third earl of jean":2fmazgb0 said:
I'm all for giving managers time subject to us not falling below an absolute minimum threshold, for me that would be not get relegated from league one. I would have in all likelihood been advocating sticking with Adams had we say got to 55 points and stayed up albeit disappointingly following the 7th place finish but the fact is he took us down, and after 3 up and down years of overall success his final year was a catastrophe. I'd be interested to know why it went so wrong, I suspect he bit off more than he could chew with the 'Head of Football' role and something went wrong with his focus on recruitment the final summer. In any case things had gone sufficiently wrong that it was the right decision to call time when we did.
That's a good summary. It was very definitely time for Adams to go - his relationship with Argyle fans and players was obviously irreparable and actually the parting of ways has gone well for both sides.
He himself would perhaps recognise that 4 years is a very good stint in modern management (in terms of games played, he's Argyle's longest serving manager for nearly half a century).
For that reason though, I think that using the fact that he took over and left us in League 2 is a pretty moronic framework for judging his work here.
Football isn't a linear progression towards some distant goal, it's about enjoying the games in the here and now. Every club suffers setbacks and every manager makes mistakes. Brian Clough took over and left Nottingham Forest in the second division, so does that mean he was a failure? Jurgen Klopp left Borussia Dortmund and now potentially Liverpool outside the Champions League places.
With Adams we got three consecutive seasons of winning (objectively) and exciting (my opinion, but I can't fathom how people see it otherwise) football. He made some monumental transfer errors in the summer of 2018 and obviously his final season was terrible, but most of his time here was good and his record before and since, with far more successful than unsuccessful seasons, prove what a great manager he is.