Woodsy

Quoted from sam gy

The guy is a Grimsby Town legend. Simple as that.

Better gloss over his management abilities then eh?

Quoted from ginnywings

This weekends opponents benefitted greatly from Neil Woods in his time there after he left us. They brought through quite a few under his guidance and he seems to be repeating the job here.

I was surprised how well we did on Tuesday night considering the amount of young inexperienced players we had on the pitch. They looked very fluent at times and it bodes well, so yeah, a big thumbs up for him and his staff.

Rico Henry at Brentford is one of the players that Neil Woods has nurtured. My favourite Bees player too.

Quoted from Ipswin

Better gloss over his management abilities then eh?

8 years as a player, and a combined 10 years as youth team manager versus about 18 months as a manager. I know what i'd prefer to focus on when assessing his contribution to our club.

Yep, we were crap when he was manager, but it's pretty much a miracle that we even took it to the final game of the season before we were relegated given the bunch of drunk up arseholes he inherited.

Let's hope that Neil is passing on all he knows to an understudy?

Quoted from sam gy

8 years as a player, and a combined 10 years as youth team manager versus about 18 months as a manager. I know what i'd prefer to focus on when assessing his contribution to our club.

Yep, we were crap when he was manager, but it's pretty much a miracle that we even took it to the final game of the season before we were relegated given the bunch of drunk up arseholes he inherited.

That is a bit rose tinted Sam. Yes, he inherited crap and his only mistake that season was taking the job. Next season though, with one of the biggest budgets in the Conference he had no idea how to put together a team that could get promotion and was conned by other clubs into buying more crap.

However I rate him very highly as a developer of players and the club owes him a great debt for keeping the youth system producing at the level we have.

Oh yeah, not for one second defending his reign as manager - it was obviously a misstep in his career.

Then again, during Hurst and Scott’s first full season in charge we finished 11th, exactly the same as the season before.

Did he have one of the biggest budgets in the Conference at the time? We assume so, but as Hurst will tell you, we never had a top budget.

I'm willing to defend Woods a bit on this. He can't delete the record that's on his name — record amount of games without a win; relegation out of the league — but he must have known what he was taking on, or walking into, and to manage the likes of Conlon, Proudlock and Linwood must have taken balls.

And let's not forget he almost turned it around. He got the team fighting at the very end, just when we looked doomed with about 8 games to go. We took it to the last day.

We may not remember the likes of Kempson, Ridley and Watt fondly, but Woods also got the very best out of Peter Bore; he signed Alan Connell and there were those big wins against Mansfield (7-2) and Histon (6-1) that don't suggest flukes.

I'm not professing he's even a good manager, but I think he probably deserves a little more credit than what he gets considering everything conveniently falls under the blanket of relegation. As we've seen with many other teams that drop into non-league, they can keep dropping.

In relegation, Woods cleared out the dead wood and signed competent players that were at least professional. And, as I'm led to believe, he instigated some improvements in training facilities, which Hegarty spoke about in that CA article. He steadied the ship when we were rotten to the core.

I don't think the squad Scott & Hurst inherited — or the club in general — was any worse than the one Woods inherited. We just happened to be in a lower division.

Yeah, in hindsight maybe management was a misstep in his career. I'm not saying he was a brilliant one — I'm just keen to highlight some of the good he did when it's convenient for us all to say he was a disaster because of relegation.

Maybe, given another club, at another time, he could've proved his credentials and become a great manager. Who knows. All we know now is that he's a brilliant youth coach who deserves all the credit he gets.

The youth scheme is proving its worth in tight financial times, and must be encouraged and continued as a viable way of economically producing young talent that will have genuine chances of first team games.

Praise to ALL of the coachs and scouts involved.

Quoted from TheRonRaffertyFanClub

That is a bit rose tinted Sam. Yes, he inherited crap and his only mistake that season was taking the job. Next season though, with one of the biggest budgets in the Conference he had no idea how to put together a team that could get promotion and was conned by other clubs into buying more crap.

However I rate him very highly as a developer of players and the club owes him a great debt for keeping the youth system producing at the level we have.

Lee flipping Ridley. One of the worst players to wear a Town shirt. What the intercourse he was doing signing him, only he knows.

The world's slowest full back