Don,
You certainly have gone in to great detail and as you know I am a great supporter of Sean and his methods leading to football I enjoyed even when we lost!
A lot of your criticism of YD is his "football talk" which leads you to question his management skills, or the lack of them.
Just think back to Shankly, Paisley and the like not too dissimilar to YD comments.

I attach much more importance to chemistry, the coming together of characters and for some explainable reason it works.

I wasn't keen on YD at first and I am not convinced he was the best candidate available. The main thing in his favour for me is he now knows how the championship works and its called practical experience.

The time I will make my judgement on him is next season when if all goes smoothly, not like this season, he falls flat on his face. Its then we will be able to make a full and fair assessment of him.

Football doesn't work that way but I hope it does this time.

The last couple of games at the KM I've sat in the west stand Near the dug out. All I can say is....... I honestly dont think he'll be here next season, or if he is he'll be gone by xmas.

He just cannot change tac-tics during a game. Against Birmingham there right sided winger ? Cant think of his name, he was ripping us apart and when he shouted at Cotterill to stay in the middle, his reply was something like ive got to stop out wide to help out n try to stop his runs.
The other one what made a few of us smile was when he brought on Robinson and kept telling him to hug the touch line and whip in some crosses. I didn't want him here, don't like the man, but gave him some slack as he'd only just took over an needed to find his feet. But the longer the seasons gone on, the more I think JR dropped a right 8ollock getting him here.

Please dont ask me about his "assistant"

I take your point about Paisley and Shankly, but both of them worked in an era when managers did not elborate much. You could say the same of McMenemy here.

Then again, if things are going well, methods are not challenged. PD somehow escapes the sort of detailed examination which SOD almost invited, and I do think that most of what he says is superficial. He is clever enough to control the interviews by his very positive manner and no one ever asks him specific questions about tactics and how he sets the team up..

Good managers surely want to talk about some of the more detailed aspect of their work. I certainly hope that Mr Baldwin gives him a bit more of grillling about what he and his coaching staff are up to than is ever communicated to us.

BVZ,

I can only speak of the games I have seen and YD has been very adept at making tactical changes. I think Don makes the point that he has a tendency to set up to be defensive I go along with that a point where I would say that he is less gungho than he was.

Donaldo, you make lots of interesting points but i can't really accept that you truly believe all that you have written.
No manager would openly divulge what tactics he was going to employ before a game.
No manager would go into a game without knowing what the opposition strengths are and how he will counteract them.
No manager would treat each and every opponent the same.

You mentioned some weeks ago that the pre match drill was always the same.
Well in the Derby match programme the Rovers fitness coach explained the reason why that is.
You should have a read of it and see for yourself what the reasons were.

On the Oldham thing, Dickov was manager of Oldham when they beat Liverpool in the FA Cup.
Also, Oldham haven't done much better this season than when he was there.
They are 16th in L1, just five points above the drop zone.

PD has got them playing some nice football when it all comes together, a glimmer of hope, but when it goes wrong there all at sea , looking for guidance but don't seem to get any. The games I've watched he's definitely no tactical genius but he is passionate!
I personally think he has been out of his depth all season and definitely on a learning curve, will he be more capable from the start of next season? I think he should get a chance up to Christmas .

Well if the club does relieve PD of his duties around Christmas then there should be some decent options for us to go for as a replacement.
Sean Dyche for one will probably be available as Burnley will be struggling in the PL as most seasons the manager who takes his team into the PL inevitably finds it hard to gather enough points to keep out of the bottom three and invariably gets the sack.

If we get relegated, as now seems likely, I think PD has got to go. I agree with Donaldo, that he doesn't seem to have the capacity to negate the often considerable strengths of other sides. We don't have the luxury of just sticking 11 fit and motivated players out there and letting them play. In some games, like today's against a fast counter-attacking side, 4-4-2 just doesn't cut the mustard. When you need not to lose, losing nobly doesn't show up in the record books. Out of his depth.

Hound: Why would I write what I do not truly believe? I go to the trouble of compiling evidence to support a point of view and then write an Article, but then you think that I do not believe the conclusion to which it leads me? Do you think that the others who agree with me think DIckov has a good grasp of tactics? Most think he’s out of his depth.

It may be difficult for you to accept that no manager would fail to consider all these things, but I am saying that there is evidence which points to just that in Dickov’s case. What you say is mere assertion. I have listened to quite a few managers over the years and studied Doncaster Rovers ones fairly closely. Both SOD and Saunders used to talk about the opposition and reveal information about the actual football. Dickov doesn’t.

