MacDonald, DiCanio and the season so far

OK, I’ve been reading some on the comments on here over the last few weeks regarding the on-field performances and wanted to think about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, before I just posted a response.
I also wanted to have actually seen the side play a couple of times before I waded into a debate, which I have now done in the Donny and Sheff. Utd. games (feel free to demand I never go to a game again as I do feel like something of a Jonah).
Firstly I’ll put the off field stuff to one side (I’ll say my piece on what’s going on in the Boardroom elsewhere).
Secondly I want to make clear that this isn’t meant in any way to be a PDC slag-off piece. This is purely about football performances so my feelings about his politics and personality aren’t that relevant (although the latter has some impact on the way the club operates and the side performs so might get touched on).
All that aside, the man led the club to a championship last season, and kept the club in play-off contention throughout his time here this term. Regardless of the resources employed that is an achievement.
However, one thing I want someone to explain to me is why, over the last month or two, there have been fans on these boards and others:
• Insisting that up until PDC’s departure we were certainties for automatic promotion;
• Slagging off the current manager’s performance, (a 2nd Malpas FFS!) and calling for him to be sacked.
Now I’m all too aware that the last three away performances have left a lot to be desired, but this bollocks started before that run of games, when, as far as I can tell from reports, stats and results, things weren’t going that badly.
The first point first as is only right. One question – Have I been looking at a different league table to some of you this season? The ones I’ve been looking at have had us somewhere in the play-off spots pretty much all season, dropping to 7th I think once or twice for days at the most, and with a very brief flirtation with the auto spots just after PDC left.
We certainly hadn’t been at the top of the table most of the season and then suffered a devastating loss of form and plummeted down the table, that was Tranmere, (they play in white and are from Merseyside).
Neither had we had a dodgy start followed by a relentless rise up the table that looked unstoppable, for that see Bournemouth (with one dodgy patch) and Brentford.
We’ve been there or thereabouts all season but, other than a little run over Christmas, have never looked consistent enough for either of the top two spots. And that was the consensus of opinion on these boards for pretty much the whole season as well, if you look back at the past discussions.
Oh and incidentally if one more person posts that “we were top when DiCanio left” I will track you down and give you a very long and dull lecture on the Stalinist practice of re-writing history, and show you a print out of:
• The Adver website story announcing PDC’s departure
• The league table on that date showing us in THIRD place
Almost nobody expected automatic promotion this season. A sizable chunk were expecting mid-table. All would have settled for a play-off place if offered it in August. When we went top in January, most of us thought it probably wouldn’t last, and as soon as a couple of sides recovered their form, it didn’t.
Second point then. Can idiots my fellow forum members stop pointing at Paolo’s win ratio, comparing it with Macs, and then insisting that means the latter is crap and should be sacked. Because it makes you look like morons.
I don’t want to have to point out the bleeding obvious but some of you people force me to. PDC has had two seasons and some 95 games to build up those statistics. MacDonald has had 10. That’s not really a fair comparison.
Tell you what take a minute and look up PDC’s stats for his first 10 games on Swindon-Town-FC.co.uk or somewhere. Done that? Doesn’t look so clever does it? Did all those calling for Macs head have the knives out for Paolo in his first couple of months in the job?
Bear in mind also that Paolo had the advantages of:
• Being in a weaker league;
• Having a larger squad that he’d largely built;
• Having a budget available for transfers, and the window still open;
• Having had a full pre-seasons training behind him to get to know the players and get the team playing how he wanted
People keep saying that the results / stats don’t lie, but I’ve worked analysing stats for a lot of my career and I can tell you that the sort of shallow referencing of them that some fans do is incredibly misleading. So, stand by for some reasoned statistical analysis.
As I said earlier I know the Doncaster, Dons and Sheff Utd performances have been bad, but this shit started before them so I’m going to talk about them later. Place the last four games, including Tuesday’s win to one side, and there are six other games since Mac took over.
Those produced 2 wins (Coventry and Yeovil away) one defeat (Brentford away) and 3 home draws, giving 9 points; with 8 goals scored and 6 against, plus 2 to the goal difference.
Those that were posting at the end of March saying that since Mac took over we’ve turned shit and the results had turned, clearly hadn’t even looked at the results because, if you look at the 6 games prior to his appointment guess what? It gave us 2 wins, 3 draws and one loss (at home to Bury FFS), giving 9 points, with 7 scored and 5 against, plus 2 to the goal difference. An identical performance other than the defeat was at home to a relegation candidate, rather than away to a promotion rival.
