Here’s a stream of consciousness when your dog wakes you up at 5 am. So - psychobabble alert!
Two conflicting emotions for me.
One- the more irrelevant but genuine nonetheless- feel a bit for the guy. He wants to succeed with this club, club have always told him he won’t get funding this window to extent he knows he’ll need to make his game plan a success, but he can’t change his objectives/ambitions, so he thinks self-defence and explain to the media- “Look, I’m not a bad coach, but I can’t do what I want to do with the resources I’ve got.” The consequences of this must have been staring him in the face- undermining the squad, undermining/slagging off the board- but probably self belief and an inability to admit he’s wrong/ change his ambition from “coach ManCity” to “coach Bournemouth“ prevented him from doing what he should’ve done pre-season, and walked away. Staying in a job where basically (a) you know you’re not going to get what you want/think you need to make a success, but (b) you can’t contemplate quitting because it’ll be like acknowledging you’re a failure, is something most of us can understand even identify with.
The more relevant emotion though, absolutely right that he was removed. He set himself up as bigger than the club- if they’re not prepared to change their rules to suit my ambitions then I’ll keep bigging myself up to anyone who asks even if it means slagging off the squad and the board. The fact he wasn’t able or even prepared (mentally or technically) to make the most of the tools he’s got speaks volumes to me, and at the end of the day he’s paid an awful lot of money to do this job- he should have had the honesty to walk away before getting to the stage of throwing his toys out of the pram. And throwing the club under a bus at the same time. So ultimately the stronger and more relevant emotion is sorry Scott but you’ve behaved badly, you should have gone earlier. Seems like the club gave him time to grow up and coach our players effectively, but he didn’t want to. So yes- sorry but good riddance.
Now let’s get someone who’s prepared to love us- it’s not a big ask really!