The Wisdom of Gaffers

Two injuries, rested a couple more, the boys who came in impressed you tonight?

(Long pause)

They impress me every day I work with them. Every single one of them. They impress me as people. Kelvin Etuhu didn't want to play tonight, and couldn't play tonight, because he felt he was going to let the boys down. I asked Jim McNulty could he play against MK Dons. He didn't want to play... because he'd let the team down. Now that is unselfish behaviour. That is behaviour that fits a king.

I need a boss with that attitude

Me too. I let the team down on a daily basis but if I fancy not bothering to go to work of a morning that's somehow a *bad* thing.

Had made a mental note to check out Flitcroft's interviews at some point in the near-future, but I think "That is behaviour that fits a king" has brought it forward in my schedule to some time this afternoon.

Also this - http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2013/feb/22/paolo-di-canio-swindon-raid

I'd have him at Villa tbh

We stay calm, we stay focused. And we stay positive. Because the positivity around the place at the minute is phenomenal. And it's a movement. And that movement's getting more powerful. Not by each result, by each performance.

They've come now so far. And they're strong. As a group of people they're strong. As a group of men they're strong. It's a galvanised unit, it's a unit that's not fragmented, it's a unit that is united in one effort and one belief. And it's a movement that's going to be difficult to stop.

The line about having 14 men every game was fairly fantastic. I think he genuinely feels Barnsley are on the cusp of transcending the paradigm of mere football. Guru Flitcroft Sahib

they're having a great run. i genuinely hope the cult continues.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/21398594

the battle of agincourt got nothing on barnsley 3-2 middlesbrough

what if Wolves are the sacrifice tho

(I also want it to continue - hopefully Lee Clark's graceless implosions will propel his dire team arsewards)

i've already said i'm happy for Wolves to be the sacrifice. said last season we needed to go down for lessons to learn and rebuilding to be done properly. am now convinced that won't happen under Steve Morgan so i'm grimly satisfied with total immolation until the cunt sells up.

this is what I was talking about in the other thread - immolation as cleansing, fresh perspectives and whatnot. CAFC in much healthier, happier state with club legend in charge and committed, likeable players who know their own game than during first go in Championship (or indeed last season in Premiership)

so eat it nilmarrrrrrr

How typical of Pompey to shell out on the deluxe ultradetox package

they will return pure, sainted, translucent, it will almost be like they are not there

They deserved to win today, they played better than us and they executed their performance better.

Paul Tisdale, Exeter City, February 2013.

We huffed and we puffed and we kept the ball really well

Eddie Howe, Bournemouth, February 2013.

Sometimes a kick up the backside doesn't do anyone any harm now and again.

Steve Bruce, Hull City, February 2013.

Of course we are very disappointed and of course it has an effect on confidence. And of course it is very frustrating for the supporters here who have seen these results over the past few weeks. But do we still believe we can make the play-offs? Of course we do.

Tony Mowbray, Middlesbrough, February 2013.

"People say there’s a mountain to climb but people climb mountains every day."

John Brown, Dundee, February 2013

forgot my quote tags, sorry

I expect John Brown to be good value for this thread for the next couple of weeks or so.

Not a gaffer, but this has got to go somewhere -

The goalkeeper underlined the side's unswerving belief. "Even if there is one game to go and we are 12 points behind, we'll still believe," he said. "We've got to. We've got to keep fighting, you never know. We have just got to keep going.

The manager is the manager. One month, three months, seven months - it doesn't matter

Rafael Benitez, Chelsea (Interim), February 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/21643152#asset

alan pardew, great with numbers

Today will end and tomorrow will begin

David Flitcroft, Barnsley, April 2013.

We were defragmented

David Flitcroft, Barnsley, April 2013

You could easily market a small book of Ian Holloway's pearls

“He’s six foot something, fit as a flea, good looking – he’s got to have something wrong with him. Hopefully he’s hung like a hamster – That would make us all feel better. Having said that, me missus has got a pet hamster at home, and his cock’s massive.” - On Ronaldo

btw out of 92 clubs in the football league, 56 have appointed at least one new manager since the start of the season

An equaliser from Aldershot with all their fans, I think other teams would have crumbled. Not this Wycombe, not my Wycombe.

People are probably looking at things saying 'Wycombe have nothing to play for'. How wrong they are going to be because we have everything to play for.

