The Poolie Bunker

Since dropping down to this level who do you think has done the best job as manager after Challinor given results and style of play. I,ll plump for Skippy Limbrick who did enough to deserve a summer to bring his players in.

Limerick and Phillips both deserved extensions imo. Philips had a good win ratio, had us playing in the front foot, and the only bad game under him was the Gateshead match.
Based on win percentage, Fev should've probably been given the job although I don't think he was the man to take us forward.

I don't think he was the man to take us down either - but the next incumbent might just do that if Landon doesn't sort the current mess PDQ.

Agree regarding Phillips & Limbrick.
We were going down until Phillips arrived,somehow got us to 63 points,when half the time we couldn’t even fill the subs bench & even then,half time it was of youth team players.

I thought Phillips was an awful manager, piss poor decision making and awful football. I thought Limbrick was hard done by, he deserved a longer shot at the job. John Askey for me was the best of the bunch, went a bit shit for him in the end though.

Askey was a beaten man and really needed to get away for his health and sanity imo.
I do agree he was a good manager and with a bit of backing would have done well for us.

The Managers column on the In The Mad Crowd site gives the factual answer (https://www.inthemadcrowd.co.uk/UI/Managers.aspx) - not that that has a lot of bearing on some people's opinions

KP has easily the best % wins (41%) and % points per game (51%) of all the managers since Challinor, followed by Featherstone, then Graeme Lee, then Limbrick then Askey. Hartley has far and away the worst record!

Agree that KP made the best of a bad hand given how few players he had to choose from. Askey's football was probably the easiest on the eye when you remember how well his team started the battle to stay in League 2 and began that first season back in the NL - pity it fell away both times.

Bizarrely, the record book will always show that Clark won 33% of his 9 games, which doesn't look too bad till you take into account that he didn't pick up a single point from the other 6.

Is that Lee's total games or league only Mr H? I thought he did well in the cup comps but was poor for League results especially after we were knocked out of all the cups?
Probably any of those named with decent backing would have been a success.

Total for all competitive matches - I used the same for all the managers. You're right, League 2 only pulls Lee down quite a bit. On the other hand, leaving out Feath's cup fiascos would push his win % up

After Challinor, the managers job has been a bleak desert of managerial talent.
The very idea of some folk getting misty eyed over Featherstone shows a lack of ambition…forget picking the best of the failures…move on and spend some money on a proven achiever, because without a decent proper manager, we’re pissing in the wind.

do not think people want him back. its more of how we have dropped since he left. gone from a second hand lada riva that was not too much trouble to a couple of allegro,s where you were lucky to get one out of the garage to use.

That's about the size of it. The thread is called 'Best of the Rest' not 'Who else was great apart from Challinor?'

It was more of a catalogue of the incapable, as the records suggest.

What the record suggests is that Pools have had far too many managers in the last 5 years and have an unhappy knack of making changes for the worse. Lee was replaced by Paul Hartley... Phillips by Darren Sarll... Featherstone by Lee Clark

You have to go a long way back to find 3 shittier Pools managers than Hartley, Sarll and Clark. I'd have them right down there with the likes of Mike Docherty and Dave Jones.

Let's hope we don't find we've replaced Clark with worse!!

Oh I don’t see any reason whatsoever why this farce shouldn’t carry on ….. regardless of common sense screaming for the return of sanity in the club.

We know the plot already as we've seen it over and over again. We'll get someone in to settle the ship (the appointment will be an underwhelming but surprising candidate as usual). They'll get a new manager bounce which will turn into a 35% to 40% win rate after a few games (and a new half decent midfielder coming in on loan - most likely with dreadlocks) - athough we will also get absolutely stuffed at least once possibly twice. Probably on a Tuesday evening. They won't have seen it coming.

We'll finish around 11th and the new manager will be given the boot at the end of the season for underperforming and it'll be rinse and repeat for 2027/2028. UTP.

Have Pools ever been on the right side of a new manager bounce?

No

Almost right- we'll finish 8th - 7 points outside the playoffs
Flirt with the playoffs, but shit the bed as usual when the vague opportunity to get into them arises

11th or 8th

surely the worst was curle,s first game where we shipped 5 goals to stockport at the vic. how many had a bit of a smile on there face when they were proved to be correct by half time of his first game.