Originally Posted by
jackal2
I generally post in support of Alan Hardy but he's trying my patience with this call. There's no doubt that this seriously undermines his credibility from a football judgement perspective, no matter which way you look at it.
There were many raised eyebrows when he pursued Harry Kewell with such determination in the first place and many who will now say "told you so", but Alan ignored the sceptics and 'big upped' his chosen man, so it's frankly ridiculous to give him only ten weeks to prove his worth. If you're going to trust your own judgement, at least do it for a bit longer than this.
Kewell's record wasn't great, but put it this way, he won three more league games than Sam Allardyce in his first ten weeks as manager, so it's nonsense to write him off as a bad manager in that space of time. I was one of those who had some doubts about Kewell's appointment, and I was very disappointed with the last three or four performances, but not to the point of calling for his head at this stage. My feeling was that he needed to get a result against either Cheltenham or Morecambe and then we would see where things went from there.
If Alan Hardy isn't careful, he's going to wander blindly into Ray Trew territory, hiring and firing managers every few months to the point where people start saying (with some justification) that the real problem is the guy making the appointments. This will then lead to progressively more fractious relationships with supporters, accentuated when the owner is so open through social media, which can only further skew his judgement and eventually leave him as bitter and detached as Ray Trew ultimately became.
Alan needs to choose his next manager very carefully, and when he's picked him, he should get the hell off Twitter and whatever other social media he uses, batten down the hatches and give the guy a proper amount of time to do his job. If he's looking for guarantees of staying up, he won't find them through repeatedly changing managers. There are no guarantees. You need to make a decision and commit to it.
Given our history with managers before Hardy arrived, which seems to be continuing, we're beginning to look like one of those (strangely often Italian-owned) joke clubs who dismiss their managers every two months and get laughed at by everyone else.