Gareth Ainsworth, Wycombe Wanderers, April 2013.

It's actually quite easy to try and run around when you're 1-0 down.

Kevin MacDonald, Swindon Town, April 2013.

<3 wild thing

Watching the FLS last night - parade of crop-haired managers in shirt and tie...and then, at the end, there's Deadbeat Gareth

(xp gareth ainsworth's pretty great too)

DEADBEAT GARETH HOW DARE YOU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69WBKAAZR_I

a legend for all to see

Think of this as retribution for yesterday's brazen revisionism

i dunno what ur even so faux-narked about bruv, he was out of our league within months of the ungrasped possiblity

every qpr fan will tell you of the alternate universe where we remained a well-managed club punching above our weight with a plucky mixture of the charlton and leicester premiership sides

even now i still make little lists of lower league ruff diamonds i know we'll inevitably sign washed-up prem reserves in lieu of

As long as you don't plunder Chris Solly over the summer, like

My attitude has always been to keep calm, carry on and take it one game at a time. That's been my attitude since 1 November.

Mick McCarthy, Ipswich, April 2013.

I suppose across the board when you first introduce something new the fair/unfair scenario has to get sorted out somewhere along the line to find out how you have to tweak it to make it better

Sam Allardyce, West Ham United, April 2013.

"Your Highway Code will tell you that when you travel at 60mph it will take 300 yards to stop, so when Andy's travelling at 15mph…"

All of them are must-win games, but obviously I don't expect to win all of them.

martin allen there. need to find a transcript.

We have two more games to go, and we need to have a scotch, go to sleep and forget about it.

Paul Ince, Blackpool, April 2013

It's more difficult than you think - you've got a crowd expecting, you've got an opposition who are the market leaders and I knew Malky (Mackay) would go hard and their team wouldn't just back off.

Sean Dyche, Burnley, April 2013.

market leaders

is dyche a mgmt theory dude

We need to tweak the nose of fear and stick an ice cube down the vest of terror.

Ian Holloway, Crystal Palace, April 2013.

Dyche later congratulates Mackay, his players, his staff and his 'troops'.

"Every time you interview me you're antagonistic, confrontational, who do you think you are, Jeremy Paxman?"

I advise my players to have sex for short periods and with the minimum of effort and use positions where they are under their partners and preferably with their wives. Because if with others, well, that will need extra action.

– Antonio Conte

Best thread.

― Non, je ned raggette rien (onimo), Tuesday, 29 January 2019 20:55 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^

Not quite worthy of this thread but worth recording

winners have a good perfume, and when you don't win you smell so bad"

Pep Guardiola, Manchester, October 2020

“It's no good him getting 100 goals if we're letting in 50 the other end'.”

John Yems, Crawley Town, October 2020

(This interview is a minor classic of the “manager spitting feathers” genre, the context is we’d just scraped a 2-1 win over Crawley with a jammy goal; Yems used to be Asst Manager at Exeter.)

This, I mean:


https://youtu.be/PuVXi3sqIkw

what do we make of that from yerman. gonna say I'm in favour

Baxter?

dyche ffs

THE PRESS | WARNING: This isn't your average press conference! 😳😅

— Burnley FC (@BurnleyOfficial) February 2, 2021

Do people really say "lookylikey"?

Takes me back to the days of person sending round chain emails with terribly compressed jpgs of Denis Irwin/Carlos the Jackal

Cant be having with any of this foreign luki-liki nonsense, four at the back, two up front and go long when you have to

'pinteresque'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJfLHmU1eRE

new fave gaffer obv

He was our assistant mgr under Tisdale for a bit, always seemed an odd combo.

Not really in the spirit of the thread but it’ll have to do. This story was told on the Exeter fans forum today:

They used to tell a story at Plymouth Argyle, going back to the days when Peter Shilton had been placed in charge of the team, that offers a little snapshot perhaps of how sometimes even the greats of the sport can lose their sheen once they dabble in the unforgiving world of football management.

Shilton was player-manager, or rather goalkeeper-manager, at the time. Plymouth were slipping into trouble in the old Third Division, the fingers of relegation closing round their necks for the second time in three years, and Shilton was trying to encourage his players to believe they could clamber away from the bottom three and rise like a “pheasant from the flames”.

