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INTERVIEW: Mark Robins Reflects On Burton Defeat

I’m glad I’m not the only one! Looks like JCH like got the nod on — it’s unclear if Willis touched it in its way in!

4-4-2 can be just as isolated, if not more isolated than a 4-2-3-1 because of the gap between the midfield and strikers. Disclaimer: 4-4-2 is our best formation right now — this is not a debate about the merits of each formation.

Appointing Peter Reid instead of Eric Black is the greatest 'what if?' in my time as a supporter. Yet, when we gave Andy Thorn the full-time job, he did terribly and a lot of us would've felt that same 'what if?' feeling had he not been appointed. With hindsight, Eric Black should've 100% got a...

Do you mean a dozen and a half because if you meant ‘half a dozen’, 6 goals is not a big ask at all — I’d expect that fro Biamou and Bakayoko!

Career-wise, it’s certainly a mistake because it looks like he won’t be playing much football for a while. Short-term financial gains don’t put weigh long-term career development. At this rate (things could, and I hope, get better), he’ll be back in L2, or at best, a middling L1 club on those...

You have ridiculously high expectations. We have 4 players who are roughly scoring 1 in 4 (Hiwula slightly under that, Bakayoko over it, with Chaplin and JCH striking in 4).You’re judging players on a very small time scale, as you cannot judge a player over 15-20 games. 1 in 4 goals translates...

The likelihood of McNulty scoring 20+ goals this season for us was unlikely. There’s a few examples of players having stormers in L2 then following it up with a comparatively ‘average’ season, such as Marquis of Doncaster, went from 26 in the league 16/17 to about 14 last season. This said, he...

Chaplin has 3 goals and 2 assists in 11 games, so far, he’s a 1 in 4 striker which is not bad at all. He’s doing quite well and still 21 so he’s absolutely worth the money. Comparatively, McNulty scored 4 in first 21 games and apparently wasn’t a ‘natural goalscorer’ until about January last...

In fairness to Robins, you can’t argue against the reasoning of his substitutions in this game. We were clearly trying to get the winner and Bayliss in particular struggled to get up to speed on the ball and was caught out a few times — that’s on him. It’s probably safe to assume that we...

To think a substantial amount of our ‘in-house’ experts were suggesting it was a waste to sign JCH. He’s improved leaps and bounds this season and Robins deserves a lot of credit for that. Even if he’s not scoring, he’s involved in a lot of our play and he could well end up with about 10+ goals...

Everyone would’ve made at least 2 of the 3 subs Robins made that game. Some would’ve brought on Bakayoko... ... I’ll leave it the professionals who actually know what they’re doing.

Thankfully, we don’t have to think about it because we got promoted and we’re doing well in L1 right now! Last season we were consistent under Robins, in fact, we’ve always been consistent in both this spells here. Robins is a switched on manager and things just seem to click with him at the...

There isn’t really a debate to be had here about what formation to use. Robins has mainly played 4-4-2 in the league, and has only really played 4-2-3-1 if we have unavailabilities i.e. Portsmouth. At the start of the season we were trying to figure things out and results have generally...

The optimistic side of me think we’d have been ok had we failed to get promoted. My comparison was mainly relating to the form of Notts County, where they were comfortably in the top 2 for most of the season and ended up finishing 5th. Whilst that’s not a disaster, you could certainly say that...

His was an MCL, which is the ‘easiest’ knee ligament to recover from. That’s still a few months recovery.

What subs would you have made for the Walsall game? We bought on Chaplin, Bayliss and Jones — Brown, Grimmer and Bakayoko were unused. The subs didn’t work, but cut the manager for making positive substitutions. Context is everything too, we would’ve played totally differently had we brought it...

Disagreed somewhat. As someone mentioned earlier, Notts County overspent massively last season chasing promotion. Whereas, we’ve mostly sorted out our finances to the point where we’re breaking-even. You’d think we could’ve kept most of the team together (McNulty and Bayliss would’ve left...

It’s pretty clear Robins doesn’t value the Checkatrade trophy. That’s twice we’ve been knocked out in the group stage since he’s been back. A win tonight would’ve seen us go through and he’s picked an U23s team with first team players who need to build up their match fitness. Looking at the...

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not Mark Robins so my interpretation of his decision making is not really valid. Certainly not a valid criticism of MR because I said ‘you bring on your main/best striker.’ That’s also a dumbing down my argument. Clearly Robins thinks Chaplin is a better striker...