Because he is more interested in niggling the opponents and the officials than he is about organising the team. I agree completely about MO’C - very rarely in trouble with officials even though he was always in the thick of things. Players who get booked a lot are not always the most intimidating, they are usually the ones who lack control. To be booked as many times as he has shows he is not a good leader.
Someone said earlier “the reason Buckley’s teams did not get promoted”; he did get us promotion from our current league and I do think we would have made it in the League Cup year, too, had that run not taken it all out of us. O’Kelly was an important player in that team, with his excellent link-up play.
Firstly, regarding the 4th division promotion team, we did actually have the “type” of midfield player we lacked in the latter years at the higher level in Steve Waddington, we also had Roy Mcdonough. Those two played in almost every game that season although everyone remembers Penn, Paul, Buckley etc. It was a much more pragmatic affair than the later Buckley teams, there were a hell of a lot of draws (17) (back in the day when a draw was an ok result) and odd goal wins (13 wins by one goal). Add in the 3-1 away win at Darlington, and 3 single goal defeats and we went into the final minute of 34 games out of 46 either at parity or with a 1 goal margin in the game.
I also disagree we would have got promoted if it hadn’t been for the Milk Cup run. It was actually that run which seemed to invigorate the team in the league that had been battered 8-1 at Bolton and 6-3 at Oxford early season when it looked like another relegation battle. The win over Blackpool and then those over Barnsley visibley lifted us, and its not beyond the realms of possibility that had we not beaten Blackpool and scraped a win over Newport the following Saturday that Buckley would have been sacked.
In reality the 3 teams that won promotion that season were all better and more consistent than us.
We only took 3 points off the top 3 teams in 6 games against them, 3 of which occured before the cup run really got going. Hull City who finished 4th - 8 points ahead of us - missed out on promotion on goals-scored playing their last game after everyone else had finished needing to win by 3, leading 2-0 with half an hour to go but then failing to score again. So there were 4 teams that were significantly ahead of us.
Folks have often said we would have won the play-offs had they been in existance, but that would have required beating Sheffield United over 2 legs in today’s format, not for me, I think we’d have been royally stuffed.
I suppose Labadie is our Dobbo and Kinsella is our Keatsey. Labadie has to prove himself to be worthy of the Dobbo crown. Dobbo was always a controlled lunatic who organised those around him. Labadie needs to take that role. I love Kinsella and think he has potential to be as good as Dean Keates, he does a lot of similar stuff, but he needs to add goals
A good read and some excellent pointers. But there was one very good reason we didn’t win promotion that year and it was all about who signed which striker late on. We were looking at John Aldridge but Oxford got him. We got Dave Bamber. Great numbers on paper but a dreadful disappointment and we tailed off, particularly after a 1-0 televised home defeat to oxford, when Rhodes-Brown scored the winner, if I remember correctly. Of course, Oxford then went on to be promoted to the top league, financed by Maxwell and with Aldridge scoring for fun. What might have been…
However, while I take your point in so much that I’m sure if we’d signed Aldridge it would have been a huge positive for us. On the other side after signing he didn’t feature much for Oxford that season, and only came on as a sub in the game against us so he didn’t actually do much in respect of their run-in and only actually scored 1 more goal than Bamber (4 versus 3).
Despite our goalscoring prowess at times that season we were never in the same league as the others defensively, or indeed in terms of goalscoring. Colin Morris (attacking midfield) and Keith Edwards collectively scored 54 goals for Sheff U that season, and they added Glen Cockerill for good measure, none of our forwards were in that league at the stage of their respective careers (especially Brown and Buckley). Likewise Wimbledon scored 97 league goals that season with Cork bagging 33. We just came across a group of teams that were better than us and had real momentum. Oxford with the money behind them - Hull, Sheff U, and Wimbledon were all looking for successive promotions and of course Hull wen’t up the following year at our place with a Peter Skipper goal while we were tailing off a mid-table “season of transition” which to me showed we wern’t good enough - Oxford and Wimbledon of course then went straight through the next division into the top tier! To me (and as you can probably tell I’ve had this discussion before) there is no argument that those 4 were well ahead of us. 83/84 was a glorious season, but in included a disastrous start and a miserable run in, in reality the glorious bit was October to February, just over half a season.
That transition lead to the 85/86 team which to me felt more like a promotion team. I think Buckley’s sometime reticence with David Kelly and an almost comical tendency to self-destruct cost us that year, and I agree with PT that a key factor in that was a very soft centre.
Derby had Steve Mclaren, Gary Micklewhite, Geraint Williams, and John Gregory to call on, all of ours were out and out flair players.
Both play/played in defensive, protection-minded midfield roles, AC maybe 10-15 yards deeper than where Kins operates. Neither expected to make significant goal contributions. Agree, as with the team as a whole, there is an imbalance in the centre of the field, but I think that’s more down to never replacing Joe Edwards.
Kins is good at his job, was he the dynamic ball-winning, pass-spreading, goal-scoring, creative force he seems expected to be he wouldn’t be in League 2.
If kinsella had a proper box to box midfielder like evans / mantom/ edwards I think a lot of people would see kinsella as a lot better than many rate him now and understand what he offers.
If we had played chambers alongside kinsella it would never have worked and people wouldn’t have rated chambers as highly. The midfield duo make each other better.
Look at gerrard and lampard for England, just didn’t work as didn’t compliment and if you rated those players having only seen them play for England in the same team you’d say they were average at best
Well now you’ve just gone and destroyed a story I’ve carried with me for nearly 40 years! I had no idea Aldridge played so little at the end of that season.
Actually, thinking about it again, it wasn’t that oxford game that summed up the end to that season. It was, in fact, a long trip into london, to plough lane, in another game that was televised, where I still remember how woeful Bamber was and, as you say, how much more effective Wimbledon were as a team, as they beat us 2-0 and put paid to any remaining hopes we had. It was a long journey home…
Kinsella gives us 100% every week. He may not be the highest quality player we have ever had but there is no way he should be getting criticised currently - there are much bigger problems in our squad…
Had to listen to the game on WM it sounded like the Scunthorpe game all over again I could see Stevenage scoring at the end, We might as well kept the rubbish we had last year.
