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I agree with you. It's just a massive shame he never won promotion as I reckon we'd have had our best chance at staying there with him. He shoulders some of that blame.Originally Posted by J R Hartley
I've heard Jones say that they signed the likes of Hasselbaink and Fowler as a way of raising the profile of the club. Whether that happened or not, I have no idea, but to fans they were, by and large, a waste of wages.
For me, Jones was a good manager. He established us as a team with real aspirations to go up. He was pivotal in our progress.
If you read any of my posts you'd spot that I'd love a bit of entertainment from our current side. However, if there is a choice, particularly at the crucial end of the season in a promotion race, would you rather entertainment and miss out or the turgid stuff we sometimes saw from both Malky and Warnock's promotion winners and get promotion, you'd take promotion every time.
Agreed about the names Jones had at the time, though. Me and a mate were trying to remember our squads from some seasons around that time and we remembered far more about Jones' players than anyone else.
I'd go further and say he helped create a side that should have been promoted.
Apparently he signed Kevin Campbell for his dressing room prescence
He certainly wasn't signed for his presence on the pitch
We were much better on the eye under Jones.
If people want to blame bulut for the current state of affairs then Jones must be blamed for failing to get us promoted
He definitely had the tools
Wasn't it Steven Thompson who used to play his guitar in the dressing room?
Luton relegating us in 82
Of our Wembley appearances
I thought Blackpool deserved to win so the Liverpool league cup final hurts the most because we won that final twice in my book when Kenny Miller missed the sitter and 2 up in the pens.
I could have lived off that win forever.
Blackpool by a distance. Biggest sliding doors moment for me as a city fan. Came up tonight (again) between work colleagues in the pub.
Stoke, yes, that smarted fairplay. That car crash of a run-in with the Preston six-niller was exasperating at the time.
Portsmouth cup final but only because of the damp squib performance on the day, the journey to Wembley was tremendous.
Weirdly the Liverpool cup final almost doesn’t register as a defeat in my memory, massive moral victory and a game I think back on fondly despite the result - not in the same ballpark as the others for me.
The FA cup was winnable, the manager bottled it with his selection.
Stoke.
The only squad we've had that was capable of staying up if he could have got us promoted.
Blackpool
big gap
Romania
big gap
Ipswich/last game at Ninian Park.
Exactly. Builds a team that can aspire to promotion; gets pilloried for not getting us there.
Best manager in my lifetime. And I include the glorious Eddie May and his amazing 1993 team in that. We had the most exciting, attacking team under Jones. He brought in castaways and nobodies, and turned them into legends. Chopra. Jay. McNaughton. Whitts. Koumas. Scimeca. There will be loads more. He knew what he was doing and we were great to watch. That, in hindsight, was a higher watermark than either of our promoted sides.
I enjoyed Jones' laissez-faire attitude to the press and even the fans. He was trying to do a job. And I think he did it very well. We all think we could manage a squad of professional footballers, but I very much doubt we could. Warnock is known as a great man-manager, but is he? He surrounds himself with a team of hopefuls and complains a lot. You can only be "inspiring" for so long. Dave Jones had to manage Chopra and Bothroyd. At their megalomaniac worst. I think he did a great job. He and that team had they stayed together could have at least formed some kind of WBA/Norwich legacy. With Tan's money maybe we would have become and stayed an EPL team. We lost a Cup Final, we lost a Playoff final. But at least we got to them. If you were to make a highlight video of City over the last 40 years, Dave Jones' teams would dominate.
Warnock got us promoted in a very short space of time
There is absolutely no doubt that Warnock is a great man manager and motivator
Dave Jones had plenty of wonga behind him and was paid well but failed to get us up
We had by our standards a good side but under Jones we failed to deliver
It’s all to do with expectations for me. I looked at how we’d defended to allow Leicester back into the tie and how Blackpool had gone to Forest and scored four in twenty odd minutes and concluded they were likely to beat us. Once I had no great expectations of us winning, the eventual outcome didn’t hurt as much.
On the other hand, I thought the tie was as good as over when we won at Stoke as I remembered how we’d beaten them comfortably in the regular season game at Ninian Park. With the first Stoke goal coming so close to the final whistle, it was a real body blow to concede then, not helped by the premature tannoy announcement celebrating our win - once Stoke were level there was an inevitability about the whole thing, yet a minute or two earlier, I was thinking nothing could stop us, so it has to be that game for me.
The other candidate is the Hamburg Semi Final in 1968, but I was too young to fully get the enormity of the situation that night, so it was just about the only time when my Dad took me to watch City lose when he was more upset at the final whistle than me.
Blackpool was by far the worst for me with City.
It reminded me of Wales v Romania.
Both occasions left me miserable as fcuk for ages.
Blackpool was probably harder because I wasn’t amongst people who understood.
