| Paul Cook 10:51 - Apr 28 with 8291 views | clive_baker |
Does he deserve a bit of credit for being so ruthless with the previous group? I felt there was a case of some babies out with the bathwater and do wonder what might've been for a handful of those, but the huge reset he oversaw was long overdue here. If we were to rid the club of that culture of mediocrity and acceptance he had to be a bit brutal with it, and was. The Demolition Man. I'm glad he didn't come in as another yes man, called it as he saw it, fair play for that at least.
Results were terrible, awful start to the season but we showed some glimpses (Doncaster home, Wycmobe away). Ultimately never delivered a level of consistency under him, glad he moved on, but in his defense he at least signed Burns, Walton, Edmundson, Morsy, Chaplin, Burgess, Edwards. Evans to a lesser extent. Brought JD back in from the cold as well.
I'm being too generous aren't I? |  |
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| Paul Cook on 10:54 - Apr 28 with 4145 views | homer_123 |
The difference between us under Cook and where we are now, is just so so far. |  |
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| Paul Cook on 10:56 - Apr 28 with 4120 views | Vaughan8 |
In terms of buying those players I suppose so. |  | | |
| Paul Cook on 10:57 - Apr 28 with 4096 views | portmanking |
No, I think you're being fair. Cook could certainly spot a player, of that there is no doubt.
Unfortunately, he simply falls into the Paul Jewell category of being a good talent-spotter and a poor coach. | | | |
| Paul Cook on 10:58 - Apr 28 with 4085 views | J2BLUE |
You could kind of make an argument that several previous managers have, through no skill or talent of their own, made a small contribution.
Don't really want to get into it because i'm certainly not arguing that they were not 99% disasters but I think each previous manager added a very small piece to where we are now. Even Lambert completely exposing Evans may have helped the takeover go through.
I know some on here struggle with reading so let me again state I am not giving them major credit or rewriting history. More just saying that through their own self preserving actions each manager may have contributed to Evans' downfall. |  |
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| Paul Cook on 10:58 - Apr 28 with 4081 views | BlueBadger |
About as much as Paul Hurst does for buying Donacien and Jackson. [Post edited 28 Apr 2023 10:59]
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| Paul Cook on 11:00 - Apr 28 with 4047 views | portmanking |
| Paul Cook on 10:58 - Apr 28 by BlueBadger |
About as much as Paul Hurst does for buying Donacien and Jackson. [Post edited 28 Apr 2023 10:59]
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Nah, I'm not having that. Paul Hurst ripped up something that didn't need ripping up, only minor tweaks. Cook (and everyone) knew that 2020/21 squad needed gutting and did exactly the right thing to try and change the culture throughout the club. | | | |
| Paul Cook on 11:00 - Apr 28 with 4040 views | SmithersJones |
I think that's fair. Overall he was bad for the club but that doesn't mean everything he did was bad. But one thing about McKenna that he doesn't get enough praise for is the way he took players who basically only signed for us because of Cook (Walton, Morsy, Chaplin), who we thought might sulk when he left, and got them playing for him in a very short space of time. | | | |
| Paul Cook on 11:01 - Apr 28 with 4026 views | clive_baker |
| Paul Cook on 10:58 - Apr 28 by J2BLUE |
You could kind of make an argument that several previous managers have, through no skill or talent of their own, made a small contribution.
Don't really want to get into it because i'm certainly not arguing that they were not 99% disasters but I think each previous manager added a very small piece to where we are now. Even Lambert completely exposing Evans may have helped the takeover go through.
I know some on here struggle with reading so let me again state I am not giving them major credit or rewriting history. More just saying that through their own self preserving actions each manager may have contributed to Evans' downfall. |
Can't believe you're giving them major credit. You're rewriting history a little there mate. | |
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| Paul Cook on 11:01 - Apr 28 with 4019 views | clive_baker |
| Paul Cook on 10:54 - Apr 28 by homer_123 |
The difference between us under Cook and where we are now, is just so so far. |
No doubt about that. | |
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| Paul Cook on 11:01 - Apr 28 with 4014 views | J2BLUE |
| Paul Cook on 11:00 - Apr 28 by portmanking |
Nah, I'm not having that. Paul Hurst ripped up something that didn't need ripping up, only minor tweaks. Cook (and everyone) knew that 2020/21 squad needed gutting and did exactly the right thing to try and change the culture throughout the club. |
Without Hurst's sheer incompetence and ego we would likely still be owned by Evans.
