Why I Think Warnock Should Walk – Part 1

From the minute I heard the starting line up to face Watford I was worried. A change to a 3-5-2 formation from out of nowhere seemed like to actions of a manager who had one last chance to save his job. Neil Warnock wasn’t in any danger of facing the sack and still isn’t. However, sixteen games in to the new season the man with a track record of getting teams out of the Championship has been found wanting.

Warnock was brought in to get a side that was sitting just outside the Play Offs the promotion that Leeds fans had been waiting eight years for. Instead of giving the side the final push in to the Play Offs, Warnock changed the playing style to one that didn’t suit the players at his disposal and saw Leeds plummet like a stone to finish fourteenth. He promised that we would never see a Leeds side play as poorly again.

This season though has seen Leeds fail to put together a string of unconvincing performances, aside from the Capital One Cup heroics against Everton. The defeat to Watford left Leeds without a win in six games. Although there was some improvement from Leeds’ performances against Birmingham and Burnley, once again Leeds were found wanting against a superior Watford side.

I have been vocal in my disapproval of Neil Warnock. While his C.V. shows that he has the ability to get teams to the Promised Land, I thought that he and Leeds United would be a bad combination. I have a lot of respect for managers like Ian Holloway.  Holloway, like Warnock, used to be a proponent of long ball football. Unlike Warnock though, Holloway took some time away from management to learn about other styles of football which led to much better passing and some attacking and attractive football. Warnock has instead to adopt the same style of football at each club he has been to.

The issue with that is that without the investment that may have been promised to him in February he has been unable to bring in the personnel to implement his favoured tactics. But surely someone with his experience must be able to make a situation like Leeds’ work for them. Instead, he has continued with a playing style that isn’t working and doing very little about it.

Many will argue that he hasn’t received the investment that Ken Bates probably sold the job to him with making his task much more difficult. Yet after a busy summer in which he signed more players than he sold, we were still being told that the squad was threadbare. Personally I think that Warnock is using the lack of investment as a crutch for the team’s poor performance. Nine of the starting line-up against Watford were players that Warnock had brought in during the summer. He can have no excuses having made so many changes. If the players he has brought in are not good enough then why sign them in the first place?

I would rather have seen him spend what money he was given on fewer players but of higher quality. Instead, Warnock has adopted a quantity not quality policy having signed four players from recently relegated Portsmouth. I questioned to ambition that we were showing in signing a number of players for reduced fees from a club that couldn’t keep themselves in the division that we were trying to escape from but in the opposite direction.

I understand a number of players were sold to bring in more money for wages and transfer fees, but I couldn’t understand selling someone like Billy Paynter, who appreciate had struggled during his time at Leeds, but bringing in 34 year old Andy Gray, a man who looked set to join League 2 Bradford City until Warnock swooped in. Having seen Gray in action this season, it’s hard to justify getting rid of someone who offers more.

Early in the season Warnock also said that Leeds still needed a couple of wingers. Despite not having the money to bring any in, at least permanently, it seemed odd that Ramon Nunez and Robbie Rogers were completely disregarded while central midfielders Michael Tonge and Paul Green have played out wide. Both Rogers and Nunez could have offered an alternative when Warnock’s tactics have failed time and time again.

While I can see that there is money to be saved in sending players like Rogers out on loan, there can’t be that much of a saving to be made by sending Poleon and Thompson out on loan. Poleon looks to have the pace and trickery to cause defenders problems and seemed a good player to have around whilst McCormack and Somma are out injured. Instead they have both headed to Bury where both have impressed with Poleon getting a number of goals in the process.

So far Warnock’s transfer policy has had a detrimental effect on the team, taking over a team that had the potential to go up and turning them in to a lower mid-table side that plays a very negative style of football. In selling off a number of Grayson’s team and replacing them with his own players, Warnock can look no further than himself for Leeds’ poor start to the season.

In part two I will look at how Leeds’ recent form has proven Warnock’s inability to change a game when we have been struggling which, unfortunately, has been far too often.