Mike Dodds. Discuss.
So we’ve had the new head coach in place for a little while now and overall from my point of view he’s been a bit disappointing.
It is early in tenure I accept but I just wonder whether he’s part of the much bigger picture as by all accounts he’s a very good coach (especially with developing younger players).
I do wonder whether he’s been earmarked for a much bigger role at the academy (director of) as that is the real play by the new owners. He always seems to talk about ‘preferring to get on the grass, training and working with the players in that aspect of the game but looks uncomfortable as the gaffer.
Once we have a first rate academy setup, fully owned location, people in place etc (may take a few years for sure) would Dodds move into that area? We definitely are running two models together and for the moment, as long as we are competitive in league 1 or the Championship (either or) the owners would be happy to keep the status quo with Dodds in charge and accelerate the academy play.
The academy model could also provide us with the potential for a stream of young ‘head coaches’ that progress through the ranks up to first team head coach, and again provide an interesting sustainability model. Sam Grace was a very early indicator for that idea (even in a caretaker position for a few games)
For me, I would give Dodds a 4/10 as a first team head coach but it’s early days.
Comments
There’s no way he’s left Sunderland with the long term view of becoming academy director of Wycombe Wanderers.
I’m impressed he committed to not changing too much too soon and rip up the work and way we played to get us to 2nd in the league.
I’m impressed with how he tried to take the game to Birmingham with 10 men but I thought we set up like a shower of shit and it was game over by then.
I’m disappointed in match day squad selection. It feels like he trusts 14 players and then picks names out of the hat for each game to be the remaining 4 substitutes.
I’m disappointed he hasn’t worked out yet that McCleary is arguably the best impact player in the league and that he doesn’t seem to see anything in Kodua. On the bench yesterday so he will probably be dropped on Tuesday.
As a coach I’m sure he won’t like the size of his squad, he will only want to be working with 20-24 players not the number we have.
I’m disappointed that we can’t seem to put a strong 60-90 minutes together yet. I appreciate he is new but this squad is better than that.
I’m impressed by how we have shown the ability to utterly nullify teams on occasions and box them into their half. The best example being the first half yesterday against Wrexham.
Personally I think he was the wrong choice for now. I think we should have gone and got an older head with vast experienced if promotion run ins as an interim and then take stock in the summer.
Sets his team up to be solid and that’s about it. Bit too early to say much more about the man - he speaks honestly but that demented pacing and chewing suggests a man under great stress.
His team has no attacking panache, lots of long ball to the lone striker. You’ve got to be an amazing striker to work with that, and Dan Udoh isn’t.
This half of the season feels like a completely different one to the first half. I’m almost shell shocked. People can bang on all they want about how we would never have expected to be in this position, but we were and the club owners fucked it up.
Can’t blame Dodds for the all the random and underwhelming signings in the window - that’s on Rice and Vyshnyakov. But the inclusion of Norris over Ravazolli is bizarre - other that being slightly more commanding on crosses, he’s a downgrade in all other aspects.
I suspect Dodds will deliver many more 0-0, 1-0, 0-1 games, some in our favour. We’ll make the playoffs and then if Kone is fit, you never know. But I don’t think we have a hope if he gets injured.
"The older head" would still have had to deal with no Morley, Kone mostly unavailable and Simons getting banned. I'm not convinced the older head would have done better.
The only thing I can't understand is the limited time Kodua is getting and the over reliance on Fred who is out of form.
Pretty much how I see it too. He strikes me as a bit too cautious.
The substitutions piece is possibly the most frustrating for me - it was one of the few negative aspects of GA’s reign too, but still - I had started to get used to the positive use of subs in the MB era and deliberately:
a) making the most of fresh legs in the second half to target wearying opposition
b) giving chosen subs a decent chunk of time to make an impact and show what they can do, not just a token cameo
I had been concerned before the Wrexham game that for a long time we have failed to break down negatively-minded teams, other than relying on Kone moments of magic.
One of the few obvious ways we still have of doing that is to use Vokes, the only striker we have to be truly comfortable with the long balls we have started to rely on once again - why does he not get more time to show this?
There is a part of me that wonders whether he simply isn’t fit to play for anything more than a few minutes here and there, like in Akinfenwa’s final season, and if that’s the case then so be it and I accept that the club probably wouldn’t openly want to say that. But otherwise…
Lots of opinions that he's doing ok given the circumstances and that's not entirely unfair but I think that takes away some of the urgency for the promotion chase, he's only been here a couple of months but already seems inflexible and the annoying thing yesterday was after a good first half they just sat back, and then after the goal it should have been 6 up front getting it forward quickly but it just all seemed a bit lost. The subs looked totally disconnected and some of the regulars looked knackered.
