menzinho

I think it can potentially be an advantage, assuming that the recruitment side of things are well run and the ideas all align. A head coach then really only has one main job – to coach! Football’s all about trying to get those marginal gains and maybe a coach that is able to spend all his time on the training pitch is advantageous, maybe one extra session might just make the difference... I think a traditional manager can still work as well, but they have an awful lot more to do and it could potentially mean one aspect of their many roles starts to suffer, for example this is from David Artell when he was the manager at Crewe; “I was doing coaching, recruitment, scouting, loan strategies, transfer strategies, individual development and contract negotiations”. He described himself as being “burnt-out” at the end of his time there and Crewe eventually got relegated back into L2. Given what Stuart Maynard has said in interviews he's involved in recruitment, but probably doesn't spend time and effort scouting, rather just gives his opinion on the players the recruitment team has identified. And I’m pretty confident that if SM really didn’t want a player the club wouldn’t sign him (I don’t think this scenario would ever happen though because our recruitment is collaborative and will be about finding players that suit the teams/SM’s style and needs). I think the real issue would arise if the recruitment and head coach had very different ideas about what the team needed to improve… I'm pretty sure there were rumours of clashes between Moniz and Branston a good few years ago!

I thought when Stuart Maynard first came in, even though we didn’t really turn the form around, I was actually quite encouraged in some of the games (even if we lost). At Mansfield and Wrexham, both tough away games I thought we actually deserved something from those games and played pretty well. I agree he shouldn’t shoulder too much blame for the defence, he tried a couple of different things and I thought we looked more solid but the continuous individual errors and inability to defend our own box was our downfall and that is more down to the players. I’ve probably been just as critical of our attacking play at times because I thought we’d been way to slow, predictable and not been brave enough to try more through-balls/crosses. I thought we were a lot more threatening with Jatta on the pitch because we actually crossed the ball more often. Hopefully this continues into next season. If we keep our better players over pre-season, improve the defence/keeper and Scott, Palmer and Baj are back up to speed and haven’t suffered from their injuries, on paper Stuart Maynard will have very good squad. And for that reason I think he’ll be for the whole season, unless it’s a disaster and we’re close to being bottom of the league (but given the quality of the squad I think that’s unlikely to happen). Even if we were hovering around mid-table for most of the season I don’t think that would get him sacked. I get the impression the owners will give a head-coach “extra-time” in the hope things turn in our favour. I’m thinking about what happened with Doncaster last season, they had a decent squad (so should we come the start of the season) but were poor/average until the last 1/3. It shows sacking manager isn't always the answer. I'm not going to lie and say I don't have doubts considering his tough start, but I hope he's over that now and he's a massive success for us!

Białkowski ???????? Johnson ???????? Rodrigues ???????? McGregor ???????????????????????????? Grealish ???????????????????????????? I've exploited the loan system! And what do you call a false 9 in 5 a-side team? A false 5? ????‍♂️????

I’d guess he’s just one name on a long list, if it’s even true! No-one knows anything about our transfers these days. We’d been “linked” with a few players before our first signing but absolutely no-one on social media knew anything about Platt. Weirdly that only game Sharman-Lowe played was the first game of last season (Bromley lost 2-0 away at Halifax) he was dropped and didn’t play another league game for them. Seems pretty harsh on a young keeper, I just watched the highlights from that game, he makes a bit of misjudgement for the first goal but nothing else really of note. So that probably destroyed his confidence. No-one really knows what's happening with Brooks either, I wouldn’t be surprised if he got loaned out again. Last season he didn’t really play that many games, only 12 appearances for Rochdale and 4 for Cork.

The not coming to an agreement could simply just be him wanting to stay and the club wanting to get rid! Interesting he’s only commenting now, we’ve known he was going weeks ago. Anyway, as has already been mentioned, those two vital goals in the Boreham Wood game will always make me think fondly of him. Oh, and I'm still impressed by your ability @Chris to shoe-horn in a dig at Richard Duffy! You never miss an opportunity! ???? ????

