BRISTOL ROVERS BLOG: G is for Gas - The graveyard of managers
Posted: November 27, 2014
By Martin Bull
I chuckled on Saturday when one irate Rovers fan demanded Darrell Clarke be sacked for suffering the ignominy of getting a draw at a team who hadn’t lost at home since early September.
Since I started supporting Rovers in 1989, we’ve tended to get our managerial appointments spectacularly right, such as Gerry Francis [first time], Trolls and Lennie, John Ward [first time], and Ian Holloway to a degree, or spectacularly wrong, such as Ray Graydon, Martin Dobson, Mark McGhee, Garry Thompson… I think I’ll stop now.
I’m not quite sure what we do to them, but we have an unerring knack of being the last ‘proper’ hands-on management job for many of our ex-managers, as if we’ve reduced them to a gibbering wreck in the corner of the room.
‘Player power’ famously helped oust Martin Dobson in 1991 and also Dave Penney two decades later, propelling them both into the record books as the two shortest-lived permanent Rovers managers ever (merely 12 and 13 games respectively). I dearly hope that this dubious honour is never allowed to transpire again. Results for both were admittedly disastrous, but it is still nothing for Rovers to be proud of that Dobson had been allowed five years to steadily improve Bury, and we gave him a mere 12 games. Penney similarly is regarded as a legend at Doncaster Rovers, with his five years including back-to-back promotions to take them from the Conference to the Third Tier. Dobson never managed again, preferring to mainly be in the background at Burnley, his foremost club during a very successful playing career, and Penney set up the Dave Penney Football Academy before last year re-emerging back into the game, preferring to get out of the firing line and be an assistant manager at Southend United.
Malcolm Allison was already 65 years old when he came to Twerton in Autumn 1992, almost 30 years since his first managerial job at Bath City. He was allegedly appointed to ‘help out’ Dennis Rofe, whose promotion from his coaching role the year before was a popular decision following a long caretaker/interim spell that put some old fashioned stability back into the club after the Dobson disaster. Not surprisingly the city wasn’t big enough for the both of them, and it was Dennis who drew the short straw. Big Mal couldn’t do much better and lasted only 18 games. Dennis returned to coaching and made a long career of it, and Big Mal also never managed again and after long battles with alcohol, domestic problems, depression and, later, dementia, sadly died in 2010.
Gerry Francis’s return for Rovers’ first ever season in the Fourth Tier (2001/02) proved the old adage to ’never go back’. There was no way of covering up that we had a poor squad and a lot of psychological baggage from the historic relegation in May 2001, and not even King Gerry could do much to annul that. Gerry resigned just in time to spend Christmas not needing to worry about football, and has never managed again, preferring media work and coaching, usually for Tony Pulis.
Garry Thompson’s record is so bad on paper that it’s no surprise he never managed again. He does however have the distinction of being Brentford’s only ever ‘manager’ to boast an unbeaten record, courtesy of a lone draw at Blackpool in March 2004 as their caretaker following the sacking of Wally Downes. As the Bees had not won in over two months, and had lost their last five games, it was probably the best result of his awful career, after Rovers’ famous 3-1 thrashing of Derby County in the F.A. Cup in January 2001, the first time a bottom division team had beaten a Premier League incumbent. He was later a part-time Assistant Manager at Conference North side Hucknall Town for less than a year, combining his position with a full-time role in promotions. Recently he became a consultant at a Sports Management agency.
Ray Graydon was a successful coach for almost two decades before finally agreeing to be a manager, where he twice led Walsall into the Championship, and once was second only to Alex Ferguson in the League Managers Association‘s poll for Manager of the Season. In Uncle Ray’s first season with us, 2002/03, Rovers were constantly in the bottom five from early November onwards and were only ‘rescued’ by the most dramatic Easter resurrection since a certain fellow two Millennia previously. Andy Rammell may have only played seven games for us and scored only in those three crucial wins, but we would have been goners without even half of those 10 points from the last four games of the season.
I call him ‘Uncle’ as a term of endearment, as he really reminded me of a gentle, courteous Wiltshire uncle. I should know as I have six of them, from a brood of 12. Life at Rovers seemed to knock the stuffing totally out of him, as he has hardly even dabbled with roles in football since his contract was mutually terminated in January 2004.
Ian Atkins was a man often viewed as dislikeable, but a tough manager who stopped the rot of the early Noughties and whose squad became the backbone of the wondrous double finalists of the 2006/07 season. He only managed once more after leaving us, doing an excellent emergency job at Torquay United to save them from relegation in 2006, but was replaced after only 29 games, and turned down an offer to be Director of Football instead. Since then he has successfully worked as a Chief Scout in Europe for Sunderland and Everton.
In an interview he said “I had three or four clubs asking for my services. I chose Bristol Rovers over clubs from a higher division because I thought they were a big club with potential to get to the Championship, with a great fan base, but it was a big mistake. .. The board was split and I was caught in the middle. It is a fantastic club with great fans, but I wish I had never gone there.”
Many Rovers fans always felt Paul Trollope was more of a coach than a manager / tactician, so it’s also no complete surprise that he has only taken coaching jobs since being sacked in December 2010.
A certain Robin Michael Lawrence is one of a select few managers to have managed over 1,000 games, although he hasn’t done so since Cardiff City in 2005. He is better known to us as ‘Lennie’ Lawrence. Since his existence as Director of Football at Rovers it is not surprising that he has never gone back to being a manager, preferring several consultancy, technical director and assistant manager roles, before recently becoming unemployed again.
Not surprisingly, given the abject failure at his last two managerial jobs (Aberdeen and us) Mark McGhee says he feels “…unfulfilled as a manager so I still have things to do”. Presumably the things on his ‘to do’ list are to find out what a few wins feel like. When in an abysmal slump at the Dons Mark famously told reporters, "Go and look me up on Wikipedia. I've got a track record". Yes, that is exactly what our Board of Directors did and precisely how he got our job!
Mark is currently licking his wounds as the Assistant Manager to the Scottish national team, under his old mate Gordon Strachan, and showed great enthusiasm for his job when he remarked that ”I imagined that I would spend my whole life managing in the Premier League and I haven't, so I still have things to do and getting an opportunity at this level is okay."
I believe that Darrell Clarke will be seen as a very good appointment in the long run, but if something does happen I somehow don’t suspect that Martin Dobson or Ray Graydon are standing by their phones each time the Rovers managerial merry-go-round is cranked up and roaring to go again.
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Martin Bull became a Gashead in 1989 and immediately fell in love with Twerton Park, standing near G pillar. In 2006 he wrote, photographed and published the first independent book about the artist Banksy. Having been exiled for much of his past, away games have always been special for him; so much so that he has just produced a new book about them, in collaboration with Rovers fans far and wide, young and old -
www.awaythegas.org.uk