My first reaction to hearing about the sacking by mutual consent of Bristol Rovers manager Darrell Clarke was surprise. That was until I thought about it for about five seconds. Then, I realised that it wasn’t a surprise at all. With Rovers in a hazardous position in League Two, towards the end of the 2013/14, the then manager John Ward was unaccountably appointed Director of Football, a non job if ever there was one, and Clarke, handed a dismal hand of cards, tried and failed to keep the club in the football league. What followed next was incredible.
Incredibly, impossibly, Clarke somehow engineered a double promotion, back to League One, the third tier of English football, the historical division for Bristol Rovers. Two years later, Clarke has been axed. It’s a sad day.
Having not watched Rovers this season, I have to take my friends at their word and their word is that the team are awful. The summer signings have bombed, as have some of the signings made before then. The tactics and selections have been baffling, the manager has clearly been frustrated with the false promises made by the board. Put all these things into the same mix and you have a recipe for a managerial sacking. Which is what happened today.
I’ll just say this about Clarke: he was the best manager Rovers have had since I started supporting the club back in the early 1970s. Yes, I know it is pointless to compare eras and others will look to Gerry Francis as the best manager in modern times. Clarke gets my vote, though.
Results are everything for a football manager and the facts don’t lie. Clarke’s recent results have been poor. On the face of it, his sacking was inevitable. What has not entered the public arena are the reasons for his poor signings, his tactics and selections. Some say he squandered his budget in the summer, others say he was shopping at the last minute in LIDL, not Waitrose. The manager himself says the promises he was made by the Jordanian owners never came to fruition. There might be a million other reasons, we don’t know. I’d be amazed if there weren’t. But Bristol Rovers has always been a secretive organisation, with stories about confidentiality clauses with former employees and the like. Mostly, fans never hear one side of the story of the day, never mind both sides. Perhaps, we never learn the truth?
All I will say is that I believe Darrell Clarke to be a decent and honourable man. I see a man of genuine passion who grew to love Bristol Rovers and gave everything of himself to making a success of his time at the club. It seems from the outside that he often ploughed a lonely furrow, having regularly to make purses out of sow’s ears. Surrounded by chiefs but never enough indians. From my distant vantage point, I felt he was hung out to dry, left to accept all the brickbats when things went wrong as the owners stayed thousands of miles away. I could be completely wrong with my interpretation of what has happened, given my relative distance from the action, but I don’t think I am that far off the mark.
I believe that sacking the manager rarely works. And it is even more rare when the owners have no plan of succession, bar hoping that the caretaker manager goes on a winning run and saves them a few bob. Whoever the owners employ, it is likely to be someone who is currently unemployed and whoever it is will face a January transfer window where it is very difficult to do good business. With someone like Clarke at the helm, despite any mistakes he has made, I would always prefer to stick rather than twist.
I could, of course, be completely wrong and they will hire a fine, up and coming young manager, just like they did when they hired Clarke. Or they could make a populist appointment such as Ian Holloway or ‘Arry Redknapp, the latter of whom is well known to owner Wael Al Qadi. Either way, this is the biggest managerial appointment at the club since…well… the last one.
Bristol Rovers have lost an honest, decent, principled, hard-working young manager. Let’s hope the new man has all these qualities, although age doesn’t matter quite so much, as long as he still has the hunger. A lot of good people have left the club in recent times and the lack of continuity does not bode well for the future, always assuming under these owners there is one.
