Nesting Place
Is Mark Robins finally a Stoke manager with staying power?
The Stoke support could be forgiven for a modicum of appointment fatigue, given managers are to us what drummers were to Spinal Tap. Yet the arrival of Mark Robins does seem to have restored at least a smidge of the goodwill squandered by the near total mismanagement of football affairs over the last 6-10 years or so. You possibly have to go back as far as the arrival of (eek) Brian Little in 1998 to find an appointment as positively received by what seems like something close to a majority of Stokies.
More than one supporter has commented that Robins ‘feels like a Stoke manager’. I’m not entirely sure I know what that means, but if I had to guess it would be due to his reputation as a level-headed, experienced manager who built a dynasty at a provincial club, in the tradition of the greatest Stoke bosses. It’s hard to overstate the depth of bond Robins established with the Sky Blues, even if Henry Winter, in his blog on the manager’s Coventry exit, has a characteristically good go at doing so:
‘He brought a city together, rallying around the club of Jimmy Hill again. Kids took off their red Manchester United and Liverpool shirts and donned Sky Blue again. Robins restored pride in the shirt. Coventry were respected again, even envied.’
Certainly the scale of the job Robins did is remarkable. He arrived at Coventry’s lowest ebb - a club ‘dragged through a hedge fund backwards’ and sliding towards oblivion under the neglectful and at times spiteful ownership of Sisu.
Our paths intersected memorably of course, just as he was beginning to bring the good times back and our own golden age was ending. As a player, Robins was famously credited with saving Alex Ferguson’s job with an FA Cup third round winner; 18 years later, at the same stage of the same competition, his team’s scalp of Mark Hughes’ Potters hammered the final nail into the coffin of his former Old Trafford team mate’s Stoke career.
From there, the Sky Blues soared under Robins, an old-school manager with his fingerprints on most aspects of the club. Two promotions followed in the space of three years. Back in the Championship, with one of the smallest budgets and wage bills in the division, he took them to within a penalty kick of the Premier League, while an offside by the width of a nostril hair was all that kept them from a first FA Cup final since 1987. It wouldn’t be a shock to see him immortalised there one day, either in the form of a statue or a stand bearing his name.
A good fit?
Those are the headlines, but what makes him the right man for Stoke City?
Perhaps most encouraging is the calm he brought to a club engulfed by chaos - nobody is saying Stoke are in the mess Coventry were, but the lack of a clear direction since relegation has left us constantly having to start again from scratch. Robins is no stranger to reconstruction, as Coventry fan Tom Furnival-Adams details in a fine eulogy in the latest edition of When Saturday Comes:
‘Robins created a semi-permanent rebuilding job for himself, as each season brought new challenges…he was faced with a seemingly endless succession of handicaps, from player sales to ongoing financial restrictions.’
Recruitment and player development were big successes of the Robins era at Coventry, with many a shrewd bargain identified and nurtured on his watch. In particular, they had a knack for finding goalscorers - Marc McNulty and Matt Godden in the lower leagues, and the now £100m-rated Viktor Gyökeres in the Championship (a signing Robins personally pushed for). Elsewhere, you’d struggle to find a better midfielder in the division than Gustavo Hamer, signed for £1.35 million from the Eredivisie and later sold for around 18 times that fee, while Haji Wright, Callum O’Hare and Jake Bidwell are likewise top Championship players.
Tactical flexibility was another feature of the Robins’ Coventry tenure; they recruited for a 4-3-3 in League One, but reached the Championship Play-Off final using a 3-2-4-1 before responding to a slow start the following year with a successful switch to 4-2-3-1. That gives some hope that he might find a playing style that suits the players he’ll inherit here, a problem that’s confounded most of the managers ands head coaches employed since relegation. That he generally managed to strike the right balance between defensive discipline and high-tempo, front-football football is another positive.
The Viveash Divorce
Nothing lasts forever, and while Robins’ 7.5-year stint in the West Midlands is a far longer one than your average modern manager/head coach shelf life, inevitably the pressures of constant rebuilding, as the club’s star players moved on, took their toll.
As has been well-documented, the apparent breakdown in the working relationship between Robins and his Assistant Adi Viveash seems to have hastened the end. Owner Doug King viewed the duo as a Clough/Taylor-type package deal, with former Chelsea coach Viveash credited with player development and leading training - “the man who paints the pictures”, in Robins’ own words.
Yet the two men by their own admission are very different characters, and clearly things became fractious, deteriorating further when Viveash, Lindsey Parsons-style, gave a reportedly unauthorised, self-aggrandising interview to the local press that infuriated Robins. The tension oozes from every part of that Coventry Telegraph piece, almost making you wonder how they ever worked together at all. Robins reportedly told King at the end of the season that he could no longer work with Viveash; King came to believe Robins couldn’t work without him. The result was that heartbreaking parting in November.
Can Robins succeed without “the man that paints the pictures”? The Sky Blues started the season poorly, but the underlying stats were nevertheless strong and suggested a turnaround might be in the offing. Hopefully, much like Clough came to regard the job he did at Forest post-Taylor as his finest work (four trophies, a cup final and a European semi-final delivered in financially turbulent times), Robins will be relishing the opportunity to prove himself without Viveash, and we’re certainly providing him with a strong opportunity thanks to the appointment of two highly respected coaches to work under him.
It’s not you, it’s us
If there is cause for concern, you could argue it comes from our side, and the mess at the top of the club, which has helped turned more than one seemingly sensible dugout dweller into Colonel Kurtz. We now have a manager again, after two Head Coach appointments. What’s in a name? On the surface, it’s another 180-degree change of direction; and the continual cycle of reactionary appointments of the polar opposite of the last bloke is in large part what’s put us in this position. Moreover, Robins was reportedly resistant to King’s desire to change the management structure to one similar to ours in the wake of Viveash’s departure - how he rubs along with Jon Walters will be interesting to watch.
Long-term, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the Sporting Director/Head Coach model is the best thing for us, in terms of future-proofing and continuity - but it requires someone in the SD role who knows what they’re doing, and evidence that we have that person currently in post is, er, scarce, to put it politely.
Perhaps that lack of experience in key roles (and the youthful playing staff) is why the club have moved to appoint Robins - a grown-up in the room who can lay some much-needed foundations in the short-term. He’ll surely have noted, after the footballing porridge that was the Plymouth game, that we’re one-paced and lacking ideas going forward, and can take that as a starting point for improvement.
If it is indeed true, as some Coventry fans have posited, that Robins does his best work amid turmoil, he’s certainly come to the right place.