Personally I really started to fall out of love with Latics during Martinez reign. Since i first came to watch Latics back when i was a young lad i eat, sleep and breath the club home and away but the frustration was mentally exhausting and turning me off on football all together and i went to fewer away games and i started to dread home games and for the only time ever happily skipped games for other hobbies.
I think Roberto was a nice man and loved the club but i felt he put his 'principles' over all else and it made him too stubborn to address a lot of on field problems when they first started and only attempted to adapt when his previous refusal to react had dragged us into a mess. His style of football was too often disorganised at the back, very little movement, not great at pressing, little aggression, isolated front man with no runners, slow tempo, posession for posessions sake and an over reliance of someone like Zog, McMannaman or Moses pulling off some individual brilliance. His post match press conferences drove me up the wall with more spin than a politician and so many cliches - the last thing you need when you're already fed up with the performance and result is 'take the postives, we couldn't be ourselves in the moment, we'll learn from this, etc'. I always felt he just never would do the most straight forward and sensible things, it always had to be a bit contrarian and i think we never had a bad set of players but often under performed quite significantly. I felt we caused and a lot of our own problems due to his stubbornness to admit he got anything wrong and how unwilling he was to change much of it.
In the last few awful managers we've had ive never been as fed up as i was at times under Martinez as the mess made under them was worse but it saw us change manager quite quickly so as bad as it was it was only a few months before a shake up. But with Roberto he'd be on a bad run playing some boring, negative football, then we'd have one big impressive result and fantastic performance out of the blue that would eliviate the pressure and then we'd go on another bad run and repeat. When we were good we were outstanding but we werent good that often and the compounding of frustration either side of those great intermitent blips and the repeating of mistakes wore me down.
But at the same time that 10 or so game run between late Feb and May was the best football we'll ever likely see. It was absolutely bizarre but magic how a team who had been so poor all season turned into world beater over night.
And of course the amazing 2 performances against Everton and City in the FA Cup. A good microcosm of Robertos reign is probably the week of the FA Cup we played a Swansea side playing for nothing with half their first team out injured knowing if we won we'd probably be able to stay up and we turned in a horrific losing performance with goals coming from stupid mistakes at the back. Under the circumstances it was shameful. Then we went on to pull off the biggest ever upset by beating City in the cup playing some outstanding stuff. Then we went to Arsenal needing to pull off another miricle and didn't bother marking their best header from a corner for their opening goal and we went down with a bit of a whimper. It was the good the bad and the ugly - an epic highlight sandwiched by crushing lows.
Roberto is a funny one to look back on as his highlights were as brilliant as his lows were diabolical. I get how people can see it either way, but personally I'd say about 80% of the time we were not very good or enjoyable and 80% of the time over 4 years i found a very hard slog. You can't take away from what he achieved and some of the great memories means he will have to be considered one of our best ever manager but i also cant forget the more frequent feeling of banging your head against the wall most weeks that will often be forgotten about as they don't make the headlines.
I know it probably wont be a popular opinion shared by most but while i of course appreciated the best bits i really didnt enjoy Robertos reign overall. I'm glad Roberto moved on and i wouldn't want him back if circumstances meant it became a possibility in the future. I'm much happier now with Cook than i ever was under Martinez.
I feel Paul Cook has got the best bits of Martinez plus Bruce and Jewell mixed together without all of their weakness. And the other reccent managers who failed so miserably make me appreciate how lucky we are to have finally got such a top man at the helm.