So Stuart Maynard clearly left on good terms to be welcomed back! We could do a tour and visit the clubs that some of our previous head coaches/managers are at now. Swansea, Wolves (Ian Burchnall & Shaun Derry), Yeovil (Mark Cooper), Oxford (Craig Short) and FGR (Steve Cotterill). Not sure the budget would stretch to reach Yokohama Marinos (Harry Kewell) or Zurich for Ricardo Moniz! Back in the real world, surely we’ll get some fixtures against teams that are pretty close to compensate for the fact there are no home games. Maybe we’ll even get another game against Forest, it’s pretty close even if it is out of the city…

A very short statement, if I had to guess the reason I'd say Pete Wild thinks more money is needed to progress the team and they either don't have the ability (or want) to increase their funds. Barrow are overachieving in L2, if they've sacked him just because they missed out on the play-offs it's very short-sighted. They average about 3,700 fans which at a quick glance puts them 19th in the table. They don't exactly generate a massive amount of income compared to the other teams in this league, they probably need 3 home games to match the income from just 1 of our home games. I think they'll do well to find someone as good as Pete Wild, he'll get another L2 job quite quickly. The managers Barrow had in-between him and Evatt shows what a good job he did.

An aerially dominate CB, that’s a very good start to this season’s transfer business and clever/reassuring to announce a defender first too. From what I can gather the main criticism seems to be that his passing from the back wasn’t great and he hit a lot of balls into touch. Could this be more down to Bradford’s style of play and the instructions he was given? He must be able to play a bit as this was very much the style for Barrow under Ian Evatt. In team that has clear patterns to move the ball around from the back he’ll probably look a lot better. Interestingly, against Bradford at home he got subbed on at half-time and we didn’t score again. He didn’t play when we beat them 3-0 either, maybe it would’ve been a different result if he had played! Kind of supports that post above from BantamDan, which is very interesting. He did play the majority of the games for Bradford when they finished in the Play-offs the season before too. Maybe there is such a thing as the “Matty P effect” after all... I think he could be a player that Bradford will miss more than they realise.

It's just greed pure and simple, everyone who plays in the FA Cup should've been able to vote and not just the top division teams. Like you both mention above, you can't claim fitness and fatigue being the reason when you then go and play a pointless exhibition match just days after the season. Now I don't want any player to pick up a bad injury, but if it does happen, they've only got themselves to blame...

For those who hate stats, and are only concerned by the wins & losses look away now! You can look at them and see how we rank compared to other teams here: https://www.fotmob.com/en-GB/teams/9819/stats/notts-county/teams I’ve picked out a few eye-catching ones, it starts off really bad and gets slowly better, so… We rank as the worst team in the league when it comes to: Penalties conceded: 17! That’s 8 more penalties than the next worse who were Walsall with 9! The average is about 6 so we’ve basically given away 11 goals! Possession won in the final third: 2.8 (times per match). Now this really surprised me, because this is supposed to be a big part of our style of play but statistically we were the worst at it! I guess when the board referenced defending from the front this is the type of thing they were referring too. Mansfield were the best with an average of 5.1. We made the least number of successful tackles, 6.3 per match. The next worse side were Sutton and there’s a bit of a jump as they scored 7.8. The average is about 9.5 here. Also, we only ranked 15th when it came to touches in the oppositions box. Interestingly Mansfield, Wrexham and Stockport were the top 3 here, so this is something that would seemingly need to improve next season. We were 1st for accurate passes 526.4 per game, in fact we were considerably higher than anyone else and made over 100 more accurate passes per game than MK who were 2nd. Interestingly, Wrexham, Mansfield, Stockport and Crawley were all in the top 7. We all know that attacking wise the stats were very good, but clearly there's lots to improve on that will help push up the table next season; the possession won in the final third, our tackling and not giving away almost 20 penalties will help massively!

