I’ve always thought we ought to have given the triumvate of Whitney, Cutler and Ward a bit more of a go rather than appoint O’Dismal.
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In the long run he wasn’t good enough to be a manager but not like they weren’t some decent parts to his reign.
Took over when team were on a poor run and in danger of missing out of play offs and took the fight for 2nd to the final game. Less said about Barnsley away the better and there were those limitations right there as a DS in charge of that game would’ve gone cautious and gone for it more in second leg.
16/17 was up and down and generally solid mid table. Some really good players signed that summer aswell, Oztumer, Joe Edwards, Jason McCarthy, Laird. If the club could ever come up with four signings in one window again it wouldn’t be finishing 16th every year in league two.
17/18 was worse but not like some horrific run when he was finally sacked.
He wasn’t quite good enough but worse has followed him and as said many times also lost the best physio a lower league club could wish for.
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Indeed.
I was it was just DS was so popular generally (apart from those pesky 12 match winless runs) so it was always going to be a big ask to have that connection especially after promotion didn’t happen and half the team left (which Whitney somehow got blamed for despite most of them moving to higher divisions).
Other clubs have appointed physios and indeed club went with O’Driscoll, an experience promotion winning manager and that connection was even worse.
Donny away in October 2017 remains the only game I’ve been to when a team’s been winning 3-0 and majority of those fans are chanting for the manager of the team 3-0 up to be sacked!
Was a strange old time when mid table in league one was deemed totally unacceptable. Five year on…
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Four wins in seventeen I think, leading up to his removal, and we managed to win two more (in nine games) and stay up by a couple of points.
Great bloke JW, was treated disgracefully by some.
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It wasn’t great but was a 3-0 win at Southend (Oztumer hattrick) about a week before he lost his job and also a 4-2 win over Doncaster in one of his last home games. The defeats to Sloppies, Posh and Blackburn in his final weeks were all teams who finished top 6 I think.
The run now is far far worse but limited calls for Flynn to go. Also in Whitney’s final transfer window you had likes of Shaibu being signed on a video reference so again age old problem of trying to improve mediocre form by signing players even worse than you already have!
I lose track of timelines a little but one that sticks in my mind was MK Dons away.
We drew 1-1 and played well second half, a bit unlucky not to win. At the end there were fans frothing at the mouth aiming all sorts of abuse at Whitney, such anger. I’m not sure where it all came from to be honest.
He wasn’t the greatest as a manager I think we can all agree on that but he certainly gave his all and as you say things have declined year after year since then.
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The Southend 3-0 win was a week or so before his sacking iirc, and the Peterborough farce in the snow was just before that. The Donny game was a few weeks earlier, I think. We’d had a miserable defeat to bottom of the table Rochdale in his ultimate home game which must have been almost the final straw.
Things would have been so different if only he could have got the best out of our record signing, Makris. 
Was it not the Shelf Stacking remark that put the nail in the coffin for JW?
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Think so yeah. Mentioning jobs that a lot of our fanbase probably do, as ‘crappy jobs’.
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O’Dismal was appointed first or are you suggesting we should have risked appointing the physio straight after Smith left?
Always got the feeling that once things went off the rails with O’Dismal, Bonser decided he needed to go but we had no other options and it would have cost more money so we went with the cheap option of promoting the physio instead.
The physio did a better job than some our latest so called managers…
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We were playing poorly at the start of that game and he was already getting stick early on. I seem to remember this was when he was in the period of insisting that Bakayoko played every game despite getting worse and worse. So some fans were already unhappy. When we scored our goal Whitney gave the away end a sarcastic wave as if to say “See, I know what I’m doing!” and then seemed to rile a few up even more. At one point during that game some idiot in our end shouted “Whitney shags kids!”. It got pretty toxic. You’d have thought by the end we’d been stuffed 5-0 rather than drawing 1-1. 
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Phenomenal Physio, bad manager… but Shrewsbury away for me
Deano left on 30th November, O’Driscoll was appointed on 18th December. In between the triumvate were announced as being temporarily jointly in charge for 3 games - the win away at Shrewsbury, then the FA Cup tie (draw away) and replay (win at home on penalties) against Chesterfield.
Whitney took over as sole manager the day after O’Driscoll was sacked - although Cutler and Ward still helped him out in an advisory capacity.
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Not many people have given the kind of service and dedication to this club during the Bescot years that Whitney has. From a football and non football point of view he’s up there with these guys for Mick Kearns. Dave Bathurst. Tom Bradley etc
Time will paper over the issues he had as manager. Seemed to struggle with senior pros like O’Connor.
Whitney gave us great Service. Nice to see him at Villa mixing with those at that level.
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When he took over he did exactly what SOD should have done and that is let good players play with a smile on their face and give them a bit of motivation . SOD had sucked that out of them and for me, cost us defo promotion.
After that he had to be given a shot at the top job but trouble was that once that squad had gone and he had to actually do manager stuff like get players and tactics needed to be more than just firing them up, he was found out for what he was…. not a manager. Add in some of the stuff he spouted and by the time he was given the boot I have to admit to be delighted.
As already said. Good physio, awful manager.
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The rumour was him and Oconnor came to blows over how he treated the younger players at the club there were also rumours around that if i remember.
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Wasn’t one of our ex youngsters on a non league podcast saying he was a bully?