A look at some of the key issues at Barnsley FC after another managerial change.

Clarke played tough hand badly

A year ago this week, Darrell Clarke’s Cheltenham Town drew 0-0 at Oakwell with Neill Collins’ Barnsley who were collapsing in the final quarter of the season.

Twelves months later and Collins had been sacked and ultimately replaced by Clarke who lasted 35 league matches before also being dismissed.

All footballing departments at the club have underperformed this season and the head coach was an easy fall guy.

Clarke had Barnsley eight points off the aim of top six with ten games left which is a failure, and he had collected ten points from the last 11 games. He arguably should have been getting more out of a squad that is flawed and lop-sided but still talented.

Collins, who was also sacked after a loss to Blackpool, may have been looking over the Atlantic from California – where he is now in charge of Sacramento Republic – with bemusement that his successor was 15 points behind where the Reds were at this stage last season.

Clarke was not dealt the best hand, taking over a squad who had a poor end to the previous season then lost six of the seven top appearance-makers, and more than 40 goals. He brought in his own assistant Dean Whitehead who left within weeks while neither transfer window was a success, and he was missing nine players recently due to injury and suspension.

After a shaky start, Clarke’s team put together a series of decent performances in November and December but consistently good results never followed then the last few months were a wild ride of one win in six, four straight wins, one point from six, three successive wins then the two defeats that led to his sacking. The performances and underlying data were generally poor, even in the wins, from the middle of January which is a main driver for the decision-makers at Oakwell.

Clarke’s Barnsley were bad off the ball in their pressing, tracking back and marking.

They kept six clean sheets from 35 games – the third lowest total in the division at that stage.

They had problems all over the pitch – missing big chances when on top, making too many individual errors for goals and struggling to control midfield consistently. At least one of those issues seemed to surface in nearly every game and it felt like Clarke could not get consistent performances out of his misfiring players. The former Bristol Rovers, Walsall, Port Vale and Cheltenham boss made tactical errors like playing four centre-backs at home to Wycombe or the diamond midfield experiment at Stockport.

He arrived with a reputation as a man-manager and is thought to have been genuinely liked by the squad. But he couldn’t remove the pre-existing mental block at Oakwell – the biggest footballing issue the club faces – which worsened under him as they only won five of 18 league games there.

The Reds were also very poor at seeing out wins, dropping 17 points after leading – 14 at home which was the most in the country – while 38 of the 51 goals they conceded under Clarke were in the second half, 19 coming after 75 minutes.

They have conceded more second half goals than any top six side has let in in total.

Much of that is down to the players’ lack of resilience and leadership as well as the shallowness of the squad supplied to him, but it does not reflect well on the head coach that his team folds after the break.

Clarke generally came across as an authentic ‘say what I think’ person in the press which, for many fans, was initially a refreshing change from Collins’ much more staid ‘company man’ persona that never won over many supporters.

But, when times were hard, Clarke was increasingly negative and critical in press conferences.

At Barnsley, Clarke got to manage probably the ‘biggest’ club of his career and at his beloved Manchester United in a 7-0 cup loss.

He will have learned from the experience and will surely get another EFL job soon, but it never clicked at Oakwell. A change to freshen things up makes some sense but the problems are deeper than the man in the dug-out.

Recruitment a major issue

The recruitment has been disappointing this season.

The summer window was mixed. Big-money recruit Davis Keillor-Dunn and returning hero Marc Roberts have been successful deals but the jury is out, at least about their impact this season, on Kelechi Nwakali – a very good technical player who has started only a quarter of the league games – Georgie Gent, Stephen Humphrys and Jackson Smith. Gaga Slonina and Matty Craig underperformed then their loans were cut short in January, while player/coach Hourihane retired.

January was much worse. The Reds desperately needed at least one striker but only brought in Clement Rodrigues from the French second division whose impact has been negligible so far, then later they signed free agent winger Jon Lewis who has barely played due to injury.

Joe Gauci also got injured early on, which is unlucky, while Dexter Lembikisa has not started and badly struggled in some of his substitute appearances. Only Neil Farrugia has played regularly and performed reasonably well, although he was also benched on Saturday with no January signing starting.

That amounts to a hit-rate of about one in five signings this season of which you can say at this point have definitely been good business.

It’s far too low, with the lack of firepower up front a particularly big issue.

Sporting director Mladen Sormaz will inevitably be in the spotlight.

Since he arrived, the club has sacked two head coaches, one of whom he appointed, then there was the Dominik Thalhammer visa saga.

But it is unclear exactly how much autonomy he has on signings and appointments, and how much influence is exerted by the owners.

A one-man scapegoat is too simplistic.