He may go on to be the most successful coach we ever had but we've not seen anything at all to really suggest that to date. He's got too many players after a really messy January and he's right at the business end of a promotion chase , none of that is his fault but it's the challenge he was chosen for and he isn't doing a good job of integrating new players or rotating.
I think it is a myth that he hasn’t changed much. He’s changed the whole philosophy from a bold, go for it approach to a let’s try not and concede approach. That has damaged us quite considerably.
It’s not the Wycombe way to dismiss a manager/head coach early but then again nothing has been the Wycombe way this season so unless there is a difference over the next couple of games I seriously think that should be an option.
Rasmus Bertelsen eligible for a work permit now isn’t he?
Four managers/coaches in one season? This is going well......
From my perspective and based on what I have watched and heard from Dodds post match interviews etc. I feel he has done exactly what he said he would do.
He undertook to stabilise the team and not tear up what had got us to second in the autumn, if anything he has made us generally more solid at the back than we were.
The style of play, transitions & attacking play take longer to get drummed into the squad, but he said that would take time which is why I suspect he undertoook not to change much to start with. We have seen the odd hint of what he is trying to achieve over the last few games, but the time to make real change will be the summer.
As for the match day squad/subs the choices that really concern me are Kodua, who I felt had started to show real promise and had started to deliver consistently and GMac who looks absolutely shattered from about 10 minutes in when he starts; I would be a lot happier if they were swapped over.
As for the signings we knew Berry & Lowry hadn't played consistently or for long spells before they joined us, so suspect they are being managed as they bulk up/gain fitness, though we have seen what they can become from their cameos to date. Similarly Back has shown us what he has to offer but needs to be managed having only played PL2/U23 football. Anders is the unlucky one given he is 5th in CB pecking order and Westergard is sort of getting there but, it seems to me, that we are unsure what his best position is or who he should replace. Pettitt was cearly signed as a development prospect & George was unlucky with his injury but was I suspect signed as a number 2 to Rav.
The signing that have worked are Simons, Taylor, Reach, Bradley & Norris - though I am not convinced that the latter is much of an upgrade on Rav.
Irrespective of where we finish the season, we will see a lot of the older players leaving us as well as the loanees trimming the squad down considerably and giving Dodds the opportunity in pre-season to mould them to his style etc.
Regarding where we end up Rice was clear at the Trust meeting recently that the ownership want us to be as high as we can achieve, though I think they are mildly surprised at how quickly we achieved the possibility of promotion. I suspect their thoughts were more along the lines of this season top half L1 consolidation, next season promotion to the Championship followed by a number of years of growing towards top 6 in the Championship, then who knows...
I would say 6/10, but in all honesty I don’t yet have a huge view.
I think what’s very clear is that Dodds and the Jan signings were not considered together. Dodds has shown pretty consistently that he either doesn’t rate most of the new signings, or doesn’t deem them necessary. On reflection many of them seem like luxury signings (not including Simons and Reach) and not signings you’d expect a promotion-chasing side to make.
It’s also a bit concerning the amount spent on some of the players who now can’t get close to the starting 11 of a league one side, which doesn’t bode well if we were to get promoted.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think we’ll be promoted this season as I just can’t see us winning enough games to go automatically, and during the playoffs I think we’ll see the fatigue in our players.
We can see that as a positive or a negative. One positive is that the off-season and pre-season will be all on Dodds, and our Jan signings should have no more excuses and should be ready to make a significant impact in league one, rather than going up potentially prematurely and having to review a squad all over again that had only recently been re-shaped.
Maybe Dodds will realise things need to change , simon’s and kone back on tuesday . One or two victories can turn things around im not losing faith just yet . Yes we have hard games but if we can get close to early season form we have a chance be positive . At the moment confidence has gone we can get that back . Don’t think Wrexham will have it all their own way . All cocky at the moment the bbc love in has started again but just like the time Bristol Rovers beat us at home it all went a bit wrong the following game.
I think Dodds has the potential to come good, certainly not writing him off yet. He deserves a full pre season and a good run at the start of next season.
The scattergun approach to the January transfer window and spending money on players who obviously aren’t up to the standard is bizarre. I’m sure they’ll be amazing next season though…
FWIW I think we’ll finish 4th and Charlton will take 2nd spot. In all honesty I’d have bitten your hand off for that in August but the Jan window has let us down, that’s not Dodds fault.