Don’t like that comparison? Think that it was PDC that was vital and it’s since he left the form has dropped? Guess what? His last 6 games (which obviously overlap a bit with the last six games before Mac’s appointment described above) were 2 wins and four draws, giving 10 points; with 6 goals scored and 3 against, plus 3 to the goal difference. A massive 1 point and 1 goal better than Mac managed in his first 6 games. Proper drop in form I don’t think.
OK then you say, you can’t ignore the last four games, they’re part of MacDonald’s record. Fair enough, those away games were bad, certainly in terms of performance. But I can’t help feeling that the reaction to them is heightened a lot by the way the fixture computer has treated us this season.
We just played 3 away games in a row to sides challenging for promotion. If those 3 games had been distributed evenly throughout the season, I’m not that sure we’d have thought much of it. Not even the blindest optimist expects to win every away game of the season do they? And the ones we expect to lose are usually the ones against promotion rivals surely? And we’ve played a lot of them lately.
It’s interesting to look at the distribution of away games this season actually. Since Paolo left we’ve played seven sides away:
Tranmere (top of the table at the time) – Win
Coventry (challenging for the play-offs at the time and in decent form) – Win
Brentford (challenging for the play-offs and in decent form) – Loss
Yeovil (play off rival) – Win
Doncaster (top of the table) – Loss
Franchise (challenging for the play-offs and in decent form) – Loss
Sheff Utd. (play off rival) – Loss
Not an easy game amongst them. So 9 points from those 7 games, more than a point a game away from home to the better sides in the division; I’d have taken that at the beginning of the season. Looking back it’s worth noting that Paolo’s side only managed to take 12 points of that lot at home earlier in the season, so if we hadn’t fallen apart in the last 20 minutes at Griffin park we could have matched that. (Actually looking at it that maybe explains why we had better away than home form earlier in the season; we played a lot of poor sides away from home in the first part of the season, and better ones at home?).
Anyway, actually diving into the stats in a bit more detail it looks to me that the change in our form doesn’t seem to date from the new manager taking over, but from the period at the end of January.
There’s clearly a lot going on at that time off the field; ownership limbo, manager resignations etc., but most importantly, a bunch of decent loan signings leave, our best player is sold, and no-one comes in to replace them.
The squad has looked thin and, outside the first 13 or 14 players, a bit lacking in quality ever since. The Spurs lads have helped a bit, but they’re young and have taken time to settle into a side that wasn’t in great form and short of confidence. Maybe Tuesday’s game will have helped with the confidence thing at least.
That does bring me to the negative comment I have to make about Paolo’s management, which does relate to his personality a little. People on here have said that the only important thing about a manager’s record is points on the board. Results are apparently all that matter and there might be a certain truth in that for fans (although there are plenty of fans who want some style and entertainment with their points from what I’ve seen).
But it’s not true about boards, chairman and club owners. All of them want results, but they want more than that. There’s a cliché that says that ultimately all managers are judged by the quality of their performance in the transfer market, and while I wouldn’t go that far, I think the combination of results and transfer market effectiveness is pretty important to anyone that’s paying the bills. And PDC is clearly not great in this area.
It’s hard to believe that after the last couple of years, with so much transfer activity, so many players signed, so much money spent on agents fees, we have such a small squad with so few marketable player assets. Of all the players that PDC signed how many are still at the club? How many that have left have brought us in any money? Other than a pretty good goalkeeper I can’t think of a single PDC signing that I think has appreciated in value. Far too many have been found wanting and disposed of.
It’s the reason why when people have attempted to argue that PDC would have sorted out the team after the Doncaster game, and the Dons and Utd results would never have been allowed I’ve disagreed. Think back and be honest about what Paolo’s reaction to a performance like that at the Keepmoat would have been during his time here.
My guess is he would have ranted and raved on TV and radio, referred to the players as mice, pussy cats or some breed of small dog, and dropped 3 of them for the next game. Some might have been told they’d never play for the club again. And then he’d be on the phone to the Chairman insisting he needed to bring in a couple of loan players because those he had were inadequate.
Only he couldn’t because the window’s shut, and the embargo was in place while it was open, so he couldn’t do what he did last season when we signed 4 or 5 players in the run up to the deadline to bulk up the squad.
I don’t know what PDC is like as a manager having to work within existing playing resources that he didn’t choose. Is he capable of getting something out of players in those circumstances without being able to threaten to bin and replace them? We’ll see, as that’s the challenge he’s taken on in Sunderland. He’s been lucky that his second game there was a local derby, where his kind of motivational passion must count double. It’ll be interesting to see if he can sustain it.

Sorry it's a bit of an essay, but that's got a lot of my chest.