Scunthorpe.

I think people are forgetting just how bad we were under Jolley before he left. No goal threat at all, route one hopeless hoofs. Did very well keeping us up but his ability to build a squad and get them playing a specific way was well short of what was needed.

Quoted from GollyGTFC

A 58 swear word abusive rant goes beyond what I could reasonably defend as being a error of judgement caused by momentary or even prolonged frustration. The truth is the guy showed his true colours. That's the real Michael Jolley, not the articulate "final third entries" modern football jargon bullsh!tter he pretended to be. The guy was and still is a nasty piece of work and you can count me out of rehabilitating the reputation he wrecked through his own actions. I would rather have Russell Slade back at Grimsby than him.

So you know him personally do you? Because the above statement has to come from someone who has spent a good amount of time in his company to say ‘true colours’, ‘still a nasty piece of work’, ‘bullish!tter he pretended to be’. Or the above statement is full of sh!t. As for rather having Russell slade back, Jesus Christ, that is another planet of thinking imo.

Was he on a football stats course and you spent a couple of long days with him finding out about his personality and all his thoughts on modern football?

Quoted from mariner91

I think people are forgetting just how bad we were under Jolley before he left. No goal threat at all, route one hopeless hoofs. Did very well keeping us up but his ability to build a squad and get them playing a specific way was well short of what was needed.

The idea that we were good under Jolley ever is baffling. He just about kept us up and the football throughout his reign was dire, truly the worst, it was anti-football.
He was a walking coaching manual and completely up his own bottom.
The most entertaining thing was that rant 😂

Quoted from Rodley Mariner

Maybe Jolley just acted poorly under a lot of pressure. The idea that couple of minutes can unquestioningly define his entire character is clearly nonsense. I don't think he'd be right for them though. Surely they want someone with some knowledge of non league. Tommy Widdrington off the top of my head?

I've seen 3 King's Lynn games this season and Widdrington has them playing some great football. It's pretty much the same team that got relegated which shows the gulf between the 2 leagues and it's a completely different style to the backs to wall one he went with last season.

If Widdrington wants to make a serious go of management he would be best placed avoiding Scunthorpe and I don't think he's that stupid. He fell out with Joey Barton at Bristol Rovers but that isn't hard I guess. He was responsible though for bringing Jonson Clarke-Harris in at Bristol Rovers who is a League One goal machine for Peterborough.

He's under contract at King's Lynn until the summer of 2024 though so I can't see Swann paying that kind of compensation anyway!

Strangely the best football we ever played under Jolley was in the 2-1 win against Notts to confirm we stayed up. At times that day we played them off the park. After that though it was pretty dire. He then spent an entire pre season playing 352 without signing a single player capable of playing as a wing back. Out of his depth. Good luck to him, certainly not as bad as Slade or Holloway but that’s like calling yourself the tallest dwarf.

It’s a pretty sad indictment of the Fenty era that Jolley was one of his better appointments. He’s one of very few to leave us in a better place than he found us, along with Slade Mk1 and Hurst Mk1. He did his job, he was appointed to keep us up when we were in free fall and looking dead certs for relegation despite being out of the drop zone. We were then ok without being exciting the following season, never in any trouble and in the final season, we started well but had badly fizzled out. Once sides dealt with Hanson, we were utterly toothless. He did sign some of the best players we had in that period in the League. Hendrie, Davis, Waterfall, Vernam, Hess, Hanson to name most of them. We had long periods of being absolutely dire under him though and, as I said, became completely one dimensional in the final months.

With the cup games against Chelsea and Palace we had two of the best days out we’ve had in the last 18 years though.

Quoted from mariner91

Strangely the best football we ever played under Jolley was in the 2-1 win against Notts to confirm we stayed up. At times that day we played them off the park. After that though it was pretty dire. He then spent an entire pre season playing 352 without signing a single player capable of playing as a wing back. Out of his depth. Good luck to him, certainly not as bad as Slade or Holloway but that’s like calling yourself the tallest dwarf.

Definitely an improvement on slade, but yeah after he kept us up the football was so so dire much of the time. Didn't someone who knows the players say he had been coaching them to mark the opposition even when we had the ball. The lack of movement up front was so bad I could believe it.

I believe the barrow board commented after they sacked him that in his interview he had claimed he would be playing attacking football, and that any fan could see that that was not true or something similar.

Quoted from mariner91

Strangely the best football we ever played under Jolley was in the 2-1 win against Notts to confirm we stayed up. At times that day we played them off the park. After that though it was pretty dire. He then spent an entire pre season playing 352 without signing a single player capable of playing as a wing back. Out of his depth. Good luck to him, certainly not as bad as Slade or Holloway but that’s like calling yourself the tallest dwarf.

