Owen Coyle

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I seriously doubt Arsenal fans said that!

Pretty sure they did. A few journos tipped him for top jobs too. That's how highly rated he was when he first went to Bolton

To be fair though, I don't understand why he was so highly rated before he got the Burnley job.

He did get St Johnstone to a semi-final, but he never got them promoted? That was Derek McCiness if memory serves me correct.

Not that there's any shame in that, as it's actually hard to manage clubs in Scotland- the standard ain't great but outwith the Old Firm most of the clubs are quite evenly matched. Paul Lambert for instance, got his club relegated from the SPL. So I'm not saying that he didn't do a great job with St Johnstone, I am merely asking did he actually do enough to earn such a reputation when he took the Burnley job?

I think his personality has a huge influence on how people regard him as a football manager. But if you drill down to it specifically on football, he has done very well in some seasons and extremely poorly in others. I think he's a fairly good standard of manager, but nothing special.

A bit unlucky. If you chart Bolton's decline from the heavy FA Cup defeat in the semi, it coincided with Stuart Holden's long-term injury. Bolton lost both their star performers last season & couldn't afford like-for-like replacements, so that has to be taken into account.

Maybe Coyle overestimated his abilities, but he did well with better players. In the end, Bolton's cost-cutting and failure to bring along more of their own players caught up with them.

So I see Bolton's decline as a combination of factors. Coyle primarily lost his job because he couldn't shake off the relegation gloom and he failed on their return back to the NPL.

Coyle shows how quickly a manager's stock can rise & fall. Plenty of managers have failed and got another chance (Pardew losing his job at West Ham & Charlton as well as Southampton), so I hope Coyle gets another opportunity to see if his success at Burnley was just momentary or whether he is a good manager who struggled under a difficult set of circumstances.

*Pardew once bemoaned how he was like Owen Coyle, then flavour of the month. Well, he turned it round to get a 8 year contract at Newcastle. Maybe Coyle needs to rebuild his reputation at the right club.