Steve Bruce was an abomination of a manager who shackled the club with three highly paid warm bodies; de Ridder, Kapo and Kingson who came on a combined £90k a week. He decimated a burgeoning youth system with a good, steady hand in charge in Paul Kelly to fund those three. He played hoofball half the time and because his teams are compact and run around a lot he gets praise from certain section of the footballing world. He leaves when things get a bit tough or his tactics get found wanting. He's a part of this merry-go-round of managers who don't actually seem to be all that competent, yet get appointed anyway because chairmen don't want to take what they perceive as a risk on a younger, probably far more talented manager. He, McKay and Coyle are all of the same ilk and we should never, ever look to hire that sort again.
What utter rubbish - before it was dismantled, the side under Steve Bruce circa January 2009 was the best that Latics have ever had.
Yes he bought some duffers but so has every manager & at least the 3 you mentioned didn't cost the £6mill (+ wages) that Bobby's Argentinian wonder man did - not to mention it ultimately leading to Benson's (poor manager but apparently an excellent scout & director of football) departure when he advised Bobby & Whelan that the signing wouldn't work
He took a side going nowhere but down under Hutchings & conceding an average of 2.5 goals a game to one with a defensive record that during his first season was down to just over 1 a game.
Within 3 matches of him taking over he'd taken a frankly shambolic side & transformed it to one that held its own against the best sides in the division (drew with Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea & Tottenham in that season).
If you take his points per game ration in that first season & put it over a 38 game period then we'd have got 51 points 7 finished 10th
The season after in the 20 games before his squad started to be sold out from underneath him Latics were on target to get 59 points that would have seen us finish 7th quite comfortably & qualify for Europe.
Did he decimate the youth set up?? I don't know to be honest but Latics were in a different era then & none of our managers under Whelan had prioritised it & the chairman hadn't wanted them to. It seems odd to single out Bruce for destroying it when under Deehan, Mathias, Benson, Rioch, Jewell & Hutchings I can remember 1 player being brought through the youth ranks - Leighton Baines
Yes the back end of that full season under Bruce was garbage but he'd had essential parts of his squad sold out against his express wishes & it was clear that the Wigan Athletic he'd been sold was going to change quite drastically. You can say he jumped ship when the going got tough but if I joined somewhere where they said I'd have a big budget, the freedom to hire & get rid of whoever I pleased & little over a year later was told "Actually no, your budget is being slashed, I'm going to release whoever I see fit & replace them with cheaper alternatives & all I ever want to do is tread water" then the chances are that I'd look for somewhere else.
How was Bruce supposed to motivate his squad to perform when the owner openly said "Job done. We're staying up. The rest of the season is about flogging who we can to build a squad for next season to see if we can stay up then too"? Jewell found the same problem when he refused to set any target above the 40 point mark even when it was clear that we'd stay up by some distance - when we reached that target, results tailed off
Martinez took the job under completely different circumstances to Bruce & knew how the budget was going to be reduced. He however can be accused of jumping ship when the going got tough & we'd been relegated
Would I want Bruce back now? Probably not, its 9 years later & he seems to have lost his mojo and I'd agree that he's now on that managerial merry go round where owners go for a perceived safe option, but for the circumstances of the time he's one of the best managers that we've ever had