Jolley always struck me as someone who did his research and, having performed a miracle in keeping us up, seemed to be unhealthily aware of the value Town fans of a certain age place on attractive football having grown up in the Buckley years.

His attempts at recreating Buckley brand sexy football were at least vaguely on track for 45 minutes, before one of the greatest Town capitulations I’ve witnessed saw us concede 4 to Forest Green in the second half of our opening game and lose 4-1. I think it was at that point he realised he had neither the budget nor talent to have us play anything other than pragmatic football and that’s what got served up for the rest of that season.

Having been burned by that, he appeared to go into full-on, anti-football, opposite mode, signing 8ft 6” James Hanson and putting all his chips on winning cheap free-kicks and throw-ins in the opposition half in order to stick the ball on his head.

And to be fair, that strategy worked for quite a bit longer than 45 minutes - we were 4th in the league after 6 games and remained in the play-offs after beating Exeter 3-1 away in that Ethan Robson inspired game in our 11th. Not a bad way to react to having our àrse handed to us by Chelsea.

That Exeter victory, on the 28th September, would be his last win in the Town dugout, before he resigned on 15th November. What’s often forgotten though is that we only played 4 games in that time - with two consecutive games called off (international duty and a wind-damaged Plymouth stadium), and his last match as manager was actually less than a month after that Exeter win on 22nd October - a 0-0 draw at Cambridge. We were 16th but only two points shy of 9th.

People seem to recall Holloway coming in over New Year and turning into us some sort of footballing machine, but I think a lot of that is caught up in the excitement of the time. Jolley’s PPG that season was 1.27; Holloway’s 1.5. Better yes, but not massively so.

Jolley did alright here. It wasn’t always exciting but on balance he was comfortably the best part of our 2016 / 2020 Hurst sandwich. And I can’t vouch for what type of bloke he was, but if anyone can tell me that he was more odious than Bignot, Slade or that cúnt Holloway then I will fall off my chair.

I get the tallest dwarf argument and all that, but I do think with the board and budget in place now we’d have seen something much more palatable from Jolley’s teams than he was able to produce under the conditions he had to work under.

I think it was a testament to just how desperate we were in March 2018 that we appointed an ex-banker whose only managerial experience was a relegation in Sweden. It was a very big risk that paid off: he turned the situation around just in time (with the help of a couple of dodgy penalties) before smashing Forest Green on the last day with a JJ Hooper hat-trick, leaving us believing that we'd stumbled across a managerial genius.

But, although he didn't have the resources to build on the survival, it became clear that he didn't have enough versatility to coach League 2 players successfully. Once everything began to unravel, his squeaky-clean persona was worn away.

I remember after he 'resigned' he went around liking every positive comment about him on Twitter whilst blocking anyone who said anything critical, even if they hadn't tagged him. A total PR merchant.

Didn't the Barrow chairman say that a player had told him to sack Jolley as he was going to take them down? That surely ended his EFL managerial career, and it would take a club in an even greater state of desperation to us in 2018 to take him on now...

Jolley is an odd one. It could’ve worked, to some extent it did, he kept us up but after that it just slowly became turgid to watch, with the odd exception.

Perhaps an arrogance on his part and an inability to recognise that a system he was playing wasn’t ever going to work? Perhaps he realised that the club was a mess and whatever he tried to do, it wouldn’t really work.

I personally wanted Jolley to be a success but even with a PPG ratio not too far behind others, it was clear it was gonna end in tears, which sadly, almost everything did under Fenty.

I’d imagine that if you say every manager down in the last 20 years they’d all say the same thing about the club and it’s leadership, with probably the exception of Runaway. I suspect Jolley won’t ever be a league manager again, particularly after his time at Barrow. He could’ve been forgiven for his time at town given that it’s very apparent the reputation the club had but now he’s had that experience too I’d imagine that’s him done.

In some respects I don’t think we can compare any of our managers since about 2000, they’ve all been unique, some truly awful, one successful and one nearly successful. They’ve all worked in one person though so perhaps that’s the common denominator? Unfortunately, everyone was seemingly taken in by that idiot Holloway so I guess in his short time people will say he was better than Jolley, Bignot etc but in truth they were all flipping useless.

As Poojah said though, as much as Jolley was a tad on the narcissistic side, there’s no way he was a more odious bloke than Bignot, Fenty, Holloway, Slade…