Quote Originally Posted by the_anticlough View Post
It's easy to let that last part take root, become the accepted wisdom, but I don't think it's fair. He was an attacking coach with an attacking philosophy - In just 16 months in the job, he took us from perennial NL play-off failures and left us in the L2 play-off positions. What more do people want? The rest is on recruitment. He was forced to try his cavalier methods in a higher league with Slocs, Brinds, Rawlo, Stone etc as all he had for a safety net.
I think accusations about his defence are pretty fair, I would have thought the whole point of the head coach model is that he either improves the players he’s been given or deploys methods that amplify their strengths and nullify their weaknesses, as much as possible.

There’s no getting away from the fact that our defensive performances were getting worse rather than better. I think he was given a bit of a bum hand with those players you mention, though he did choose to drop Stone and bring in Slocombe before the first Mansfield game, for whatever reason.