Good to have a top top ex player like yourself to tell us all then isn’t it Why not post up who you played for etc
We finished 13th under Adkins and were improving all the time, that’s how Adkins won the fans over. McCann came in and we’d lost Campbell and Evandro, but he brought in a shed load of new players, most of whom were poor and took us on the worst run in Championship history, culminating in relegation (obviously not helped by Bowen and Grosicki leaving). I don’t believe we’d have been relegated under Adkins last season.
Irrelevant, what you believe. You can say you believe we'd have won the FA Cup too.... It's a results based business. GM is getting results now having been given a chance to right the wrongs of last season. Look forward not backwards.....
If it’s such a results based business, then why did Grant keep his job after last season? There isn’t a manager in the country at another club who would lose that many games, fold so badly and still get the chance to stay on the following season.
Good read Accrington Stanley's 'no superstars' ethos offers Championship chance John Coleman’s canny squad blend of experience, misfits and loans have promotion out of League One in their own hands Ben FisherFri 1 Jan 2021 08.00 GMT Until last week, for a few days at least, those basking in Arsenal’s struggles frivolously floated the idea of the club sparring with Accrington Stanley in the Championship. Such a meeting may seem incomputable but part of the sentence could soon ring true. It is increasingly difficult to ignore Accrington’s promotion credentials and, with at least two games in hand on those above them, John Coleman’s side are primed to supersede some of League One’s most famous names. On Saturday they were planning to upstage second-placed Portsmouth before that match was postponed. However, if they earn maximum points from three games in hand on the leaders, Lincoln – collected following Covid-19 outbreaks at rivals – eighth-placed Accrington could soar to the summit. On the eve of the season Coleman gathered his squad to tell them he believed they could ruffle feathers – again. “Two years ago we won League Two, quite comfortably in the end, when everybody fancied us for relegation,” says Coleman, who claims the club operates with a “bottom two” wage bill. “The three teams who went up with us are all in the Championship now: Coventry, Wycombe and Luton. They haven’t overly spent on their teams, so why can’t it be us?” Coleman has an intriguing cocktail of players. They have three loanees from Chelsea – the goalkeeper Nathan Baxter and the midfielders Jon Russell and Tariq Uwakwe – two from Newcastle and one from Watford. Coleman speaks to Anthony Barry, the former Accrington midfielder who joined Frank Lampard’s staff in August, a couple of times a week and Chelsea’s first-team coach helped to smooth those arrivals. Until last month Baxter was backup to Toby Savin, a promising 19-year-old goalkeeper who progressed through Accrington’s academy after spells at Everton and Crewe. Meanwhile another midfielder, Joe Pritchard, who spent 14 years at Tottenham, has thrived since landing in Lancashire in May 2019 and Matt Butcher has impressed in the anchor role following his release by Bournemouth. The front two of Colby Bishop, a former PE teacher, and Dion Charles earned their stripes in non-league. The experienced trio of the captain, the 32-year-old Seamus Conneely, Mark Hughes (34) and Sean McConville (31) vet the dressing room. Pritchard captained Tottenham’s under-23s, playing alongside Harry Winks and Kyle Walker-Peters, but his career stagnated and the death of Ugo Ehiogu, a former coach, left him “crushed” and “broken for quite a while”. At Accrington the facilities are modest and the players are not pampered but the club have reignited his love for the game. “No food [after training] and we wash our own kit, but I’d do that for the rest of my career if it meant I could play in a first team,” says Pritchard. “When you’re a young player and you’re caught up in the atmosphere of a big club, you can easily be blindsided by how grand it all is: ‘Look at this training ground, I work here every day.’ “When I was at Tottenham I was told by Wayne Burnett, the under-23s manager, that until you’re playing regularly in a first team you can’t call yourself a player of that club; it was one of the best pieces of information, which I needed to hear. I’d never stepped foot on a first-team pitch for Tottenham and I never played for Tottenham; I’d call myself a Tottenham youth player but that’s as far as it goes. And that stuck with me when I went to Bolton. I wouldn’t even have called myself much of a Bolton player. I only had five appearances and two starts. I didn’t establish myself, but I’ve just touched 50 appearances at Accrington and I actually feel like an Accrington player.” please log in to view this image John Coleman’s Accrington start 2021 eighth in League One but with games in hand on all the sides above them. Photograph: Kevin Warburton/A Moment in Sport/ProSports/Shutterstock They work hard but have fun. In pre-season Coleman challenges signings to a relay race against his staff – “the lads get one of their quickest to run 400m and we generally get about six to run about 65m each” – and on away trips the manager and his longstanding assistant and best friend, Jimmy