When things go badly, despite him “taking the positives”, we never learn what he actually sees these as. He usually associates causes of defeat to bad refereeing decisions, player attitudes or individual mistakes. As with his pre match interviews he then pours out the emotion which seems to distract his interrogators from pressing him on technicalities and detail. He could divulge more sophisticated football-related reasons after the event; that would not be giving anything away, yet he does not. With all the recent failures the team have had so many opportunities to take and learn from “the positives”, but we do not know what he thinks they are, or whether lessons from “the positives” have been incorporated in future games. He is frequently referred to as having been a passionate player, but that seems to be all there is to him. Passion, alone is not enough for a whole team playing at this level. Indeed it may well have an adverse effect on his judgment.

On the dismissal of the Oldham coaches, having sacked the backroom staff, the club would hardly continue with the same coaching methods, would they? Obviously they got rid of them (and their methods with them) because they were no good. They then installed people not chosen by Dickov and only then did they beat Forest and Liverpool. Dickov himself went soon afterwards, presumably because he could not work with backroom staff that were not his.

How Rovers management could imagine that PD and Co who could only achieve a 25% win percentage at Oldham, which kept them only just clear of the League 1 relegation zone, would be good enough to sustain us in the League above, I do not know.

Donaldo, i am sorry but i can't go along with your train of thought on this.
First though, all of your compiling of evidence isn't flawless as was proven by your initial statement that Oldham beat Forest and Liverpool after PD was sacked which you now acknowledge to be incorrect.
I have never heard a manager do a pre match interview and reveal what tactics he is going to use to during an up and coming match, it just would not and does not happen.
Now, it doesn't matter whether SoD or DS talked the talk, their records were no better than PD's in this division with the exception of our second season in it when we did exceptionally well and got about 60 points.
Donny Pirate put a post on the current match thread which showed our record over the past three seasons (including this one ) in the Championship.
They are almost identical, proving that my thoughts of whoever is in charge here will have the same problem.
That is that we are a small fish in a big pond and will always have trouble competing and unless there is a significant input of money into the playing side things will always be the same for us.
You say "were the positives incorporated into future games".
Well we don't know do we and neither do you, you are, i guess, just assuming that they were not.
You also seem to hold SoD in some high esteem but as a matter of interest his win percentage at Bristol City up to his sacking there was just 25% as well.
Now SoD has had much more experience than PD as a manager and even he is having difficulty getting results at a club which also doesn't have a big playing budget.
Coincidence ?
I think not.
As for post match comments always blaming something else, come on, all managers do it.
On Saturday we played to a strict game plan in the first half, containing Readings attacking threat and they did not manage a single shot on our goal.
Afterwards Adkins said that his team couldn't get going in the first half.
What he didn't say was that Donny prevented them from getting going.
Is that not what you accuse PD of.
Now i do concede that PD MIGHT not be tactically aware but i doubt it very much. It is just an assumption by some frustrated fans who want us to do better.
He has played at the highest level and is an International footballer so with that background for 25 years or so there is no way on this earth that he didn't pick up much knowledge along the way.
The problem he has is that in our division he comes up against managers who are better than him and teams and players who are better than ours.
Back to Oldham now, since he left they haven't done much better, once again flirting with the bottom of L1 so not much difference at their place either.
Whilst there are some on here who are very much against him retaining his post with us there are also others who understand why he has such a tough job and it MIGHT not be because he is a bad manager.

Hound:
You say “your compiling of evidence isn't flawless as was proven by your initial statement that Oldham beat Forest and Liverpool after PD was sacked which you now acknowledge to be incorrect.”

I do not acknowledge this at all. If you read my original post again, you will see that the “they” I referred to from the previous paragraph was Dickov’s backroom/coaching staff and I was talking about his flawed coaching methods. I quoted the Oldham chairman in what he said when he announced that those staff were being dismissed. My point was that it was not PD’s coaching staff’s methods that were the cause of the FA cup success. Dickov stayed on a few more weeks, but Dickov's coaching methods obviously went a few weeks earlier with his coaches and that was the ultimate cause of his departure! I hope that is now clear.

I cannot believe that you attempt to put DIckov's miserable record alongside SOD's. We finished 12th and 14th in SOD's first two seasons and got 48 points in his final full season and escaped relegation. There was no comparison with the quality then with what we put up with now. SOD's record for all 3 years was far better than PD’s. He had one bad run and got sacked; PD is now on his second bad run and is still there.

Even the comparison with DS falls down somewhat since he had to take the players that McKay foisted upon him, but when he was able to choose his own squad with considerably less money and unable to even fill the bench at the start of the season, we won League 1. This was when DIckov was struggling at the other end of the table even with players like Derbyshire, Baxter and Smith to call on. Saunders team knew how to win and how to defend and did not have the luxury of Johnstone and Turnbull as the last line of defence.

