Neill Collins

I say one of the lowest - we scraped in the top 10 - NC certainly outperformed in position in the table for the budget given - I’m guessing our mate iseka was in those figures aswell!

 

Keep mentioning it all you like, won’t make it true.

We didn’t have the biggest budget but it was top ten minimum; plus he had a better squad of players to begin with than most others. Finishing sixth was no overachievement whatsoever.

He threw away a real chance at pushing for automatic promotion. The run of form Feb/March onwards was criminal, proper relegation form.

Up to January he’d done well overall, results wise, whilst being a poor side to watch and with the home form being pretty dreadful for a side competing at the top end.

Don’t rewrite history. He absolutely fell off a cliff. We’d never been playing well - but when we stopped nicking games due to having the best goalscorer, he got found out massively. We hadn’t been winning games by dominating, by even edging play: we won them by staying in them, passing it about slowly and passively but by being lethal when a chance came. We didn’t so much go out to win any games, more waited for the opposition to do something to lose it.

That said I still don’t think the timing of his sacking makes any sense, and I never will. It should have happened weeks before; or after the season ended.

I wish him no ill will. He clearly did his best but wasn’t the right man for our club. Hope he gets back in, probably back in the USA where his kids are happier. Good luck to him.

 

The form of Cole and certainly Roberts before his injury really hid things last season - Roberts was incredible. Far out performing his save xg% by miles. He was head and shoulders above any other keeper in the league according to the stats - only Alisson had better in all 4 leagues at the time

 

And yet he was in 6th place and had qualified for the playoffs when he was sacked due to foul mouthed ranting by our "fans" - There was obviously no succession plan in place as the subsequent appointment showed. Nobody with a brain sacks someone with one game left whilst you're in the playoffs unless you've got Klopp lined up. Proper kneejerk stuff based on venom directed at him.

Who knows what would have happened in the playoffs - would Collins have got us promoted? His record against the other contenders wasn't too shabby, maybe he would. We'll never know.

And as for that world beating squad you're on about? Over the course of the season, the BBS and the rest of our fanbase castigated all our players. Cole didn't want to be here. Kane lazy. Williams rubbish. Connell gone backwards. Phillips anonymous. Cadden useless. And those were supposed to be our "best" players.

Couple that with him having to protect a hastily thrown together defensive line due to an embarrassing transfer window - and I'd say it was fully justified to err on the side of caution. Oh and even though he's the most negative coach ever, he still managed to score more goals than we did under Duff.

He's clearly not the greatest manager we've ever had, and some of the games bored me to tears, but we're crying out for continuity. We've had a conveyor belt of gaffers in and out for years and we need stability. I hope Clarke is here for 10 years.

 

There's no rewriting of history as whats gone has gone. He had an inferior budget to Duff and all things considered for me did a better job with worse tools to ply his trade. Duff had it all his own way from the playing side through to the fans' backing.

If people expect to see free flowing football, then watching a product in L1 isnt going to satisfy that urge - given that the players in it in the large are decidedly average/poor at their profession. Of course the football could have been better, but having watched us for 40 years I have seen worse. I see no point in the club going to these constant lengths to recruit someone, to not back them - NC isnt the first time this has happened. The board should have backed him in January for that automatic push - the sides around us did it.

He had 1 bad run of poor results and he got the bullet - where do we draw the line with that? If DC goes 7/8 games without a win - do we sack him aswell to give us plenty of games to get someone in and have a push for the playoffs? No manager in the history of the game has never not had a bad run of results, it just so happened ours was at the wrong time of the season.

I like DC and how he comes across - far more personable and all that, but there will come a point if he isnt backed he will walk if he see's we're on the cusp of something - again something we have seen before a few times in the last 10 years

What I dont like in a portion of the fanbase is this sense of entitlement that seems to be emerging - we have always been associated as a club that grafts and do well against the odds and punch above our weight. L1 is probably about our level nowadays and we have to accept that, unless we start splashing the money about. For people to say that we have spent the most number of games in the league above is about as relevant I suppose as the NC debate

 

Nice bloke, seems a genuine guy. He deserves best wishes from all of us for not being a git. As far as the football is concerned I thought he was clueless, failed to motivate, couldn't organise and most, if not all, players regressed under his coaching. Play offs under Collins were fluked by poor quality of opposition and several goals out of the blue when the team looked inept. Glad he's gone but wish him all the best and I hope he's learned from his BFC experience.

 

World beating? I said better than most at this level. It was.

 

I thought both Duff & Collins did well with us. Once Duff got his side sorted we showed automatic promotion form from about November onwards. It was the early weeks that cost us when we were trying to adjust & deal with the player turnover.

I thought Collins did a cracking job of hiding the squad’s deficiencies for a long, long time. It seemed obvious to me & plenty more on here that we were a really slow side & that if you pressed us & played at a high tempo we wouldn’t be able to cope. It wasn’t until Lincoln in March time that we were properly exposed & then others followed the same blueprint.

The big issue for me was that we had no wingers or options to change things. Everything was built around 3-5-2 & I can see why Clarke’s wanting one or more wide men in just to be able to change things round.

 

And we were 6th.

Better than most at this level.

 

When did we play decent football home or away ? it was anti-football fuelled by coach and fed by negative misery now at Hudds, unfortunately what I saw last Friday Earl still think the directive is backwards or sideways.

 

But still not good enough for most on here, sadly!.

 

you don’t get the overall stats we did without playing some decent football

 

Beg to differ we stumbled to a lot of the wins and it was awful to watch.

 

Think he did ok here but what did for him was the football.. it was boring at best and awful at time.. which lost the fans
A microcosm of Southgates England..

 

We're where we are on merit. Accept League 1 and you end up in League 2. I never used to agree with third division manager, third division team mantra until we signed Steve Parkin and he brought in Garry Jones. Latterly Keith Hill who brought in Done, Wiseman, McNulty, Perkins, Davies.

Crap breeds crap.