Mike Ashley can prove he is genuine by hiring Billy Davies as Rangers manager now

[buster. 4,808]

In the few days prior to an AGM at Ibrox, it would probably be sound council to ignore newspaper articles that seek to talk people up or speculate strongly on what may happen but without real evidence.

Edited December 21, 2014 by buster.

[ian1964 10,409]

Lifted from FF:

 

"Nippy Sweetie" is a Glaswegian term often used to describe irritable little men with sharp tongues and loud voices.

 

Billy Davies readily acknowledges that he represents a classic example of the breed. Standing 5ft 5in – although he maintains he is actually 5ft 6in – the 49-year-old manager sacked by Nottingham Forest for a second time on Monday has paid the price for failing to control a personality which latterly seemed to have crossed the border into downright paranoia.

 

If the impressive collection of Championship manager of the month awards he accrued during successful stints with Preston North End, Derby County – whom he led into the Premier League – and Forest are testimony to a genuine managerial talent, Davies could never quite escape his self-destructive insecurities.

 

"He's 5ft 5, he's from Glasgow and he owns a Rottweiler called Axel, that's all you need to know" was the standard response from local reporters covering Preston when the nationals called for information on a head coach then perceived as a rising star.

 

In Lancashire, Davies was noted for installing a film-editing suite in his house, assembling montages of his Preston players' flaws and staying up until the small hours pondering how to rectify them.

 

During his latest stint at the City Ground this interest in video technology took a slightly sinister turn, involving the covert filming of journalists at Forest press conferences. Or at least those he had not already barred. Only the club website and a regional television station seemed safe from Davies' enthusiasm for blanket media bans, as Forest morphed into "the Midlands' answer to North Korea".

 

If a run of eight games without a win, culminating in Saturday's 5-0 defeat at Derby, finally prompted Fawaz Al-Hasawi to dismiss Davies while preparing to find another manager to re-ignite Forest's play off ambitions, trouble had been brewing for some time.

 

Long-serving club staff were sacked without explanation, while Jim Price, Davies' cousin and agent, joined Forest in a senior role. After being suspended as a solicitor, Price was barred from taking up an official role as a director because he would not have passed the Football League's fit and proper person test.

 

Davies became embroiled in ludicrous rows with photographers during games at Millwall, Brighton and Barnsley. But Al-Hasawi's patience really started wearing thin when the Kuwaiti owner became engaged in a disagreement over transfer market policy with a manager who had spent £9m since his return in February 2013.

 

If a five-game touchline ban imposed for using abusive language to a match official after a 2-2 draw at home to Leicester in February – (although Davies denied making physical contact with Anthony Taylor, the referee, in the tunnel but lost his appeal against the last three fixtures of that suspension heard by the FA ) – hardly helped his cause, a recent refusal to talk to the media for "legal reasons" finally appeared to raise red flags in the boardroom.

 

Davies' obsession with conspiracy theories and old grudges was starting to grate – possibly even among a group of players containing several huge admirers of a Glaswegian who will begin life at any new club watching from the stands while he serves the final three games of his touchline exclusion order.

 

Despite being hampered by a series of injuries to key personnel, including the at times brilliant Andy Reid, there was a sense that Forest were starting to surrender too easily while acquiring far too many unnecessary enemies. The tunnel altercation with Taylor precipitated Davies' second banishment from the dugout this season following a brush with Craig Pawson, another referee, in August.

 

Negotiations with Neil Warnock – who would have seemed like football's answer to Kofi Annan compared with Davies – hit a glitch last night, with Gary Brazil, the academy manager, in temporary charge for Tuesday night's match against Charlton.

 

To Davies' advocates this misrepresents a smart manager capable of real cleverness and, at least before he fell increasingly under Price's spell, genuine charm and smart humour. In January, when many still believed he would return Forest to the Premier League, Reid was at pains to praise his manager. "Billy Davies is absolutely fantastic," said the Irish midfielder. "His tactics are second to none. We go into matches knowing exactly what we're up against and how we're going to beat it."

 

Two months is a long time in football. As he approaches 50, Davies has a shattered reputation to rebuild. The road to redemption could be slow and winding.

[Scott7 5,139]

That is far too much baggage for any manager, never mind Rangers. A whole new field of opportunity for the timmish press.

[Rangersitis 0]

It's either him or a bottom end Scottish football manager.

 

I don't really care either way as I won't be back until those at the top are all gone, but this 'great manager' myth surrounding Billy Davies is a strange phenomenon as it only really exists among Rangers supporters, and perhaps PNE.

[RANGERRAB 3,254]

I don't really care either way as I won't be back until those at the top are all gone, but this 'great manager' myth surrounding Billy Davies is a strange phenomenon as it only really exists among Rangers supporters, and perhaps PNE.