It cannot simply be assumed that PD is tactically aware because he is doing the job he is. If he was doing it well, it might be credible. If he did not repeat the same mistakes time and again you might accept he was shrewd in this respect.

Some of us cannot turn a blind eye to the evidence. This goes well beyond what he says and doesn’t say. He doesn’t seem clever enough to identify what goes right when we have had good runs. Because twice, these have been followed by some of the most abject displays imaginable. Being beaten at home by the bottom team in the League below would have spelt the end of most managers, but he was forgiven.

Nor does he seem able to select the best team. He kept Sharp yet probably his best signing apart from Johnstone, Duffy, spends far too much time on the bench. It’s difficult too, to name any player who has actually got better this season, apart from Brown. Young players like the much-vaunted Spaniard De Val just haven’t developed and he and his talented backroom team were not perceptive enough to even recognise that Forrester was concealing a serious injury from them.

Oldham are in your words “flirting with the bottom of the table” in 15th place currently, which is one better than PD ever achieved as his team was actually flirting with and sinking into the bottom of the table most of the time he was there – look at the stats. But as you say SOD got sacked for a 25% win percentage at Bristol; Dickov jumped before he was pushed, but my point was that 25% is not a recommendation for management in the league above.

I think I’ve now elaborated on almost every aspect of the large volume of evidence that points to Dickov’s unsuitability to continue in his post.

Very clever wording donaldo in your initial post in that by implication you took away from PD any of the credit due to him for the Oldham Cup wins.
Back to SoD, he too had two bad runs, the first half of his first season was a disaster, rescued only when he HAD to play Heffs, whose goals then saved the bacon after Christmas.
During SoD's last season we could not win a game after Christmas and escaped relegation by the skin of our teeth.
We all know what happened in the first seven games of the following season.
That is why i compared the two of them (PD and SoD).
Is PD doing well or not.
Not if he was the manager of a club with lots of money, like QPR for example.
Could Redknap come to Donny and do any better than PD on the same budget?
Well i guess we will never know but it won't happen so we will never find out will we.
Many of the questions that you pose are open to question as they can't be proven one way or another.
We obviously will never agree on this but that is fine by me, so perhaps we should draw a line under it and talk about something else.

Just to add my input Oldham are on for there best finish and points total in 5 years. They're in 15th well above the bottom 4 and could finish in the top 10. They've improved massively since Dickov left.

Well Azza, last season Oldham got 51 points.
They could also lose their last two games which would give them a 54 point finish this season so it wouldn't be so much better.
Having not seen them play i can't comment on whether they have massively improved.

Yesterday evening i was tootling about in the garden as you do and it suddenly came to me, i can't think of why i hadn't thought of it sooner.

On Saturday there was a ten minute rendition of "Paul Dickovs Barmy Army" and quite a few times the crowd sang the new song "Staying up, Staying up Donny Rovers - the last line of which is "playing football the Dickov way".
Now those songs were being sung by most of the three sides of the stadium.
That doesn't appear to me that the majority of the fans are wanting PD out.

Sorry, i should also have said that i could hear the songs at the Millwall game as well.

I also heard the song and I laughed. I'll say why I laughed because it is down to "Dickovs way" we are where we are. You can throw players, lack of funds at it all you like. He's had time to sort this mess out but his lack of experience has failed him. I will add which many seem to forget, Dickov himself came out and said he will use his "contacts" to bring in the type of quality players the club want. He's brought in a few but still finds himself struggling. That's not down to finances as he's been backed very well IMO.

I read Hound you will be there on Saturday and so shall I, hopefully it won't be our last in the championship for a few seasons, but personally I hope it's Dickovs.

We should all have a mass pray tonight between 7.45 and 9.45pm that Wigan do the business on Birmingham.

I only made the point about the songs because it kind of backs up my theory that there are more people backing PD than there are against him.

I do recognise that he is lacking in experience but he has to get it from somewhere.
If by some miracle, we do stay up then he should be better for this years learning curve if the club keep him on.

You should look out for me on Saturday Azza, i will be wearing a red and white hooped shirt.

Hound: Dickov may be in need of a good agent soon and I think you would do a very good job for him.

I am trying to fit "There's only one Paul DIckov" to the meter of the Funeral March and I can't really manage it, but using "You don't know what you're doing" I can get much closer.

It can't just me me that thinks he is doing ok though donaldo, you must have heard the song at Millwall and a few thousand at the home game were belting it out.
Perhaps it is you who is in the minority eh?

Hound:
I know we will not agree on this, but as you say there needs to be respect from other people's points of view, so I thought we'd end with my attempt at a joke.

We could always talk about golf.