Now that the season is over we can take a look at that most unfortunate of creatures. A yo-yo club. This year’s SPL new arrivals Dunfermline are leaving us after just one season in the top flight. This isn’t the first and probably won’t be the last time it happens.
I can sympathise with Pars fans. It happened to St. Mirren in 2000-01, in a large part due to having to upgrade Love Street to a 10,000 seater which was required by the SPL at the time in their infinite wisdom. These days 6,000 seats does the job for them. It was four years before St. Mirren played in the SPL again – there is a reason why they call the First Division “Alcatraz”.
Dunfermline had been staring down the barrel of the gun for some time and had it not been for Hibs woeful season (barring the Scottish Cup), relegation would have been confirmed some time ago. Funny things happen when teams are facing the drop and one of the oddest is that they sack the manager. I’m a little bit old-school when it comes to this side of things but I tend to think the eleven men on the pitch are the ones who determine whether your team wins, loses or draws. Either that or Roberto Di Matteo is actually the world’s greatest manager.
So you can see where I’m going with this. Why does anyone think it’s a good idea to change the manager with a handful of games to go?
Fair play to Dunfermline though, at least they had a plan and brought in an experienced ex-SPL manager in the form of Jim Jefferies. Down south, Wolves made a managerial change which confounded everyone and the results which followed surprised no one.
So how does Jefferies stack up against the man he replaced Jim McIntyre, the man who built the Dunfermline team that won promotion to the SPL in the first place. Fortunately (for the purposes of this blog, not the good of the game – I’ll discuss that in the future) due to the structure of the SPL we can compare the precise fixtures Dunfermline played under Jefferies with those played under McIntyre. All in all he was in charge for their last eight games in the SPL: St. Mirren (H), Dundee United (A), Hearts (H), St. Mirren (A), Aberdeen (H), Inverness Caledonian Thistle (A), Hibernian (A), Kilmarnock (H).
So let’s look at how McIntyre did with those fixtures earlier in the season. Well as it turns out, not so bad. Two wins (Dundee United, Hibs) and four draws (St. Mirren, Inverness, Aberdeen and Kilmarnock) to give ten points and a goal difference of negative one.
Now under Jefferies, the Pars achieved their first home win of the season against an increasingly pathetic Aberdeen on the back of an 8 goal thriller of a draw at St. Mirren Park. However in the crunch game against Hibs, they got wiped out by four goals to nil (or three to nil if we had goal line technology or competent officials). Still given they had a mountain to climb when he took over surely relegation was always the more likely outcome?
Well, let’s look at the stats for the last eight games. One win (Aberdeen) and three draws (St. Mirren – twice, Inverness) to give six points and a goal difference of negative six.
Now the conclusion to draw here is not the Jefferies is a worse manager than McIntyre. Who is better requires a greater depth of analysis than this and perhaps next season in the first division will also help us form an opinion. The conclusion I draw is that Dunfermline have certainly gained nothing from the managerial change in the short term – this much is borne out by the fact they have been relegated. But further to that, they have got rid of the man who built them up and got them promoted from the first division and replaced him with a man whose last experience of the first division was in 1994.
Jefferies is an experienced manager and he was successful in the old Division One back then getting Falkirk promoted (one point ahead of Dunfermline interestingly enough) but he is used to managing SPL teams and a league where a top six finish is good enough for most. In the first division it’s first or nothing.
A small caveat I’d like to note at the end is that some may point to teams facing relegation having poorer form towards the end of a season for a variety of reasons thus making the comparison unfair. To them I say Wigan.
Always play to the whistle! 