Again, not suggesting he deserves any credit, just that he may well have been a useful idiot in the long term. | |
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| Paul Cook on 11:02 - Apr 28 with 4007 views | TractorCam |
Morsy himself said the only reason he dropped down to League One was for Cook. Not for Ipswich Town, for Cook.
For that one alone, absolutely. |  |
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| Paul Cook on 11:03 - Apr 28 with 3965 views | Keno |
No |  |
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| Paul Cook on 11:04 - Apr 28 with 3949 views | ChorleyBoy |
| Paul Cook on 10:57 - Apr 28 by portmanking |
No, I think you're being fair. Cook could certainly spot a player, of that there is no doubt.
Unfortunately, he simply falls into the Paul Jewell category of being a good talent-spotter and a poor coach. |
Exactly. "They haven't gelled yet" was Paul Jewell speak for "I don't know how to get them to play together". |  | | |
| Paul Cook on 11:06 - Apr 28 with 3890 views | clive_baker |
| Paul Cook on 11:00 - Apr 28 by SmithersJones |
I think that's fair. Overall he was bad for the club but that doesn't mean everything he did was bad. But one thing about McKenna that he doesn't get enough praise for is the way he took players who basically only signed for us because of Cook (Walton, Morsy, Chaplin), who we thought might sulk when he left, and got them playing for him in a very short space of time. |
Yeah that's very fair.
I guess the counter to that, and to contradict my OP might be that KM and his team have made these Cook signings look so good. You might argue the coaching and leadership is of a standard that could've done that to any well backed and relatively expensively assembled L1 group. Not to discredit the players we have here of course, and I don't necessarily buy into it. Would be an interesting experiment though to drop, say, the Derby squad into this environment, let McKenna add his signings (Davis, Clarke, Hirst, Luongo, Broadhead etc) to it. Dare say they would do very well too. | |
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| Paul Cook on 11:06 - Apr 28 with 3888 views | Guthrum |
I think that's pretty fair - good at hiring, poor at tactics. |  |
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| Paul Cook on 11:06 - Apr 28 with 3878 views | Herbivore |
He was surprisingly hopeless as a coach and manager but alongside Ashton, there were some decent signings made in the summer of 2021. There were some duff ones as well (Harper, Fraser, Piggott in particular have been expensive flops, Carroll was a waste of a wage) but that is always likely to be the case when making a lot of signings. His most successful signings were largely people he'd worked with before but then struggled to get a tune out of here. I'd say recruitment wise we've taken it up a gear, signings like Davis and Broadhead in particular have been superb. |  |
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| Paul Cook on 11:08 - Apr 28 with 3842 views | BlueBadger |
I strong suspect that McKenna would've(and HAS, in the case of say, Jackson and Woolf) gotten far more out of some of those players(I'm thinking of the likes of Dozzell, Bishop, Downes, Woolf and Jackson) than Cook did. | |
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| Paul Cook on 11:08 - Apr 28 with 3846 views | clive_baker |
| Paul Cook on 11:06 - Apr 28 by Guthrum |
I think that's pretty fair - good at hiring, poor at tactics. |
He did oversee that Celina goal against Crewe though. That was delicious.
And Bonne coming home and scoring.
Far too few highs though unfortunately, and far too much guff. | |
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| Paul Cook on 11:09 - Apr 28 with 3831 views | Superblue95 |
| Paul Cook on 10:57 - Apr 28 by portmanking |
No, I think you're being fair. Cook could certainly spot a player, of that there is no doubt.
Unfortunately, he simply falls into the Paul Jewell category of being a good talent-spotter and a poor coach. |
Paul Jewell wasn’t that great a talent spotter. He just liked signing midfielders in their mid 30s who he remembered from match of the day 5 years beforehand.
Add 19 loans a season to that and it’s not hard to believe he left us bottom of the league. |  |
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| Paul Cook on 11:09 - Apr 28 with 3833 views | LankHenners |
A little bit maybe in terms of some of the players that he persuaded to come in but the first summer after the takeover was always likely to see a fairly decent amount of comings and goings and we did nearly lose Woolfenden because he wanted to play Nsiala instead.
The good results/performances under him always seemed to be outliers and he never showed he could take the positive parts and get us to repeat them consistently whilst improving the negative aspects.