After a slightly awkward silence, someone tentatively pointed out the word he might have been looking for was “phoenix”. Shilton, standing in front of his players as a double European Cup winner and the record England appearance-maker, paused for a few moments to take it in, the realisation dawning that his motivational speech had not gone quite as planned. He needed a line to reassert his authority. “I knew it began with an F,” he said.

Ha

I notice one of this thread's favourite gaffers has been making headlines:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/apr/12/northern-ireland-england-womens-world-cup-2023-qualifier-match-report

"Anybody can be a coach or a manager and go and say ‘right, there’s a possession, there’s a game and there’s some passing’. Anybody can do it. But not everybody can do it like [Fotheringham]."

Kenny Miller, Huddersfield Town.

not strictly the gaffer but I do understand why Fotheringham has brought in someone to the club who is even dumber than himself.

ahahaha

Beautiful

I love this thread do much

so

I take it that's the Kenny Miller?

From Mark Fotheringham's Wiki page:

Mark McKay Buzz Lightyear Fotheringham (born 22 October 1983) is a Scottish football coach and former player who is currently not succeeding as coach of EFL Championship club Huddersfield Town. He became the head coach after a rather romantic evening with Leigh Bromby in Da Sandros where he was promised a lucrative 3 year deal for bending over when prompted.

he's objectively the worst htafc manager I've seen in my lifetime. I won't go too far into it because it would be a very fucking tedious and long post. Short version: extremely thick, tactically clueless - does pointless like for like subs when a game is desperately needing a change, constantly throws players under the bus publicly and more frequently the younger ones. But this is worst bit, he talks absolute garbage but aggressively adds "Listen!" too every sentence! Also even lots of people outside of the world of online HTAFC fans are starting to notice how extremely deranged + embarrassing his post-match pressers are, without fail every week it's like he's commenting from a parallel universe about a completely different match and some of the football podcasts have picked up on this and even they have noticed how bizarre it is that this inconsequential moron is managing in the 2nd tier of english football

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/EXRCDD/1990s-uk-miller-magazine-advert-EXRCDD.jpg

"I take it that's the Kenny Miller?"

unfortunately, yes

“I think the vegan food is quite nice – I enjoy it. Chips are vegan, I didn’t know that. It is a worry with the planet. It is a shame what is happening: you can see it is happening and we are all starting to be aware of it. What is going to happen to our kids and grandkids? It’s real. The club has been great, it is fantastic what they are doing. Other clubs should be taking it up. I had a wee bit of vegan curry, a wee pie and mash today. I haven’t tried the burger yet. I might try one on Saturday if we get a victory.” Duncan Ferguson

i was wondering how that was panning out :D

“So yes, I missed out on a couple of good players early on in the summer, but I’ve always been a massive believer as a manager in fate, and when a player tells me they’re going somewhere else I always say to them ‘well it’s your mistake, son, you’ve missed out there’, and that’s how I feel. I don’t dwell on it, I always just think ‘well, something will happen, they’ll get injured or something’. I just get on with what I’ve got and try not to moan about it too much.”

the sageness + serenity of Neil Warnock

Bear with me with this one but it's something I've often thought about it. Managers (and players too now) often refer to "moments" when talking about games but I'm pretty sure this wasn't a part of gaffer vocab until the advent of non-English speaking managers and players into the English/British game, and it still sounds kind of weird coming out of the mouth of, say, Sean Dyche rather than Arsene Wenger. I want to say it was Dutch players who I first noticed doing this but can't be certain.

Not quite the thread but

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/18/sam-allardyce-mystery-mural-dudley-former-england-managers

Cardiff lost 5-0 and were relegated that season when a controversial 2-1 defeat by Chelsea hastened their demise in May 2019. “It’s a lonely job, being a manager,” Warnock says. “I felt very lonely at times and probably the loneliest was at Cardiff when Chelsea got a goal that should have been disallowed for three yards offside. I knew that would relegate us. The dressing room was desolate because the lads had given me absolutely everything. I can tell you now the linesman was Ed Smart and Craig Pawson refereeing. I can see it as if it were yesterday. I’ll be looking at that on my grave.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/aug/01/neil-warnock-interview-manager-pep-guardiola-alex-ferguson-virgil-van-dijk

RIP Kenny Jackett.