A COUPLE OF BIG ISSUES DIDN’T HELP ROWETT’S POTTERS CAUSE

AREUNION with Gary Rowett this weekend brings back a lot of memories. The first thing I’ll say is that when he was announced I thought it was a great appointment and everyone thought he’d do a good job. He’d been successful before Stoke and he’s done a good job since with Millwall.

It would be interesting to get his take on why it didn’t work, but the first sign was probably when he brought in seven or eight of his own staff. For context, Mark Hughes had arrived with two coaches and a fitness coach.

Rowett wanted to change everything and I don’t know if that caused a stir with people who’d been there a long time.

To be fair, I got on well with pretty much all of them and they seemed to be decent guys – but looking back you can see we had a massive hangover from the Premier League and the new manager needed to get everyone on board. You couldn’t afford to pick fights.

Two big problems: I don’t think we as a squad adapted to the rigours of the Championship and I don’t know if he was ready to take on a squad like that.

He tried to change the personnel too and brought in nine new players that summer. If you’re doing that, the people who come in have to be better than what you have already. I’m not sure they were – but they were still coming in as starters.

We ended up with Bojan and Peter Crouch on the bench, Mame Diouf frozen out. We had lost a few decent players, but still had the base of a squad that was more than good enough to challenge.

Still, tactics were ok and training was decent and we had a run going into the winter of eight unbeaten. We had momentum but it wasn’t winning momentum. There are a lot of close games in the Championship and it’s a fine line between winning and drawing.

We couldn’t find that something extra. I don’t know if the amount of coaches led to mixed messages – and

Rowett will admit he probably got his messaging to fans wrong. I don’t think you can ever take on a fanbase and when he called them out the writing was on the wall, as it had been for Mark Hughes 12 months earlier.

The surreal thing was that it was about Bojan, who was such a nice lad, never any harm in him and a huge fans’ favourite. It felt almost kamikaze to take umbrage with supporters chanting about him.

It was the wrong sort of person to call out in the media to use as an example. It would have been better to take on someone like me, but I guess he’d already done that.

When we lost 3-1 to Blackburn I didn’t have my best game but I wasn’t that impressed when he asked in his press conference why fans were booing him instead of the defenders. I had no problem with being dropped, that’s football, but it was a bit cheeky for a manager to suggest booing players.

Bojan just needed managing.

He wasn’t going to give you 9/10 every week after we’d lost the core of the team that had given him the platform to float around spaces where he could be at his best.

But managing him would still be a simple thing to do. You just had to talk to him and explain that he might come off this week or might come off the bench that week - but you’d use him.

In fact, the three we brought in from Barcelona – Bojan, Marc Muniesa and Ibrahim Afellay – were all great acquisitions with great traits, superb in training. We needed more of those characters. Afellay could be straight to the point – he’d tell you if you’d had a bad game – but that was one of the reasons I liked him.

The Bojan fall-out and bad results around Christmas left Rowett on the brink before we had an FA Cup game at Shrewsbury. Like Hughes at Coventry, he made changes for what was a must-win. I couldn’t understand it. It’s not like we play 70 games a season.

We drew, we were eight points off the play-offs and he seemed quite relieved when he left that week.