Originally Posted by
the other bob wilson
It’s often said these days that the most important part of a football manager’s job is “man management” - knowing which players benefit from the carrot treatment and which ones need the stick. I’d say it’s a truism that current thinking is that the majority of younger players benefit more from the carrot than the stick, but, of course, there will be some younger players for which that is not true.
On the subject of Isaak Davies, I can remember Steve Morison saying after an under 23 match where he’d scored twice that he should have had a hat trick. This surprised me a little at the time, but I took it to be an attempt to keep a teenage player’s feet on the ground after he had done well in a game. Why it surprised me is that it struck me more as the sort of thing you’d say to someone in a one to one situation and that’s the thing that I don’t think has been concentrated on enough here - what happened was not just stick, it was a stick wielded in public for tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands of Cardiff fans to hear.
As I mentioned a few days ago, I can only think of Dave Jones’ public criticism of Adam Matthews to compare to it, but this was worse because Davies was a sub who was subbed, something which, more often than not, is humiliating for the player concerned.
In my job as a Trade Mark Examiner, there would be weekly meetings where about twenty members of staff would discuss accepted Trade Mark cases about to be published in a journal. Most of the cases discussed were judgement calls where sometimes senior officers decided someone like me had maybe gone the wrong side of the line in allowing it. On very rare occasions, someone would make a howler of a decision which was completely wrong, but, even then, there was no talk of the type you heard from Morison about Davies. Thankfully, I never made such a mistake, but it was still an uncomfortable experience to be told that I probably shouldn’t have allowed a particular mark to go ahead - especially when I happened to be attending the meeting where it was discussed.
Of course, all of this is as nothing compared to what Isaak Davies experienced after the Bournemouth match - the more I think about it, the worse what Morison did gets and, having been quite in favour of him getting the job on a longer basis based on his work over the past three months, I now find myself starting to believe we should look elsewhere.
On Sunday, I thought Isaak was one of a few City players who made wrong decisions when there were half chances to get a winning goal, but, honestly, is it any wonder after what happened to him in the previous game? Can anyone on here say with hand on heart that they would have benefited from being hung out to dry in public like Isaak was? Speaking for myself, it would have set me back an awful lot if I was trying to make it in the game and my manager had done what Morison did.
Reply With Quote