The unwarranted sackings and baffling appointments have gone on for far too long now. The latest attempt on the ‘baffling’ side of things came from Cardiff City this week as Alan Shearer became one of the leading candidates to land the job of taking the Welsh side to the Premiership; a man with eight league games experience as a boss was being potentially heralded as one that is better equipped to take charge of the side than the recently departed Dave Jones.
The latter is a man who guided Stockport County to the second tier of English football in 1997 for the first time in their history – a club who are now a non-league side – achieved promotion with Wolverhampton Wanderers to the Premier League in 2003 – Wolves finally mixing it with the ‘big boys’ after numerous play-off heartbreaks prior to his arrival – and twice reaching them again with Cardiff.
Compare all this to Shearer’s eight games in charge and imminent relegation with Newcastle United and I think we can safely assume who is the better qualified to handle the reigns of a Championship club that have both eyes on promotion to the top league. He may turn out to be a top manager in the future, but he is not the right man for the Bluebirds at the present time.
Jones’ dismissal and Shearer’s near installment as manager was a coupling of outlooks, both on the side of unwarranted sackings and baffling appointments, so here’s a little note to the board at Cardiff City: your club have not been in the top division since 1962; it is not your given right to be there; Dave Jones got as close to the ‘Promised Land’ as anyone. What makes you think that Shearer and Malky Mackay are the right men for the job of getting the club there again? No wonder so many clubs cannot gain stability when the manager’s and players’ positions plus the chairman’s frame of mind are anything but stable.
Either the majority of chairmen don’t know much about the history of football. Or they are just too plain stupid to realise that dispensing with managers willy-nilly very rarely breeds the desired results. So here’s a little modern history lesson for those too dumb to see that in football at least, patience is a virtue. If I was to name and go through all the examples that support this philosophy then I would be here all year, but I will highlight one in particular, which entails a lesson of the past about a club who had – and no doubt still have – similar aspirations to the ones that Cardiff have today.
George Burley was sworn in to replace John Lyall at Ipswich Town in December, 1994 with the club bottom of the Premiership table. He could not save them from relegation that season and so followed a five-year stay in the old First Division, now the Championship. It wasn’t until their fourth attempt at the play-offs in 2000 that the Tractor Boys finally won promotion back to the top division by beating Barnsley 4-2 in the final.
In their first season back, Burley and co finished in a quite remarkable fifth place only four points behind second placed Arsenal and above glamorous luminaries such as Chelsea, thus bringing European football to Portman Road for the first time since the early 1980’s. This earned the Scotsman the Manager of the Year award, but after suffering relegation the following season and getting off to a bad start to the old First Division in the campaign after that, Burley was relieved of his duties in the ridiculously early season period of October in 2002.
Jones had six years at Cardiff, his longest spell at any club. In the end, despite several admirable achievements, he failed to win promotion with a squad that was clearly as good as those of the three sides who went up. Fair enough to give a new man a chance.
In general terms I agree with the point you argue, but, speaking as a Cardiff fan, I think you could have picked a better club to make it with.
Let’s not forget that Dave Jones had six seasons at Cardiff, so we are not talking about some knee jerk reaction here. Six seasons is a long time, especially when you see the same things going wrong in each of them (for example, have a look at Cardiff’s record in the month of November since 2005/06).
Cardiff’s capitulation over the last four matches of the season just ended would be a top contender for biggest footballing implosion of the twenty first century if they hadn’t surpassed it themselves with the mother of all late season collapses in 2008/09.
Dave Jones’ Cardiff side had a history of losing the very big league matches during his time in charge. That is why many of the 23.000 Cardiff fans present on the night watched the Play Off defeat by Reading with a sense of resignation – they had seen it all before and expected no different from a City side under that manager.
That said, I think Dave Jones did a good job overall at Cardiff in his first five seasons with us, but that cannot be said about 2010/11 when we played like a collection of individuals as opposed to the three sides above (and many below us) who were teams in every sense of the word.
Last September Dave Jones himself said that he did not expect to still be in a job if the squad (which he called his best ever) he had put together were still in the Championship in twelve months time. If the man himself thought that you can hardly blame the club’s hierarchy for feeling the same way.
I don’t think it was a traditional sacking, more like when you realise you don’t fancy your girlfriend much any more, and she doesn’t fancy you. Was a parting of two seperate souls. It was the correct decision and am pleased we have appointed MM.
This report fails to state that Cardiff have stuck by Dave Jones for six years making him the longest serving manager in the championship.
Dave Jones worked wonders with a shoe string budget taking Cardiff to Wembley three times and he was a great manager for Cardiff.
After six years it was time for a change, his tactics were too
predictable and the team never won if they conceded first!
There was no plan B and an over reliance on highly paid underperforming players and rarely gave youngsters a chance!
DJ was too quick to blame fringe players who made mistakes,
EG Adam Mathews who Celtic signed on a free.
Having said that, Dave Jones is an experienced manager that any other team on a limited budget should seriously consider.
I do agree with all your points, but I think, whether Cardiff have got a fair amount of money or not, I think he’s done well to get them so close to promotion to the Premiership considering the club have been lingering in the lower divisions for nearly fifty years now. They’ve only been in the play-offs two seasons in a row and I think he may have eventually achieved it had he been given another season or two. It took Alex Ferguson SEVEN seasons to win the league for Man Utd, a club that is and was EXPECTED to win it. He finished in the bottom half a couple of times as well. I think there was more expectation to win the top division than the amount expected at Cardiff to get promoted to the top division as United had won it many times in the past and were often challenging for it when they failed to do so unlike Cardiff who have only been near the top for the past two seasons.