I've never run a club, so don't know what boards think are the qualities needed in a manager, but there's a fantastic YouTube vid of a fans forum with the Southampton board which explains this so well. The background is their fans were united in wanting the manager out a long run of bad results with him, and he tried to avoid responsibility by saying he had compromised how he wanted the team to play. That was nonsense, as he is the manager, so he decided how they play, so he didnt realise he was blaming himself. A few days after this vid they sacked the manager.

www.youtube.com/watch
FANS' FORUM | Southampton panel answer your questions - YouTube

The board explain to the fans they decide taking things like results, quality of training, manager relationships with players, his overall vision of play, and his ability to improve the team.

Judging by these criteria, one wonders what they would make of our manager.

Our results are dreadful, home and away, it makes no difference. He is still surviving on the basis of the good first two months of the season. In the last 5 months since October it is 5 wins from the last 22 games, even worse than our form last season under him. By now I dont see improvement in Welling, quite the reverse, we got worse. He has had more than enough time in the last five months to see the problems and introduce solutions. But he demonstrably lies about the situation to cover up the constant underperformance.

In his latest interview he comes up with nonsense like, "Someone who really knew football would look at that game and see how well we played at times. The first half we dominated. (No we didnt)They scored from a long ball for the second, (No they didnt, it was just a standard free kick into the box) if you play like that you will win more games than you lose (no you won't, we have been playing like that for 5 months now and been losing more than we win), were progressing slowly (no we are not, we are doing worse as we go on), we will keep moving forward (we are not moving forward, we are moving backwards and having to pad the squad out with inexperienced short term loans. I was chatting with a player early in the season who was really keen on Warren, chatting again recently when I mentioned his name in passing that same player just rolled his eyes expressively, and his abusive behaviour means he has a bad relationship with players who can't show it, and I dont see any positive relationship there. That is the sad thing, most will probably choose to leave at the end of the season rather than have another year with him, only 4 stayed last season for another season with him, I wonder if this year will be the same again). I dont like outside noise so I dont worry about it (that is why he keeps getting sacked from every job as he never learns from his mistakes or broadens his thinking, and just surrounds himself with yes people who dont challenge him). Latest interviewer's "question" kind of sums things up, looking back on the Braintree game, "Not a bad performance at all, some individual errors and a couple of interesting officiating mistakes so its a case of just doing what were doing and keep going". He surrounds himself with these sort of opinions, and ducks the reality everyone else can see.

Unfortunately Warren's presentation of his results is inaccurate (I avoid saying lying, as I suppose there is a tiny chance it was a genuine mistake) he said in the pre Chippenham interview his stats last season were W3, D2, L2, but actually they were worse than that, they were W3, D2, L5.

His Wikipedia stats are also inaccurate, saying he has P45, W18 D13 L14 for a 40% win percentage, whereas he has had a total of 13 league wins over two seasons, and a couple of cup wins, before getting immediately knocked out, so how he or whoever has posted this on his behalf comes up with 18 wins is a mystery that will fool some people into thinking he does well, but his overall league win percentage is 31%.

I am really impressed with the Dartford manager, as he is so amazingly direct and straightforward, which could backfire, but seems to work for him. So I had a quick word with him before our game against Dartford, about his approach as a manager, and he told me, "You have to be honest".

So true. When I see interviews with our manager saying we played well, when fans can see we didn't, saying we are progressing when we aren't, saying he has stats, that are wrong and cover up how badly he does and how we are not improving, then it reminds me of a comment on the Welling Twitter site, that amused me with its directness, as it called him a fraud. I wondered at the time what the person who said that meant, but as time has gone on, and I have seen his unreliability over what he says to cover up his poor performances, I formed my own views on that, which I tend to keep to myself. If we lose against Chippenham he will say, yet again, we were unlucky, we deserved something from the game, we created plenty of chances and he is pleased with the performance and that anyone who cant see how well we played doesn't understand football.

It is all like a street magician, trying to shift the attention to last season, to next season, to avoid attention at how bad things have been this season since the Havant game in September, with the 5 wins from 22 league games and poor cup runs. Looked at more carefully, our good form at the start of the season was 3 wins against teams doing badly at the time (Cheshunt, Hemel and Dulwich) and 2 very good results (Eastbourne and Oxford). Since then other teams have improved, while as results show, we have demonstrably gone backwards. I have seen nothing to suggest he can fix things, or that he even recognises things aren't working. The fans don't rate him, the players aren't performing for him, it is bewildering how the club still have confidence in him.

The Dartford manager made me smile in an interview, watching him manage his own very honest approach. Dartford are second in the table, 13 points behind the leaders so only likely to go up via the play offs, but even then they only have a 1 in 6 chance. So the manager said in an interview that he should be sacked if he didnt get promotion.

Then he quickly realised he had made a mistake of possibly talking himself out of his job (as there is a strong 5/6 chance he won't get promotion). So to buy more time he quickly qualified his statement by saying later in that interview if he didn't get promotion in the next 2 seasons he should be sacked.So it was funny to see him making that mistake, then quickly realising it and correcting himself to get himself out of the hole he had dug.

But he is an admirable manager, going out to meet fans in bars, not just contemptuously dismissing them as unimportant ignorant noise, as he is clever and understands the support of the fans is as important for a manager as the support of the players and board.

And that is what football management is about, trying to spin things to look positive, to try to buy time to try to improve things. But they have to be honest.

-- Edited by Johnny Hartley on Sunday 26th of February 2023 08:38:51 AM

Wingnut wrote:

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If you love D******* and their manager so much perhaps you should adopt them as your team. I am sure they would love your forensic analysis of games - even the ones that you haven't actually been at....

Oh, by the way, if they finish second  (or even third) at the end of the season, they will have a 1 in 4 chance of promotion.

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 And if second, they will have home advantage right through. 

This thread made me look at our home results again, as I hadn't really thought about them until this thread mentioned how bad they are. Looking at our results I see we have won 1 home league game out of the 9 games we have played in the 4 months from November onwards. It shows why the casual football fans are dropping away from attending.