Having slept on it, here’s hope I stand on things.
DB as a candidate to follow LM makes a lot of sense. Young, progressive, a series of increasingly difficult and increasingly good jobs behind him. Educated within CFG, 10 years as a coach at OUFC including six of those four years when we were an EFL side plus a more recent six-month spell at Stoke City U23s. The downside was that we didn’t truly know the level he had been working at in the ISL but bearing in mind players like Ryan Williams and Adam Le Fondre were playing in that league, we had a hint of an idea. All managers come with pros and cons – LM joined us having been the man at the helm for MK Dons’ relegation after all. I don’t prescribe to
@Orkney Islands Yellow theory that he is a ‘fraud’. He has a body of work to fall back on. Someone like Pep Clotet didn’t – it was failure after failure with short term spells at basket case clubs disguising his own shortcomings. He is a fraud and I don’t believe DB is. Nor do I think that his lack of EFL experience is fatal either. Lincoln have hired some futsal coach and are going along well with a much worse team than us, for example.
DB said so many of the right things and often still does. He said he wanted to continue what LM had done here –
superb. I made the Atkins-to-Rix analogy earlier in the thread. Out went Atkins with his pragmatic 5-3-2 and in came Rix who overnight tried to make a bunch of League 2 cloggers play like Vialli’s Chelsea in a 4-4-2. It completely derailed the team. I expected the transition from LM to DB to have some teething difficulties, especially with the injury crisis he inherited, but the transition has been anything but smooth.
On the pitch, however, if DB was supposed to be Manning 2.0, it is like we’ve gone back to a beta version. The style is Manning-esque but the play is so ponderous and played in such a low gear that we go nowhere with it. Needless triangular passing out of defence where after seven passes we are back where we started or, very obviously after last night, inviting a heap of trouble from a high press and ending up losing the ball or it goes out of play. DB is playing the LM way but with the brakes on. I didn’t think LM’s team was particularly interesting or exciting (a mirror image of him), but DB’s team is the same without the winning result at the end.
The most worrying thing was that the team gave up last night. They didn’t believe that their approach would lead to anything and went to pieces. They had no Plan B to turn to even with the shape change and looked powerless to stop the onslaught. I wouldn’t say he has ‘lost the dressing room’ overall but last night he did. The approach from the first minute didn’t work and the players did nothing to sort it out amongst themselves.
Where does this leave us? This has to be DB’s ‘Appleton’s Cambridge’ moment where everything changes. Be brutal and freeze out the quitters and losers (and there were some of those last night) and regroup for the summer. Failing that, it will be curtains. It’s hard to make any sort of case for DB after it but since he will be here until the end of the season at least, we have to support the team until then. DB and the players did not make a good case for that at all last night. It was horrendous for all concerned.