After the pick up in form I brought in a couple of players in the January window.
Both stars of the future I think and both for less than £600k, combined. Allen I knew about from my U19's role. I put both of them to work in the 1st team. Usually from the bench.
Our form became hit and miss though as you can see.
Not terrible, in fact we still had a pretty good run. At one point I think I had 1 league loss in about 20 games. But we started to drop points and fell off the pace a bit. At one point we were just outside the playoffs. Oddly enough our drop away happened around the same time that Danny Rose got injured for the season....
So we ended up 12th. Not what the board wanted but better than when we had started and something I was fairly happy about. Throughout my first season with Leeds I had the dreaded 'one bad performance away from the sack message' about four times. I also had the fans or fan favourites (ta Nigel Martyn) say they wanted me to have more time.
My job security fluctuated from secure, to precarious and all shades of worrying in between. By the end of the season I back on very insecure. I had a feeling I was going to be sacked after the playoffs and the manager merry go round started, or that maybe I'd get the start of next season but it wouldn't be a very forgiving one. Which left me with a bit of a choice. Did I want to stay and chance it or jump ship - hoping the season (ish) I'd done in the championship had enhanced rather than harmed my standing?
On one hand I was starting to build a team. I had my two new players and two new youth players coming in on a free at the end of the season. I had room in the wage budget for some more and some dead wood to clear that might bring a little bit of cash in.
On the other hand the players irritated me. The best I could hope for in a team talk was no reaction across the board. What I tended to get was players switching off or getting angry. Now I'm not grand master when it comes to team talks but I wasn't saying anything to them that was horribly wrong. They just didn't respect me or what I had to say. The way around this was to increase my rep or get rid of them. Increasing my rep meant doing better which the players didn't seem to care about, and getting rid of them involved a pretty extensive clean sweep.
Rose and Gosling occasionally seemed to dislike me and my talks but they were the heart of the team. I couldn't really get rid of them (though getting rid of Gosling would have please half the team who hated he was captain).
So I decided to leave. I didn't care about the club. They were going to be nothing but a stepping stone. Although I had a soft spot for the players I'd brought in I wasn't tied to a long term development of a club.
Lesson's learnt:
1) Love for the club matters - If you hate them or don't think you want to build with them then it's not the move for you. Battling relegation and failing with Eskilstuna City would have been more rewarding than being snubbed by Leeds.
2) Rep and Respect matter - If your rep is low and the players don't respect you...you're going to have a bad time. I was constantly fighting in team talks, and in team meetings, to combat morale issues. It was an uphill battle because ultimately most of them didn't care what I had to say unless it was something they already agreed with.
3) Personalities matter - They had plenty of clashes within the team which meant we became less effective. Gosling had an amazing season as captain but that didn't filter down because so many of the team struggled with him.
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