In times when their club is struggling, football fans like to find a contrarian take, or a complex reason for a problem. Whether it is a case of them trying really hard to look clever, or having something of a Pep Guardiola “galaxy brain” moment, who knows – but all sorts of reasons for Plymouth Argyle’s dismal drop to the bottom of the Championship table have been mooted in recent months. I will explore some of these in more detail below, and I would stress that some of these I do believe are contributing factors – but only minor ones. I think it is important to realise that sometimes, the main reason for the problem is staring you right in the face.
Wayne Rooney is an utterly, utterly, abysmal Head Coach.
I fully acknowledge the challenges that the Argyle board encounter when recruiting a new manager / head coach. We’re not the biggest club in the country with the deepest pockets. We may miss out on first choice targets due to our location or budgetry constraints. This means that a young, unproven name may get the job, or someone with a CV that contains some past failures as well as success.
However… to recruit a man who has done nothing BUT fail in management?! Rooney gets a free pass from some for his poor job at Derby due to their financial issues at the time, but his job at DC United was indisputably terrible. No adjective can adequately describe the job he did at Birmingham, dragging them down from the playoff places to a relegation battle – which they would ultimately lose.
Whilst the rest of the footballing world laughed at us for what seemed to be an utterly bizarre appointment, a wave of pre-season optimism spread amongst our fanbase – and I can’t for the life of me fathom why. I (genuinely) applaud our fans for having such belief – because I certainly didn’t have any. Every single rational piece of evidence suggested that this was going to be disaster – just like Derby, just like DC United, just like Birmingham. And would you believe it – it has been a disaster.
“It will be different here” were the words fans were clinging to. Then, some bog-standard *entry level of media training* quotes, followed by some amusing appearances in local pubs, seemed to be all it took to truly convince us that it WOULD be different here. “He seems to have a genuine connection with the city and our fanbase” was now the line. National media and rival fans continued to mock, but the Green Army were building up a siege mentality. It was us against the world.
And there were some good moments, without question. The home victories over Sunderland, Luton and Blackburn were all strong performances, the last of which cementing a solid start points-wise – 11 from 9 games. The opening day embarrassment at Sheffield Wednesday seemed to have been consigned to the history books, and the outside world were (somewhat prematurely) starting to wonder whether they should have mocked the appointment at all.
From his final 14 games in charge however, you are truly scraping the barrel to find any positives. An undeserved win against then-bottom Portsmouth, and two terrible performances masked by late equalisers against Preston and Watford, made up the majority of his other points gained. The stats suggest that, though they are bottom of the league, Argyle were perhaps lucky to have even picked up as many points as they did. The only possible cases where they got less than they deserved were the improved performances against Sheffield United and Middlesbrough. During most games, Rooney set Argyle up with no organisation, no identity, and no cohesion – and has been bailed out by moments of individual quality, rather than tactical expertise.
To those who defend him say “you can’t exactly blame Rooney when *player x* makes a mistake!”, fair enough – but then, by the same token, you can’t exactly credit him when a player sticks one in the top corner from 25 yards out! In particular, the Watford game was staggering – having barely created a chance all night, Argyle came away with a point thanks to two wonder-strikes from Andre Gray. If he did that every week, he’d be in GOAT territory. But he doesn’t – and he hasn’t actually scored a single goal since.
It clearly wasn’t sustainable – and whilst some fans chose to bury their heads in the sand, others were realising that unless performances improved, results would worsen. And so it proved, as Argyle got a single point from the final six games of the Rooney era.
And then we come to the away form. 1959/60 was the last time Argyle lost as many as five league games by a four-goal margin or more. Wayne Rooney managed that in half a season. 13 away league games. Two points. Three goals. Zero wins. It is an insult to the fans that travel. Yes, the home form was better (it couldn’t be much worse), but the fact remains that Rooney ended up with the worst points-per-game record of any Plymouth Argyle manager in history.
