ClaphamFox

It won’t be Martin, but I just have a feeling we may already have an agreement with another manager to take over if we stay up.

I suspect he will move on in the summer irrespective of whether he keeps us up or not, but especially if we survive.

Rowett has a reasonable track record of stemming the bleeding at clubs in crisis by focusing on the basics—being compact and disciplined out of possession, filling gaps and reducing exposure in transition. This is what we need. Whether our squad of players buys into it or not remains to be seen, but his skill set is exactly what we need right now.

If a squad is so toxic that no manager can get a tune out of them, you need to weed out the bad characters during the transfer windows and replace them with better ones. And if the weak culture at the club is the root cause of player apathy, then of course you need to change the culture too. The root cause of our problems is the weak culture that has set in under Top, which has filtered down to the playing squad. Our transfer policy has exacerbated and reinforced this weakness by packing the squad with overpaid journeymen. This cannot be changed overnight. If KP remain in charge, it will have to come from the CEO and technical director, so we'd better pray we somehow recruit well for those roles. If we were a functional and well-run club, the manager could just focus on training, picking the team, choosing tactics and a bit of man management—everything else would be in place. As it is, we need a manager who can somehow establish a strong culture within the squad despite the deep-rooted ineptitude all around him. That's a very tough job, but not necessarily impossible. If Rowett can't achieve it, we will go down. There will be no other way to prevent it.

Professional footballers may as well be children. If they've been crap all season, they're not going to spontaneously sort it out for themselves. The only way this can be changed is by bringing in a new manager with different ideas. That's just the reality of the situation.

Of the realistic candidates, who would you have chosen instead?

When viewed in the context of where we were a few years ago, obviously not. As recently as last summer I would have been depressed as hell by this appointment. When viewed in the context of where we are right now, I'm happy because I think Rowett offers us the most plausible route to survival—which is our sole priority for this season. We've travelled a long way in the wrong direction over the past few years. Surviving this season might put a floor under our downward spiral and enable us to begin, slowly, to rebuild.

And would they all want to sign up for an interim gig—especially if some of them are currently employed on long-term contracts elsewhere?

Yet Smith still managed to significantly improve our form and kept us in contention to survive until the last day. Had Smith come in a few games earlier, he'd have very likely have kept us up. If Rowett starts before Saturday, he'll have 14 games—six more than Smith did.

If you wanted to do that, wouldn’t it be better to choose somebody that most people would have heard of as your fake rejected candidate? Throwing Thelin’s name into the mix doesn’t do anything other than make people vaguely wonder who the hell he is. I’m not going to argue with the main point about our club being a absolute joke at the moment (how could I?), but this business of interpreting every single crap rumour as evidence of some devious plot by the owners seems a little unhinged.

What would be the purpose of throwing Thelin’s name into the rumour mill while instructing the journalist to make it clear Rowett has got the job? Who benefits and why?

He never said it was a done deal, just that talks were ‘advanced’.

Rowett was a massive fan of Ben Nelson when he was on loan at Oxford last season, too.

100%.

It's genuinely surprising to see how many of our fans do not understand or accept that Khun Vichai's tragic death changed everything with regards to KP's fitness to run our club. Yes, we continued to be relatively successful for a few years afterwards, but that was because the structure and culture that Vichai established took a while to fall apart. This is normal: a ship holed below the waterline does not sink immediately. It took a while for Top's weakness and ineptitude to dismantle everything his father had built, but it was always going to happen eventually. And now it has. Yes, agree with this. No matter how bad things are, the idea that getting relegated to League One will improve things is desperately naive. I like Jake and respect his passion as a fan, but I think his take on this is daft.

Rowett rarely plays 4-4-2.

His most played formation is 4-2-3-1, followed by 4-3-3. The main difference between him and Cifuentes is that Rowett places heavy emphasis on a compact, organised defence rather than playiing out from the back and inverting full backs, etc. But the formation itself will be what the team is used to.

Yep. If somebody with zero experience as a manager can’t get a tune out of them, what chance has an experienced manager with a track record of quickly improving clubs in the position we’re in now?

We have enough individual talent in the team to score goals in most games we play (we’ve scored a lot more than most teams around us). Our glaring weakness has been our lack of defensive structure, which has turned us into a mentally fragile team when put under any kind of pressure. Rowett’s speciality is defensive structure and organisation. If he manages to instil some of that, the team’s confidence will improve and we’ll start winning games. This appointment will give us a fighting chance of staying up. And in the circumstances that’s about as much as we could realistically hoped for.

This is almost certainly what’s happened. But who was it? Skubala?!

I live in Oxford and the fans here still rate him. The view locally is that he was sacked because he stood up to the owners.

Because they were clearly targeting somebody else who ultimately turned us down.

"Hey Sean, are you interested in being our new manager?" "Well I kind of fancied a break after Forest. What kind of package are we looking at?" "How much can you afford to pay us?"

If you read the story on Football Insider, it's clear they haven't actually spoken to anybody at the club. They've just spoken to somebody else in football who has told them that it would be a major coup for us to get Dyche, but that Dyche probably wouldn't fancy it. That's how Football Insider works—they speak to somebody unconnected with a club who offers an opinion on something they know nothing about, then presents the story as if they've got it from a credible source.

There's a nice symmetry between RVN's situation towards the end of last season and King's now. Then, RVN was saying every week that he wanted to lead the rebuild and was seeking reassurances to that effect, but the club was refusing to even speak to him about it. It was obvious they had no intention of keeping him on, but nobody could be bothered to tell him. Now, Andy King is saying every week that he’s just an interim and doesn’t even want the job full-time, but again the club is remaining silent. It’s obvious they want him to continue, but nobody can be bothered to tell him. Two managers, both really struggling with a toxic squad. One wants the job but isn’t wanted by the club. The other doesn’t want the job but is wanted by the club. How does the club handle both situations? By refusing to speak to them and hoping the whole thing somehow blows over.