I think every team needs its share of experience and I guess if a player has racked up a lot of games in the EFL they should be good, so in theory yes. That’s not always the case though, it wasn’t long ago when we basically only signed players from the EFL and a lot of them, even the experienced players, weren’t very good. I don’t think it matters too much how many games a player has played or what level they were at before, quite simply the question should just be are they good? I know it’s too easy just to say sign good players, but that’s the truth. Jatta, Macari, Langstaff, Austin & Nemane hadn’t kicked a ball at this level before this season. They’ll be lots of players in the NL, youngsters with very little EFL game time and players from Ireland/Scotland that are more than good enough for this level, I guess the skill is finding and signing them! And we really struck a load of misses with our loan signings last season too. It should basically be a chance to sign a talented youngster that’s essentially too good for us but not ready for their own team. I’m talking; Grealish, McGregor, Bola, Yates, Grant, Patterson etc. I’m hoping we can re-address that balance this year.

Congrats to Crawley, I thought once they went 1-0 they managed the game very well. Their fans will be incredibly grateful for VAR though. If that pen had stood and been scored it would've been a massive controversy! However whilst I’d be celebrating, I’d be a tad worried going into next season. They lost 18 times in L2 and only finished 9 points ahead of us! That doesn’t exactly feel like a team that's ready to step-up. The top 3 were quite comfortably ahead of the rest in the end and their massively superior GD tells a story too. Recruitment will have to be almost perfect for them over the summer, even with that I think if they stay up next season they’ll have done very well.

Both Farrend Rawson and Jacob Bedeau will be leaving Morecambe, both offer slightly different things, will be interesting to see the stats for these too. Danny Collinge is an interesting player, featured quite a lot for England youth teams and signed for Stuttgart when he was younger. I think he's very comfortable with the ball at his feet so it wouldn't surprise me if he was player we were looking at. I can’t claim to have seen much of him but by all accounts he had a very good season and was named in the National League Team of the Year.

Joel Senior will be leaving Morecambe now and Gus Scott-Morriss will be out of contract but Southend do have the option to extend this - no news as of yet. Senior seems the obvious choice at the moment he's definitely good enough for this league and won Morecambe's fans and players’ player of the season award. Similarly Scott-Morriss won the fans and sponsors player of the season award this season. He is generally very highly rated by Southend fans, most would say he’s the best right wing-back in the NL.

With O'Brien and Bostock off, there's space to recruit two really good options. I noticed Charlie Lakin had a really good second half of the season at Sutton, seemed to score every week at one point! Callum Maycock from Solihull is out of contract and has been offered a new contract – usually a good sign! He played pretty much every game and scored 8 goals too. Most Solihull fans seem to really rate him and is described as “tireless” and “energetic”, not sure how technically good he is though – he doesn’t stick out in memory when we played them. Interestingly JJ McKiernan is the only player Morecambe have offered a contract to that hasn't turned it down, yet. His defensive stats are surprisingly good, and I know he considers himself more of an attacking midfielder.

Next season is tough to predict for me, we've been so mixed since SM arrived, but the squad should be better so... 24/25: 7th (Lose play-offs) 25/26: 6th (Lose play-offs) 26/27: 2nd Promoted 27/28: 11th League 1 28/29: 13th League 1

Yes, it's never quite the same when Notts aren't playing but I've got a few topics I think I'll post over the summer that'll entice a few replies (or drive them further away as I try to just about connect them to Notts!)

It was a great performance by Oxford, I fancied Bolton before it kicked off but they just never got going. Their performance reminded me of ours in the play-off final against Harrogate. Watching Ruben play again was bittersweet! I know some thought he'd made a strange decision moving to Oxford but he got it spot on and is a Championship player now. It's been quite a dramatic rise for him these last few seasons. I was slightly hopeful if it hadn't worked out at Oxford we'd see him again for us but I think that ship has truly sailed now... Be interesting to see how he gets on the Championship now, I think he'll be fine!

