Sacking a manager. The easy way out. You might disagree but let’s lay it all out here and see where we get to. Two National League managers lost their jobs this week.
Results will dictate one definitely should have done and other hasn’t facilitated an improvement in the previous manager’s efforts. We are of course talking about Harry Watling and Michael Doyle, dismissed by Ebbsfleet Utd and Woking within the last seven days.
Watling lasted just 90 days at the Kuflink Stadium winning just a single match, his first in charge. Doyle had replaced Darren Sarll in December last year and just about kept the Cards in the division despite at one stage the club looking destined for the drop.
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Ebbsfleet themselves survived on the final day, drawing 0-0 at Boreham Wood and sending the Hertfordshire side down instead. However, after a horrendous start under last season’s saviour Danny Searle, Watling was brought in to lift the Kent club out of the bottom four and away to safety.
During that fateful three-month spell, the Fleet didn’t leave the bottom spot in the table. Now I maintain and always will that you need knowledge of this division to survive, that being you as the main man or your assistant.
The National League is unforgiving in this day and age, it’s the bastard league to get out of the right way, easy to get out the wrong way. Neither Watling nor his number two David Kerslake have that knowledge or experience.
It’s also easy to point at that being the reason and simply they were never destined to pick up the required results to make a difference. But is there more to it than that?
Who appointed him in the first place? Doesn’t the buck really stop there? Are the players at fault? It’s extremely easy to just get rid of the manager but there was a reason he was appointed in the first place; he was good enough then but not now. Those results would say so, but is it a poor appointment from the top in the first place?
Was he given the right tools to do the job? Could he move on enough players that have been there too long and a squad in need of freshening up? Or was he just doomed from the start?
Well, the Fleet announced Watling was on their radar back when they sacked Dennis Kutrieb and brought in Searle and that led them to appoint him this time around, citing he himself wasn’t ready back then to take the job.
Fast forward to now and Ebbsfleet appear in a worse state than if he had joined the club after Kutrieb’s sacking. No accountability ever seems to appear directed to those who appointed the person who ends up leaving the club. Surely they had discussed in an interview how he expected to see the team up, was he on a hiding to nothing with the wrong personnel available to him?
I fully appreciate you can’t sack off a squad of twenty-two players mid-season but the lacklustre performance of more than a few contributed to the manager’s downfall.
Doyle’s task was made harder from the poor recruitment prior to his arrival, a bloated budget full of underperforming or injury prone players struggling to maintain their National League status.
Whilst they just about did that, the lack of uncertainty around their ownership and budget through the summer painted a not so clever picture. I watched them early in pre-season and felt then despite there being around four weeks left at that point they were going to struggle again especially as the owner at the time announced how close they were sailing to the wind.
So far that’s been proved right as we head towards the halfway point of the season. Doyle, I feel has been a victim of circumstances since the summer and has been treading water as far as he can. Is he a good coach/manager? The jury is clearly out on that, and it’s no surprise that a new investor has designs on his own man to lead the Cards forward.
These aren’t the only two men to lose their jobs this season and they won’t be the last I doubt, sometimes you wonder what goes through the mind of owners, chairmen and CEO’s, accountability never seems to land at their fee however and that’s pretty much why the managerial merry-go-round will never end.