Tangential point but there is no way ‘it’s my train set’ Rice would allow an ‘older head’ in the building. That person would probably require the monicker ‘manager’ and wouldn’t want to be working in an environment set by Rice anyway. I suspect that some or all of the above precluded the arrival of the first choice Scandi ‘head coach / manager’. So we got Doddy who doesn’t strike me as the inspirational figure head we need(ed) to get us over the promotion line.
It is very early days but it'd take an outrageously argumentative positive poster to say his spell here has started well.
We're barely winning a game and barely look likely to create many chances or score many.
Luckily we've got a superb centre back combo keeping us in games.
It's not easy coming in mid season and finding you have a ludicrous 28 or so strong first team squad, with seemingly 5 or 6 of them having barely played for months.
But we've certainly not seen any sort of new manager bounce.
Maybe that comes Tuesday with Simons back in. Maybe the slight hope that he's the new Morley re-ignites, along with Kone returning.
We finally went back to a single pivot for the Burton game and looked a threat again, then we played the laughably bad Peterborough and went double pivot for “safety”.
The most annoying thing about the ousting of Blooms is that he’d got us playing entertaining football for the first time in decades, and now we’ve gone back to tedious, attritional football that’s about as exciting as watching the Excel spreadsheet it’s based on. This is like Taylorball, but without the success.
I feel a mix of sad and frustrated at the way Dodds is reacting. On one hand he has been pushed into a position with a team that was beginning to struggle and what would appear a load of random signings.
On the other team selection is horrific, how GMAC started again yesterday after his utterly awful performance at Peterborough is beyond me.
Also the slow tap tap at the back before an almighty hoof to nobody is making us slow, boring and predictable. Thoroughly dire to watch and not yielding results.
Would rather he gave it a go and missed autos than this boring rubbish.
I feel for Dodds though, he’s just a patsy, someone for Rice to blame when it all goes wrong despite it all clearly being Rice’s fault.
He’s just a bit of a wet flannel. Said it much earlier to much dismay and downvotes. Not convinced by him one bit. Would’ve much preferred we stuck with Grace and Vokes until the end of the season.
We've almost always had a good back four, a tenacious if uncreative midfield but without Bayo, lacked a strong attacking force. Now we have all of those things, we seem afraid to use them. Humphries was scoring for fun at one point. Don't get me wrong, I know teams are setting up to block us now but I think we will live to regret wasting our loans and front players by being overly cautious if we don't go up this season.
We were better than Wrexham in my opinion, but I got the feeling that we knew a draw was enough for us...
Dodds job given the turmoil before his arrival and the bizarre January window is harder than we would imagine. We expect promotion to the Championship now...not another League One season.
on the point of another season in League One, quite a rebuild job as likely to lose Kone, Low and all the loanees plus I assume Vokes, G Mac maybe retiring. Tough gig for Dodds next season whichever league we end up in.
Welcome aboard, @Highclasscoach. I see that you only joined this morning and have already achieved a better up:down thumbs ratio than a lot of us who’ve been scribbling away for many years.
I’m known (amongst other things) for my hypersensitivity in such matters.
I would imagine G-Mac's inclusion was forced on him late by Kone's illness. Feel bad criticising McCleary as he's one of my favourite players and on his day a sublime talent, but as other have said, he works better as a sub these days.
Selection is one thing but keeping him.on and hooking Fred who was at least keeping them busy was disappointing for me. (Sub Gmac can change a game... for me we had no real 'finishers' on the bench)
It did feel odd taking Fred off and leaving McCleary on.
And you're spot on about the "finishers". Early season what worked brilliantly for us was having a front 3 we could bring on who'd give a real threat.
With no Lubala (didn't clock why he wasn't around) and Kone, we suddenly were down to Vokes (barely played, probably the late call up with no Kone), Berry and Kodua. Both of whom have barely got near the pitch in weeks. Berry looked pretty nervous, giving it away immediately which almost leading to a good chance to them straight away and then a powerpuff shot later on, one of our few attempts.
Bit harsh on the shot from Berry which was very well saved
Possibly, but never felt confident.
Very fair point, however with such a big squad, let's throw someone else in, we do not look motivated to win these games and the in game management and reactions are too slow and too late.
The Wrexham keeper played very well I thought. Great save from the Low header and the Berry shot...which should have been the equaliser.
I think the save was from Taylor; Low had the high header from the rebound which some described as missing a sitter. Not so sure about that.