I've just read that article, thanks for posting it @Robbie! The bit about LW leaving really stands out though, he speaks about him like he was some sort of super-human and how he was "heartbroken"! I can only assume he wasn't the only player who felt that way given he says the mood of players was horrible. That clearly affected the form more than we realised. And I know it's harsh, but I'm imagining if I was a player hearing the next gaffer is coming from Wealdstone I wouldn't initially be excited. Now I'm not saying a "big-name" was someone we should've gone for but I'd imagine it would've lifted the spirits quicker, whereas SM probably had to prove himself on the training pitch and needed time to bond with the players to get them back on track - which by the end of the season (FGR excluded) he did. Very interesting though, just hoping we offer him a new contract over the summer or early at the start of next season like we did with Macca!

I know age is just a number, but I'd be amazed if a 17 year old was good enough to come in challenge for the No.1 spot... I've never seem him play (or even heard of him for that matter). He does sounds like a very promising player though, played the back end of last season in the NLN for Darlington and has already played for the England under 19s when he was just 16! I've found a little article about him: https://rokerreport.sbnation.com/2024/3/18/24102459/the-lowdown-on-matty-young-how-is-sunderlands-next-top-keeper-prospect-doing-at-darlo

Given most their work goes unseen I can’t really comment on how well they’ve done but they’ve been part of team that’s been on an upward trajectory over the past few seasons. The team was definitely fit enough to carry out LW rigorous pressing and I know Tom Weal got a lot of credit for the penalty shoot-out that eventually got us promoted. In terms of coaching staff, only Joao Alves remains from the promotion season so you can’t accuse Notts of being too sentimental now… They’d have been on short(ish) contracts just like the players, I guess the club thinks a change would be beneficial. Always sad when people move on though and it's a lovely message that Tom has posted. I hope he and Ian Hutton find new clubs for next season.

If you scrap VAR fans (and managers) will still moan about the decisions the refs get wrong, I'd predict they'd be quite lenient for a few months but once the novelty of no VAR has worn off and big decisions go against them they'll want some sort of way of looking at these scenarios... Every other sport manages to implement some sort of technology without it having a major impact on the flow of the game. I think it just needs to be used a lot more sparingly, some form of VAR-Light! Stop checking goals/fouls for 3 minutes, stop drawing lines for offsides - if you can't tell with the eye just go with the on field decision. Just add a bit of common sense into the whole thing really. You could even have a system where managers/head coaches get a limited number of challenges like in tennis or cricket for example. VAR should be treated as a fall-back system, not something it seems refs are totally reliant on now. I'd totally understand why you'd scrap it in it's current form but I think getting rid of it creates another set of problems.

It’s been a few weeks since the retained list was announced and I guess he will be the first “signing” we will potentially hear about. But as we’ve only offered him a one-year deal, I wonder if he’ll be exploring his options to get a longer contract elsewhere. What do you think, do you expect him to stay?

Now that would be an interesting offer and dilemma! I know his last few seasons haven’t been great since his big injury at Chesterfield. Assuming there are not any lasting effects I’d be very tempted as we'd effectively get a replacement and a lot of money. He just scored 7 goals in 16 games in a struggling Boreham Wood team, I think in our team given the chances we create he would do pretty well. Peterborough sold Mason-Clark to Coventry for £4.25 Mil so they would be one of the few L1 clubs that could realistically afford him…

If hadn’t been for the points deductions it would be a foregone conclusion really. It does feel like gap between the Championship and Prem is getting bigger and I’d be amazed if either Luton or Burnley stay up. I agree I don’t think forest staying up is that bad, their prices will continue rocket and most ordinary people won't be able to watch them, luckily there’s a better value team across the river… It's likely you’ve got the three teams that went up going straight back down, and the potential champions have breached 115 rules. It’s the greatest league in the world, apparently.