Many of Sormaz’s predecessors also had difficult starts – with the Reds being relegated in the first seasons of Ben Mansford, Gauthier Ganaye and Khaled El-Ahmad, while Dane Murphy was a Clarke Oduor goal and a Wigan points deduction away from also being on that list. Then they all oversaw much better second seasons. But Sormaz, unlike those above who started off in the Championship, is sporting director rather than chief executive so is just involved with the football affairs as CEO Jon Flatman has taken on the rest.

Owners not ‘greedy’ but presiding over club going backwards

There is a lot of anger towards the owners from supporters.

The regular chant of ‘greedy b******s’ is harsh on chairman Neerav Parekh and the Cryne family who put in up to £8million a year between them and appear to have far better intentions for the club than controversial predecessors Paul Conway and Chien Lee.

Issues like being much worse at home than away are not for the owners to sort out – that is what coaches are for.

But the buck stops with the owners for the club’s regression over recent seasons and there have been mistakes, particularly in rercuitment for which they must take some blame.

Statements following the sackings of the last two head coaches have suggested the Reds wanted to return to the high-pressing style which has brought them success previously.

That begs the question of why they didn’t employ a coach who would do that in the first place, hinting at a lack of clarity and coherence.

With points totals of 86 then 76 and now 52 with nine fixtures left – and a projected total of 65 based on points per game – the club is going backwards down the third tier table.

The Reds were extremely unlucky not to go up at Wembley two years ago but, since then, have not played consistently well enough – especially at Oakwell – to get promoted.

The quality of the squad has reduced by the window, with players signed in the Championship unsurprisingly not replaced by the same calibre, but the discovery of gems such as Luca Connell and Adam Phillips has been followed by more erratic recruitment.

It is fair to worry that they will now become an average, mid-table third tier side.

This is very likely to be their joint longest spell outside the top two divisions since the 1970s – with the other being when they went into administration in the early 2000s.

But they will have to hope this season is just a blip in which they underperformed in a particularly tough division and learned lessons which will help them next year. There is optimism about the future within Oakwell.

They may benefit from the new spending rules coming in in the summer which, although they could impact Barnsley’s budget, should hit bigger-spending clubs harder.

There will surely be interest in the likes of Connell, Phillips and Davis Keillor-Dunn in the summer while, with a host of fringe players out of contract, there is likely to be another major overhaul of the squad.

Players have disappointed

The players, by and large, have disappointed.

Davis Keillor-Dunn has been excellent, as has Marc Roberts overall, but few others would be in contention for Player of the Year.

Midfielders Luca Connell and Adam Phillips – despite as good numbers of goals and assists as ever – have been inconsistent.

Jon Russell has had his best season for Barnsley and Mael de Gevigney has been solid again. Corey O’Keeffe is one of the top assist-makers in the division but has made key defensive errors. Other than DKD, the strikers’ goal return has been poor.

Collectively, Clarke’s assessment that they are soft and flaky has some credence. If promotion becomes mathematically impossible soon, it remains to be seen what mental impact that will have on a squad recruited for the top six and including many players who reached the play-offs in the last two years.

Huge opportunity for Hourihane

The Reds are looking for their 11th permanent head coach in just over seven years. It is very possible that 20 years will pass with no boss lasting two full seasons since Simon Davey left in 2009.

Conor Hourihane is the latest incumbent on an interim basis until the summer.

The only current bosses of the top 92 English clubs who are younger than the 34-year-old Irishman are Brighton’s Fabian Hürzeler and MK Dons caretaker Ben Gladwin. He is not the youngest ever Reds boss – Lee Johnson was 33 when he took over a Barnsley team including Hourihane in 2015 and Allan Clarke 31 when he started the revitalisation of the club in the 1970s.

It has been a hectic year for Hourihane who was captaining Derby to promotion last May before returning to Oakwell as player/coach, retiring from playing and now taking over from Darrell Clarke. Last year he was working in the evenings with Barnsley’s under 15s and under 16s, but he will lead the first team out at Oakwell on Saturday. Although he is a total unknown as a manager – having only worked with youth players before this season – he comes across as a very diligent, articulate and passionate young coach.

He is hugely popular with Reds fans from his playing days, even if there was disappointment that his second coming this season lasted two games before he retired. He has impressed everyone at Oakwell as a coach this season and was selected ahead of previous caretaker Martin Devaney. He started badly with the loss at Mansfield after two training sessions in charge but simply must beat lowly Cambridge at Oakwell on Saturday after a full week of training.

The idea of Barnsley winning the final nine games, which is what could well be required for sixth place, feels ludicrous but they need to squeeze some positivity out of what looks like being a nothing season. This is almost a nothing to lose audition for the permanent job for Hourihane as, if he wins a decent amount of games particularly at home and brings some positivity back to the fanbase, he will have a strong case in the summer for the permanent role – even if other options are being explored in the background.