Update from Doug O'Kane

YOU can't but the person who quoted you and/or site admin can edit the post to do it.

 

The more you look over this the more it looks like sacking him was a panic decision. Scared to miss play offs but little consideration of what the alternative would be or ongoing consequences. If Devaney is the better option he should have been doing the job 2 months ago. If they had a manager lined up they should have been in almost immediately. I dont know if Collins would have been right for another season but i dont see the logic in him taking us this far and then sacking him and disrupting the whole plan.

 

Would you say there is a plan? The players that were suddenly allowed to play attacking football (as you suggest) didn't play Northampton off the park at the weekend.

All the noise (yes I know is that it's speculation) is that we kind of had something lined up but not really but might have someone else but not really but we haven't.

And I was being flippant with the "have a go mate" remark. But Devaney's record as caretaker manager isn't exactly sparkling is it? And I love the bloke.

And I don't like the plan - at all. Its why I'm commenting about it. I think it's stupid, short term and foolish. We've lost another manager after one season, and will have to reset in the summer. Again. Like the summer before. And the one before that.

I hope I'm proven wrong. I hope Devaney leads us to three wins in the next fortnight. If he does that then there can be no doubt that it was probably the right decision - it's a results business. That's been my main defence of Collins this season.

 

I'm not sure it was scared to miss the play-offs that was the main driver. Allied to the extension of the early bird deadline I can only think that season ticket renewals looked to be somewhere short of what they were last year. Seeking for someone to blame they gave Collins the shove. Like Fonzie says here we are again, seeking a new Head Coach and another reset because of the players not likely to be here next season. It seems like an annual occurrence. It doesn't provide the continuity you need to build a successful team.

 

From memory, it was the 5th most goals scored after a sub, but didn't have an equivalent table for goals conceded.

 

Firstly having read my post back it comes across a bit angry and it wasn't meant to, I just got typing away and yeah, so sorry about that.

I was pretty disappointed with Devaney's performance at the weekend. Imo he should have just gone for it but apart from a couple of tweaks he slipped into the Collins style of play very quickly.

I agree that the plan of allowing successful managers to leave after a year like Val and duff isn't good but I think sacking someone for underperforming (and I know on Collins we disagree on that one massively) is a totally different thing. I don't think that keeping a failing manager just out of some kind of continuity is the right thing to do. If you sign a bad centre back you don't keep them in the starting 11 for 3 years just in the hope they'll get better, you acknowledge the mistake and bring someone else in. Again on Collins specifically we will disagree here but I mean in general. It's been said every time we've sacked a manager "we should keep them, we need continuity". But the plan of allowing managers to use us as stepping stones isn't good because whereas getting rid of a bad manager can give us improvement, losing a good one rarely will.

On the subject of whether we actually had someone lined up or not I'm not sure. There's always so many rumours that I try not to listen to them. If we had though and it fell through then I'm not sure that shows a weakness in the plan, just a weakness in ability at the top. I hope it's not true and didn't fall through due to eligibility reasons because if it did it's an awful start for the new leadership roles we created.

 

I see your point - Chelsea had a culture of sacking managers under Abramovich and that delivered titles and a Champions League. At the same time, Arsenal stuck with a stale Wenger for the continuity and they drifted and probably lost 5 or 6 years.

I guess it just comes down to the fact that people disagree on whether Collins was the man for the job.

I look forward to circular arguments all summer about the subject

 

I can't wait.

 

Maybe Collins was due a decent bonus for getting us in the playoffs? It would be incredibly dirty of us as a club to sack him to avoid paying him but nothing really shocks me in football these days.

 

I agree. Main reason must have been lamentable season ticket sales with the early bird deadline looming. There must surely have been a calculation as to how many would have been likely to pay full cost. I can’t see the sense of doing what they did for any other reason. I’m so sick of watching the current team that I ended my involvement in terms of attending a few games ago, and I won’t be taking much interest in the playoffs, but sacking Collins at that moment seems crazy to me if based solely on team performance.

 

yeah perhaps true. A bit sad if no coach sells more tickets than one who got us in the playoffs.

 

https://www.barnsleyfc.co.uk/news/2024/april/collins-departs/#:~:text=Barnsley Football Club can confirm,that a change is needed.

Our CEO said fans would be updated in the coming days. I must have missed that because since Collins left there has been nothing but silence.

 

I wasn't expecting it to result in a surge of ticket sales for Saturday's game, but it seems to have been the prompt that resulted in the home sections selling out.

The result may well have put paid to the optimism of those fans but there's no doubt the sacking resulted in a surge of interest in the game.

 

Didn't Devaney also say, more would become clear on Monday, that didn't happen either.

 

It looks like the surge of ticket sales for the Northampton game indicated new optimism for the playoffs. The subsequent limp performance and usual give away goal at the end might just have killed it again though.

 

Collins did get us into the playoffs. With 3 games to spare, I believe.

 

I’m led to believe that we sacked Collins solely because of our fans & season ticket sales.

I’ve only heard things second & third hand but from what I’ve heard the atmosphere at the club was really good. Collins was really popular with the players & was a lot less strict than Duff was who was a bit more old school.

It’s clear we’ve made a massive balls up in not making sure the replacement could get a work permit before sacking Collins. It beggars belief that we could sack him at this stage of the season without having the replacement ready to start work immediately.

Having said that I think it’s probably for the best anyway. If a new manager comes in & tries to get them to do something different then I think we’re more likely to take a hammering. Devaney tried to get us to play more on the front foot pressing higher in the first half on Saturday & the result was a team who were completely knackered in the second half & I fully believe a good, motivated side would’ve ripped us apart in the last half hour.

We can’t play pressing football with this side. We don’t have the players to do it. The defence isn’t quick enough or good enough in the air to deal with the counters & Connell doesn’t have the fitness he had last year.

It’s crap. We all want to see more entertaining football but we’ll get hammered if Devaney tries to implement a high press just to appease the fans.

We’ve got good technical footballers & we need to play to our strengths. We need Kane, Connell & Phillips on the ball not sprinting up & down in an end to end game.

 

If we've sacked a head coach based on ticket sales (I'm not doubting you btw) then that's a new one for the club surely, to that end it would mean that the board were listening to the moans in the ground, socials and on here which is a tad crazy to base a decsion.
If it turns out to be the case and we'll never fully know then surely they'll appoint someone to put bums back on seats and a somewhat steady pair of hands who's managed at this level as min requirement.

 

I struggle to believe that this chain of events was solely down to fan reaction and season ticket sales. They were potentially a factor, but the idea that they've overlooked a supposedly happy dressing room, as described, to take these steps seems pretty ludicrous to me.

Additionally, this doesn't fit with the alleged recruitment attempt of Thalhammer as the replacement, as it would be obvious to anyone within the club that appointing another unknown foreign coach with no experience of English football, at this stage, would be unlikely to be viewed positively by the fanbase.

If your version of events is accurate, which I don't think is the case, then it would suggest that the decision-makers have literally no understanding of the fanbase and their motivations. We might not be totally aligned, but I struggle to believe that the disconnect is as complete as that.