nigel clough

David Graham to burton? stranger things have happened!

I think that people are looking at Macfarland's tenure at our club with "reverse rose-tinted specs" (whatever they are!!).

He came into a club that had just scraped-out of what looked like certain relegation and found itself without a manager almost the week before pre-season training (and had missed out on several targets due to CL's departure) and inherited a group of players that were plainly not good enough for another battle at the bottom.
He really had a "demolishon job" to do before he could properly re-build.
He identified the "dead wood", moved them on with the minimum of fuss and went about building a spine to the team, bringing-in the players that were a vast improvement on what we had before - his aim was to make the team solid from the back going forward.

He was a straight talker (anyone remember when he said "I'm not going to bulls**t the paying public by saying that performance was good enough" after a win against Darlo, I believe?!). He had the team training properly and had some good contacts that allowed us to bring-in some half decent players that were streets ahead of the ones that departed.
Yes, he did bringing-in Matty McNeil and Gary Brabin (which might have worked-out) but you weigh that up against the decent players that we managed to bring-in and I believe his transfer record was no worse than the vast majority of managers that we have seen here.

The style of football was dour, but it took months to bring the team up to the standard required. By the time the players were in place they were really having to grind-out the results to keep in the league.
We'll never know how things would have worked-out with Roy Macfarland, but I think he deserves some credit at the very least for giving us a very good platform with which to move forward.

**EDIT** I forgot to add that he is a good choice for manager at Burton. He know the team, the club and has the contacts should he need to bring-in additional players. I still think that Burton have it in their hands unless something very drastic happens - I hope to be proved wrong!

I think there may be an element of people overstating the downside of McFarland's reign to counter the oft-repeated fallacy that Leroy Rosenior won promotion with McFarland's team.

The squad that McFarland inherited was not that bad. Saunders had lost the plot, but Lee soon organised them into a decent unit. McFarland certainly had a lot of attacking talent at his disposal when he arrived in Graham, Williams and Brandon - but he got nothing out of them.

No comment necessary! The Southend team was 5 Rosenior, 3 McFarland, 3 pre-McFarland. The Southend 16 was 6 Rosenior, 6 McFarland, 4 pre-McFarland.

McFarland only just pulled us clear of relegation by finally getting a watertight defence to gel. You can't even claim that this "laid the foundations" for Leroy as McFarland used a five man defence which Leroy immediately discarded and returned to an orthodox back four.

There is far more of a case for saying that Cyril Knowles nearly got promotion with Stuart Morgan's team - you never hear anyone saying that!