would be a lot stronger with those 2.
Because of his circumstances. If he was Man City manager with that record he’d obviously be sacked but when your Barnsley manager who are already one of the smallest teams in the league who lost 8 of their first 11, replace the team with mainly kids with no championship experience, lose your assistant, lose your chief exec, have no chief exec for 3 months, have an owner trying to sell the club so doesn’t want to tie the club down with players on big contracts, lost 3 captains in the space of 12 months, don’t sign the type of players the manager wants, start the season with just 3 strikers including one who was unfit & one who wasn’t ready then expecting anything other than relegation form would be a miracle. I’m convinced he overachieved having us outside the bottom 3 given all that went off & the players he had. To me it’s no wonder he was wanting out given that so many were on his back when he wasn’t even underperforming. We should’ve been bottom & probably cast adrift.
We have over performed based on the players at our disposal. Our recruitment post promotion has been, to a large extent, abysmal. Any manager keeping this team up would have performed a miracle. We failed to adopt the plan to the Championship. This failure soon caught up with us in an unforgiving league.
It didn't help, but in my opinion it doesn't give a full picture. The start of the season's results were actually fairly good given that we had so many new players and indeed most people on here said as much at the time. We got some wins against decent teams and lost by the odd goal to Ipswich, Sheff Utd and Wolves. The worry is the capitulation of results that have come after that. Personally if you're going to give Hecky credit, then you have to give him blame too. For whatever reason he couldnt get them playing the level of football they played in the first 16 games or so.
Hecky should have been at this club for a long time, but he wasn’t backed because of the “plan” I don’t blame him at all for upping and leaving, he was dealt a **** hand and It will be a long time before I forgive the club for that.
The plan was based on being self sufficient, it can't be the desire of the club to lose players, it is the financial reality of being a smaller revenue club with an owner who could not afford to dip too deep in to his pockets to support the finances. The issues really started to build when we lost quality players, some for decent fees and little, by comparison to the fees received, was reinvested in playing staff. The hope was that our new owners would be able to inject cash in to the club to enable payer recruitment and retention of our new found talent. We've only had one transfer window and it's hard to see if it has been successful or not, initial results suggest not but it is still too early to judge. The new owner issue is really simple, they have spoken about a desire to commercialise the club. It's much harder to commercialise a losing lower division side than a winning team. Unless their idea of commercialisation is new sponsorship deals with the owners using this as a route to fund the club I can't see Barnsley FC suddenly becoming the club of choice in the Far East.