That being said, My Wife did understand and was gutted for me.
She made me go straight out after…sadly it was to a bar/restaurant that had orange lampshades throughout the place.
I really felt deeply sad.
My late mother’s late uncle (whom I met several times in my youth) was devastated to watch us lose to Sheffield United in the 1925 FA Cup Final. In his old age, knowing I follow the City, he told me this repeatedly.
Very sadly, he couldn’t afford to go to London for the 1927 victory versus Arsenal!! Something he forever regretted.
Apart from his last season did Dave Jones have plenty of wonga behind him?
I seem to recall him having to wheel and deal a lot and we never had the biggest of squads apart from his last season.
Finding players like Johnson, Loovens,Chopra and selling them on for big profit to keep the club afloat. Or getting players like Whitts, Bothroyd, McCormack, Burke for chump change and turning them into some of the best players in the championship.
Malky was given a much bigger war chest to get us promoted in 2013 and I’m sure if Jones had been given 20m to spend like Warnock had in 2019 we wouldn’t have seen it blown on the likes of Bacuna, Flint and Marlon ****ing Pack.
This is in no way to distract from what you say, but I believe that Peter Ridsdale was quite influential at the time as well. He was responsible for bringing in Loovens, while Jones at the time didn't rate him. He was mainly responsible for the idea of not paying much in transfer fees but paying big wages, so while it would appear we were selling to keep the club afloat, I think most of those transfer fees were going into the kitty for wages. There's no way we would have paid big wages on the crowds we were getting. While I can't say I like Ridsdale at all, he knew far more about football than those who have followed him.
2009/10 was the first season in a while where we spent more on transfer fees than we made, mainly due to buying back Chopra.
I've always felt it a little unfair that Malky never got the recognition for his first season in charge. He inherited a decimated squad, virtually bereft of attacking options and, without that much to spend, got them into the playoffs and a league cup final. If memory serves correctly, fans chanted his name back then much more than they ever did for Jones and appreciated a side that showed a bit of back bone when things got tough. The new owners gave Malky 3 years to win promotion, but after his first season, decided to chop that down to 2 and gave him some money. I completely agree that I wouldn't have trusted Warnock with that, but it's one thing to have some money to spend, another to bring in the right players. Until we reached the PL, I think both Malky and Jones had similar records of success when it came to spending money, something Jones had in his last few seasons. Malky has since been vilified over signing Cornelius, but there are other PL managers who have spent far more on duds than that. Solskjaer probably wasted more.
Transfers aren't just a managerial decision (apart from Warnock, probably). It highlights how much of a basket case the club has been over the last decade or so.
I know Ridsdale had contacts In the game but transfers were much more of a managerial decision in the era Jones managed in. I doubt we had a recruitment department in those days.
I’d argue the big wage signings of Fowler and JFH etc were much more likely to be Ridsdales signings than Jones and I’d certainly credit Jones with getting the best out of waifs and strays, none more so than Jay Bothroyd.
As for fans singing the managers name i don’t think Jones would lose any sleep over not being as popular as Malky or Warnock. In fact im not sure cheering more for effort and steel over attacking style is something to be beat a manger with not unless your sludge and stick in the lower divisions of the 80s
Jones didn’t need to fist pump after games or kiss the badge to hoodwink the fans.that he was one of them. He didn’t go on MOTD putting himself out there for the Everton job. I don’t recall him taking all the credit when things were going well either. He didn’t need to feed his own ego.
You make a good point about getting the best out of waifs and strays, as you put it. Have a listen to a TWS podcast with Dave Jones. He talks about his time at Cardiff and it's probably the most in depth I've ever heard him talk about Cardiff. If I remember correctly, he didn't call them waifs and strays, but gamblers and addicts as that's all he could get to come to the club!!
He gave those players a lot of freedom to do what they wanted. Generally it worked but that freedom came at a cost. Reports of players drinking before that Boro game when we had automatic promotion in our grasp. But, in general, he appeared to be a good man manager and got the best out of some players who had maybe underperformed elsewhere.
His biggest fault was his tactical inflexibility. Players said he never really changed things depending on how the opposition would play. His thought was that the opposition should be more worried about us. I remember Craig Bellamy's first City game - home to Doncaster. It was garbage for half an hour and we struggled. Chopra went off injured, we didn't have another forward on the bench so Chris Burke came on and we went to a 4-5-1, matching them in midfield. We won 4-0. There were often calls for us to match up in the centre of midfield as we would often be overrun there. He did so and we played well. A couple of games later we went back to 4-4-2 and lost a few.
History seems to have painted Jones as a manager where every game was free flowing football. Sometimes we played some really good stuff, the likes of which we haven't seen since. It's also true that we were really shite at times under him as well. Some of my favourite City memories happened during his tenure. Some of my worst City memories did as well.
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