Bell, moonlight as quizmasters. “We’ve developed a game, a cross between the Krypton Factor and The Cube,” Coleman says. “We even had a message off Gordon Burns telling us how well we were taking his ideas forward.” Coleman’s jovial character was encapsulated in a video of him channelling Elton John before Christmas. He can, Savin says, often be heard singing at training at 9am and his players feed off such energy. “If you have a positive spirit around the place, I think people work better,” the manager says. “But it’s not a holiday camp – far from it, because you have to have discipline and you have to work hard. No one gets treated any better or worse than anybody else – everyone is valued. There are no superstars and the blend is good. But people who just think we get by on hard work and gung-ho are missing the point. The players are very well coached by a solid staff, which might not be big in numbers, but are very good people and leave no stone unturned. “I think they think a lot of it is based on team spirit – but they couldn’t be further from the truth. A lot of it is based on analysis of opposition, hard work on the training ground, shape, patterns of play – that’s what we’ve always based our philosophies on. That can get lost because we like a singsong and we do like the lads to enjoy the experience, but I’d like to think most people who come and spend time at Accrington leave as better players and better people.” The Fiver: sign up and get our daily football email. Uwakwe scored a debut hat-trick in September and a peach against Peterborough four days later. “Since Frank Lampard has come in [as Chelsea manager] everyone is seeing that, if you’re good enough and playing well, the opportunity is there,” says Uwakwe, who stays in touch with Tore André Flo, one of Chelsea’s loan coaches. For now, the focus is on propelling Accrington, who have lost two of their past 12 matches in all competitions, up the table. League One was supposed to be Stanley’s ceiling but Accrington, a prudently run team rooted in non-league until promotion under Coleman in 2006, have form for surprising people. “I think we are on our way to making people believe that we are not really ‘little old Accrington’ any more and we’re pushing for the Championship,” says Savin.
Good interview with Fleming. I hope he makes that LB position his own. I like to see home grown players in that starting 11.
If you watch honeyman at the point of the ball coming off the post you’ll see he is looking around for options, he can see the doc to his left and back heels it, quality play, good players always work out the best option. Now if a cpl more players could take a leaf out of his book, we’d score an awful lot more goals...
You're completely entitled to that opinion, but we didn't just lose Evandro and FC. We lost also Marshall who's proven that he's a top keeper at champ level again and again. We had the Henrikson mess by Ehab, I'm sure you'll state we should have played him but he's a player that didn't want to be here and most fans wouldn't want him anywhere near the side again. Regardless, he was our best midfielder. On top of that, we also lost Pugh, Martin and Kane who although was unspectacular, featured heavily. We lost the spine of the side and then tried to replace it for a fraction of the cost. You can say that you think Adkins would've kept us up, we'll never know but the budget he had compared to Grant was completely different. The monies spent on bringing in the likes of Elphick, Pugh, Martin (cost an absolute fortune & was woeful) albeit on loan was huge. Grant may have brought in a shed load of new players and his recruitment wasn't good enough either but they were all dirt cheap and bargain basement. We couldn't even compete with Barnsley for Wilks FFS. Grant didn't have the luxury of spending £20k a week on a striker on loan as Adkins did nor bringing in a CB with the calibre of Elphick or somebody like Pugh. You can say that you think Adkins would've kept us up, but it's a fact that his budget was significantly higher than Grant's.
He's very good and very consistent, not sure I've seen him have a bad game. Really impressive 1st half especially yesterday. Just unfortunate he's got Elder in front of him, who's in the top 2/3 LBs at this level
Agree with the above. Herbie Kane was a big loss at the time, first through injury then he was re-called, or sent back to L'pool. At the time he was the cog in our midfield and bossing games. I thought Adkins under achieved at City with the squad he had although he was excellent in front of the media etc and always sounded positive. Perhaps he would have been more suited to the CEO's role at City, taking the flak off the Allams and generally being the spokesman for the club.
Allardyce SECOND favourite to be next Premier League manager sacked. Betting odds for Allardyce to be the next topflight boss to be given the boot are just 14/5, with only Sheffield United's Chris Wilder given lower odds of 6/5, according to Oddschecker. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/sport/pre...ague-manager-sacked/ar-BB1cqMDp?ocid=msedgntp
I'd have thought Wilder at 6/5 would be the man to put the mortgage on, but maybe they're already resigned to relegation and might be planning for a restructure next season in the championship. I don't know the length of his contract.