In the end the best thing he did was do badly enough that Ashton/Gamechanger felt comfortable getting rid at a time when McKenna was waiting around for someone to find him. |  |
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| Paul Cook on 11:10 - Apr 28 with 3786 views | Pique |
Cook deserves some credit for the summer of 2021. The clear out was necessary and another manager might not have been as ruthless. And then the recruitment that summer could have been a Keane/Jewell style disaster (ie influx of dross), and if that had happened Game changer could have got cold feet over the money wasted, just as Evans did. But that didn't happen, and recruitment that summer was generally good. A lot of the credit for that goes to Ashton, of course, but it's hard to believe that Cook didn't have a major role in the recruitment of Morsy, Chaplin, Walton and Evans at the very least.
After that point, he deserves very little credit for the catastrophic mismanagement that followed, especially the selection of his ridiculous backroom staff. A couple of promising performances couldn't hide the fact that he was the wrong man for the new set up, too old school, wanting to run the show himself (the fact he was so keen to work for Evans was very telling). And that he was too rigid tactically and couldn't get a tune out of a very good squad. Unfortunately for him, League One is now like the Championship five/ten years ago - the game had left him behind. |  | | |
| Paul Cook on 11:13 - Apr 28 with 3717 views | surreyblue |
I think that is fair. Of the likely starters tomorrow, 5 are Cook signings, and only one is a Mckenna summer signing.
Perhaps we look on him in more favourable terms because of the dross that came before - unlike Keane, Hurst and Lambert I never felt like he did damage to the club, just wasn't the right manager to achieve our objectives (similar to Jewell). | | | |
| Paul Cook on 11:15 - Apr 28 with 3700 views | Churchman |
No, he doesn’t deserve much credit.
I’ve no problem with shifting out players you don’t rate and bringing in those you do or the reset. But the how you go about it is everything and his way of doing it looked wrong at the time. You can be relentless, determined, decisive and strong without going about it in the way he did.
Most of those players needed to be moved on. The culture and acceptance of mediocrity had to go. But you don’t have to blow a gasket on tv. You don’t have to bin the lot; the good and the bad. Bomb squad? Crude. It was wasteful and left us with no real team at the start of the season. Just a load of players (plenty of good ones tbf) thrown together.
Cook strikes me as an honest likeable man, but the job he did here was poor and it was never going to work. He had to go. |  | | |
| Paul Cook on 11:16 - Apr 28 with 3687 views | Dyland |
| Paul Cook on 11:09 - Apr 28 by LankHenners |
A little bit maybe in terms of some of the players that he persuaded to come in but the first summer after the takeover was always likely to see a fairly decent amount of comings and goings and we did nearly lose Woolfenden because he wanted to play Nsiala instead.
The good results/performances under him always seemed to be outliers and he never showed he could take the positive parts and get us to repeat them consistently whilst improving the negative aspects.
In the end the best thing he did was do badly enough that Ashton/Gamechanger felt comfortable getting rid at a time when McKenna was waiting around for someone to find him. |
That last para is the best damning with the faintest (actually none) praise I've seen in a while :) |  |
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| Paul Cook on 11:16 - Apr 28 with 3691 views | saffers12 |
| Paul Cook on 11:10 - Apr 28 by Pique |
Cook deserves some credit for the summer of 2021. The clear out was necessary and another manager might not have been as ruthless. And then the recruitment that summer could have been a Keane/Jewell style disaster (ie influx of dross), and if that had happened Game changer could have got cold feet over the money wasted, just as Evans did. But that didn't happen, and recruitment that summer was generally good. A lot of the credit for that goes to Ashton, of course, but it's hard to believe that Cook didn't have a major role in the recruitment of Morsy, Chaplin, Walton and Evans at the very least.
After that point, he deserves very little credit for the catastrophic mismanagement that followed, especially the selection of his ridiculous backroom staff. A couple of promising performances couldn't hide the fact that he was the wrong man for the new set up, too old school, wanting to run the show himself (the fact he was so keen to work for Evans was very telling). And that he was too rigid tactically and couldn't get a tune out of a very good squad. Unfortunately for him, League One is now like the Championship five/ten years ago - the game had left him behind. |
In terms of backroom staff I knew the writing was on the wall when we drew 2-2 with Wimbledon.
They were doing kick ups and laughing with each other, whilst the players warmed up (really stuck with me). Can you imagine K Mc standing for that!
I use this when teaching about standards within coaching to my students. |  | | |
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