Up to this point, I admit that the tone of this article has very much been one of 100% of the blame lying with Rooney. I don’t actually think that it is 100% on him – there are other factors. But they are minor factors. Some fans, however, see the following as primary reasons for the club’s awful form this season. To go through each of them in turn:
“The players simply aren’t good enough”. Granted, some of this squad are probably not Championship quality. Fans of every other club around us in the table would say the same of their squad. As I stated above, it’s not as if they have been playing well and simply been outmuscled by superior quality – if anything, it is the opposite. There has been a complete lack of organisation right throughout the team, and points have been won mostly through moments of individual quality. And this is the real crux of it: good managers make players better. I appreciate this is just an opinion, but I think players like Szucs, Gyabi, Al Hajj, Ogbeta and (even) Palsson have been made to look worse than they actually are. Under a good manager, I genuinely think they could offer more. What is more inarguable is the form of players who have been here a number of years. Gibson, Mumba, Whittaker, Galloway, Houghton and Hardie were six pivotal players at the start of last season – they now look shadows of their previous selves. Our Head Coach has made them worse, not better.
“We have been really unlucky with injuries”. The injury list has been horrifically long at times, and the number of injured forward players would affect any club. However, the defence and midfield – Joe Edwards apart – has remained injury-free. Sure, a lack of forward line can invite more pressure onto a defence, but the defensive players on the books still should be able to generate a record far better than 51 goals conceded in 23 games. Also, and again I appreciate this isn’t possible to prove – but is something happening to cause these injuries beyond bad luck? In an article published on 20 December, Rooney was quoted as saying “we’ve actually stepped the training up to train harder”. Within the next seven days, three more players got injured – two of them being non-contact injuries. His Birmingham squad also “suffered” a lot of injuries. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.
“We might as well keep Rooney, because no one else will be able to do better” – categorically not true. When Ian Foster finally departed after achieving just 12 points from 14 games in charge, Argyle went under the caretaker control of Dewsnip and Nancekivell for the final five matches. What did they manage, with the same squad Foster had? Nine points. More than double the points-per-game. Similarly, thinking back to the darkest period in the club’s history, Peter Reid started the 2011/12 season by managing just one single point from his first nine games. Carl Fletcher then faced his first nine matches in charge with the same financial constraints in place that Reid had, whilst the club’s off-field future was being resolved. Fletcher’s points tally? Eight. This ties back in with an earlier point – good managers make players better (or at least, a change can have an impact). Our fate is absolutely not already sealed; get the right manager in, and Argyle can definitely still stay up.
“We can’t compete at this level financially” – it is true that a lot of other clubs at this level spend a lot of money, amounts we can’t compete with. However, it is also true that other clubs at this level WASTE a lot of money. That is why we were so highly regarded as a well-run club just 12 months ago. We boxed clever; we made the most of what we had. Shrewd acquisitions such as Lewis Gibson on a free, Finn Azaz on loan, and £1 million for Morgan Whittaker who made the official EFL Championship team of the season. Whilst other clubs made mad decisions (such as Birmingham sacking their manager whilst in 6th place and ending up relegated), we showed that, by out-smarting clubs rather than out-muscling them, we could compete in the Championship. I still think we can. Sadly, the club’s showcase of smart strategy has since faded, following one of the least shrewd managerial appointments the club has ever made.
Simon Hallett has done a lot of good for this football club. It would be very harsh and selective to say that “he got lucky” when it was going well or anything like that. Off the field, he is seemingly going about things the right way – exploring avenues to make us a sustainable Championship club. I wouldn’t have blamed Hallett for the mistake that was Ian Foster, either – provided that he learnt from it. Foster was, as I said at the top, an unknown entity. How was Hallett to know that Foster would start treating the players the way he did. In the end, he sacked him (just) in time to preserve Argyle’s second-tier status. I hoped that it would have been a lesson learnt – if you can’t go on managerial reputation, try to make sure they are at least a good fit.
However, I cannot hide my utter disgust at the board’s decision to appoint Rooney, and then keep him as long as they did. It was pure arrogance on their part. If they say that words akin to “how clever will we look when this works and we prove everyone wrong” didn’t go through their heads when they made their choice, they’re simply lying. They liked the fact that the world was writing Rooney off, and rather than making a sensible, sane appointment, they wanted to try and show how much smarter they were than everyone else. Well guess what, chaps – there’s a REASON why he was being written off. Take a look outside of your data-driven obsession, take a step back, and see how blindingly obvious it was that this was going to fail. His underlying stats were terrible, as was his points record. All he did at Argyle was carry that on. Who could possibly have seen this coming?!
Thankfully, the nightmare is now over. The worst manager/head coach in Argyle’s history has been let go. But the board have now got two appointments in a row badly wrong. One more wrong decision, and it’s back down to League One we go. All that good work from 2019 to 2023 to get us up to the Championship will have been wasted. A critical decision now has to be made. Over to you, gentlemen…