So with this said, why on earth do you still back Chris Coleman?
A number of reasons:
- Out of all the managers we've ever had in my lifetime, he comes across as the most intelligent and therefore in my opinion likely to be able to turn things around given time.
- With Wales he was widely praised for his man-management skills. Their players and fans were gutted he left because he had them overperforming.
- The January window is notorious for being more difficult than the Summer window to try to bring players in, so getting replacements for Grabban/Vaughan and a better keeper was always going to be tricky, and they're the positions in which we most needed some quality. Grayson had already wasted the little budget we had on dross.
- A new manager would need time to get to know the squad to determine who should stay and who should go, and decide which positions to strengthen. This would effectively give our League 1 rivals a head-start on the transfer market and may see us sticking with certain players for the first half of the season that a lot of us would like to see gone.
- A new manager will bring his own on-field tactics to the club. While granted some might see this as a good thing, our team has finally looked like they have been gelling together for large portions of the last 6 matches or so, aware of what they're supposed to be doing for large portions of the games. New tactics means relearning all this, which again would likely mean we were playing catchup compared to teams in League 1 that have the same manager as last year.
- He genuinely seems to want to be here and seems passionate about it. There may well be other managers who would fit this description too, granted.
- I would worry about who we might be able to attract to the job if we got rid of him. Last year Aberdeen's manager wouldn't touch us with a barge pole and we had to settle for Simple Simon. This year we're in a similar situation with not knowing what's going on with regards to a takeover but now we're a division below as well. I just can't see a queue of better managers beating down the door.
- I would like to see what a manager could do if he was given more than a season to achieve his goals. Again there's an argument for getting someone else in and giving them time, but I think at least some of the problems we've had over the past 10 years have stemmed from chopping and changing managers too often. Certainly a large amount of the debt has come from managers arriving with the attitude of "spend as much as possible to get us out of the shit without any regard to the future financial situation, because let's face it I probably won't be here by the time the finances bite me on the arse anyway".
- The club has a reputation of getting through managers willy-nilly and not letting them have time to turn things around. This reputation makes us a less attractive club for new managers and players alike. The manager side of this is obvious, but also players won't want to come to a club to be with a manager they already know if they think he'll likely be out of a job in 6 months and they'll be left playing for a different manager instead.