 

So if not Billy Davies who? And who do you actually want on the board? You really don't know do you.

[trublusince1982 243]

raging don't want chicken curry for my dinner tonight but since i don't know what i want will just need to have chicken curry.

[rbr 1,247]

I dont want this man anywhere near Ibrox , however he fits the profile of an Ashley man to the tee , another missed opportunity if he does get the job

[Ser Barristan Selmy 222]

I don't really care either way as I won't be back until those at the top are all gone, but this 'great manager' myth surrounding Billy Davies is a strange phenomenon as it only really exists among Rangers supporters, and perhaps PNE.

Not saying he's great but he's done well in the championship whereas the main 2 other contenders both did horribly in league 2 and were sacked.

[trublusince1982 243]

Not saying he's great but he's done well in the championship whereas the main 2 other contenders both did horribly in league 2 and were sacked.

 

spent quite a bit did he not

[chilledbear 16]

This is copied from Rangers Media.

 

 

So we see that Davies is in line to take your manager's role should McCoist depart. As a Forest fan who has sat through two of his tenures, I can only warn against the dangers that come with the management of arguably the worst man in football.

 

One thing you may find is that a lot of Forest fans still wax lyrical about his time with the club but this has been significantly reduced after his second spell. He went from the messiah to a pariah in a little under a year after a comically tyrannical period where we overspent but underachieved whilst severing all ties with the academy and media and firing everyone who dared question him.

 

It's said you judge a man by the company he keeps, and this says the world about his character. Billy's first act when he returned was to bring in his cousin James Price as director. Now, 'Jimbo' had recently been disbarred from the legal profession and was therefore ineligible to act as a director at a football club. They frequently tweeted about the work James was doing for the club, but when questioned it was all denied... Within six months they'd fired so many staff members that we had literally no scouting system in place, a mere handful of 'his' coaches and had there were no active links between the senior team and the academy.

 

During all this he managed to become the only part-time manager in the football league. Unbelievably, he'd only spend 3 days a week in Nottingham. For the rest of the week he retired back to Glasgow (not once did he move here) and whilst he claimed to be spending the time doing 'video research', our inevitable late-season fall suggested that not a lot was being done.

 

That, as with most things was all propaganda. They were the kings of open speech on social media when the going was good, but were nowhere to be seen when we weren't winning. In reality, even during the good times it was only hate and self-fulfilling bile they peddled. Check out the frankly incredible Twitter timeline of Price himself (@Jimbo519242) to see what we mean. Through this they promoted their 'unfinished business' agenda and it quickly became clear that it had nothing to do with righting any on-field failures but more to do with settling old scores with people who scorned them during the first tenure. They picked needless fights with some of the best and most genuine people in Nottingham football, banning both the Nottingham Post and Radio Nottingham from the club as much as contractually possible. As a club we became the enemy of the everyone we mixed with and it was quite literally us against them in every part of the game.

 

It wasn't just professional relationships they destroyed. You may have seen that Forest have fell into trouble with FFP this week and we're now under a transfer embargo. This is partly down to our enthusiastic but slightly naive owner, but mostly down to gruesome twosome's cavalier attitude that FFP would 'never stand up'. Well, here we are, he's gone and we're feeling the effects of his excess. We were seemingly in financial trouble every week, we had unpaid invoices piling up around us and nothing was getting paid... Be it transfer installments, loan fees, even catering bills... nothing got paid on time. We weren't short of cash, they'd just not hired somebody to do it.

 

Not to say that it was all bad in fairness, on the pitch at least. The football his teams play is attractive enough and the highs are pretty high. We put 5 past both Derby and Leicester at home and when we won 3-1 at WBA in 2009/10 it was as good as we've known it lately. His team didn't follow it through though. His emotion-led 'us v them' system runs out of steam in February and it's not pretty from that point. You go 10 unbeaten and then don't win in 11. There's a reason his longest tenure at a club has been

 

To all those thinking this is just typical bad feeling towards an ex-manager, we've had failures before. David Platt, Gary Megson and Steve McClaren have all been and gone (with weaker results) and I hold no particular ill will towards them. All in all, it says the world that the only club that took Davies back after he was fired by Forest....was Forest, and only then after the previous chairman had died and the CEO had moved on. He was brought back a desperate owner who needed a positive appointment and knew he would be guaranteed good PR if Davies came in. They fired out positive propaganda about how Davies would be 'our Ferguson'. Despite this, 10 months later he's out of a job again.

 

To summarise, Billy Davies is is a cancer that eats away at all that is good the longer it's left unchecked, a parasite who leaves every club in a worse position than he found it and you'd be well advised to keep a wide berth of him and his entire circus. I don't know where Ally McCoist's problems lay but he will seem like paradise to Davies when everything inevitably comes crumbling down.