My God, maybe he ripped out Mitch Candlin’s throat at half time and turned him into a vampire which is why Mitch never quite made it at Stratford Town or got his Sean Geddes FA cup moment, what with the sun being up during the first half even in winter, and that fact that through sheer bad luck they drew AFC Wearwolf in every round of every cup and got bullied at set pieces, especially those involving crosses. 
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Alfa male managers. Once the only type of manager. But now a dying breed as the balance of dressing room power has shifted to the players. Players who will down tools if you upset them. Hence the coaches at the top of the game do nothing but heap love and hugs on their players and blame everyone and everything for defeats other than the players themselves. Smith was a fine exponent of this.
I fear Flynn is a bit of a throwback too. You can “love his honesty” but once you’ve called out individuals, there is rarely a way back in the modern dressing room.
Whitney would have possibly got us up if he’d have got the gig instead of O’Driscoll. In Whitney’s words, that team managed itself. It was when Whitney started trying to manage it, it went wrong. Sometimes horribly.
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Arr.
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I think that, in terms of your last paragraph, you’re absolutely correct in that the team managed itself and everyone had bought in to what they were trying to do and was willing to work really hard and put their bodies on the line. Just the sort of players whitney loved.
The problem wasn’t with him trying to manage that team, it was the fact that we inevitably lost the key players at the end of that season because they all went on to bigger and better things, so whitney was tasked with signing similar level replacements, not just in terms of ability but also in terms of attitude and understanding of what we were trying to do. I’d suggest that would have been a herculean task for a wise, experienced manager, but to leave a rookie manager to do it, pretty much unsupported, was a huge mistake. We now have discussions about a director of football, well that’s exactly what we needed then - a wise old head to guide and assist. All ifs, buts and maybes but that’s where the club turned for the worse. In the circumstances, there have been many clubs who have just missed promotion one season and then struggled badly or even been relegated the next. We were never in danger of that, but the future direction of the club was changed.
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The issue for me was that he didn’t stick to system. He purposely went out and supposedly used most of the budget on Leahy and Devlin to play as wing backs. He tried it a handful of games then moved to a back four where neither could defend.
At the time (both after DS walking and SoD getting the boot) he was the right man to jump in. In hindsight, SoD was possibly the right man at the wrong time. With us not going up and the mass exodus that ensued, he would have got players in who would have responded to his methods, rather than a squad he inherited that were the complete opposite
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