Every week, Sky Sports experts will review the Football League drama on FL72 Review. Check out Garry Birtles' thoughts on the latest action...
Monday 22 September 2014 15:32, UK
It causes uncertainty when things aren’t right at your club. Everyone was waiting for Felix Magath to get the sack and now he has finally got it people want someone in place quickly because it’s looking quite dire for them at the bottom of the Championship. Kit Symonds is second favourite and the fans seem to want him. They need some unity and he might just be the perfect fit.
They went ahead at Nottingham Forest, before Forest came back to beat them 5-3, so you know they’ve got it in them, they’ve also got Ross McCormack who, given the right service, will score them goals, so all the basics are in place and it just needs the right man put in there as quickly as possible.
They weren’t helped against Blackburn by Shaun Hutchinson’s sending off – it was just senseless. When everything is going against you, you want to keep 11 men on the pitch, you want to get everything right and then that challenge flies in. Going down to 10 men doesn’t help your cause at all – and then to compound matters they left one of the best finishers you’ll see at that level unmarked, Jordan Rhodes.
Russell said he’s flattered to be in the frame for the Cardiff job and rightly so because it’s a cracking job. You hope somebody like Russell can get a job like that because he deserves it for what he’s done at Leyton Orient. He’s done a fantastic job there, the players obviously don’t want him to go and you know he’s a very popular guy. Given the chance he can do that for Cardiff.
Everybody you speak to about Russell Slade, nobody has a bad word to say about him. He is breath-takingly honest. I used to live near him in Nottinghamshire so I know all about him and he’s one of those guys you want to succeed.
The players have bought into Neil Redfearn’s way of thinking and his system is working. I saw them against Birmingham at St Andrew’s and in the second half they were absolutely different class. They got a good win at the weekend over Huddersfield and all the players seem to be on the same wavelength now. A new manager could come in and totally change it with his methods, his system, his training methods. That could knock them backwards again. It seems a strange one when things are going ok for them. It looks like the owner has made up his mind now, though.
But how many managers have you seen like that come into English football and really struggle with the pace of the Championship, especially. It’s fast, it’s frenetic and it’s a little bit different to the continent, where it’s slower and methods and players are different. Managers sometimes find it a little bit difficult to adapt.
This is what anyone involved in football loves to see – players coming through the academy system. We talk about how important it is and this personifies how important it is to bring kids through and give them a chance if they’re ready – and you can see this boy is ready. He’s full of confidence. The number of players you see go to the bigger clubs and just not get in the team – you look at Scott Sinclair, when he went to Man City, his career going really well at Swansea, and his career came to a grinding halt. You don’t want to see that and hopefully situations like that will make youngsters like Alli think ‘I want to keep playing, get a lot of experience and go to bigger clubs when I’m more mature’.
It’s a young team and it’s nice to see that. It’s a team that can learn together and grow together, hopefully without teams coming along and pinching their best players. If Phil Brown can keep that team together, as young as they are, they have got a good chance of vying for promotion. They’re always one of the pre-season favourites to be there or thereabouts and on this evidence you can see why. Families will tell their children to go to these football clubs because you can see players like Jack Payne given a chance at an early age. You can clearly see he has got it and he wants it.
