Stuart Maynard, the head coach of Notts County, has acknowledged that the job is harder than he anticipated after his team’s near-complete collapse in League Two, which put an end to their hopes of making the playoffs.
It was announced at the beginning of the season that Luke Williams would be leaving his position as manager at Meadow Lane to accept the open managerial position at Swansea City in the Championship. Williams would be moving up two levels of English football in an attempt to keep the Welsh team from facing relegation.
Maynard, who had previously managed Wealdstone, a non-league team, was named the Magpies’ new manager for a three-and-a-half-year contract. Maynard led the Stones to their best league finish in thirty-five years by finishing in 13th place in the National League the previous season.
The 43-year-old’s tenure at Notts County hasn’t exactly gone well, though. Since he took over, the Nottinghamshire club has only won once in ten games while suffering seven losses. In addition, the team has fallen from fifth place in League Two to 17th place.
To Maynard’s credit, when Williams relocated to Wales, the team did not go into cruise mode. In his final seven games in the dugout and his final 12 games overall, the newly promoted team had only won two games.
Tuesday night, County will play Bradford City at the Valley Parade after trailing 2-2 at the Crown Ground on Saturday after taking the lead twice away at Accrington Stanley.
Prior to the trip tomorrow, Maynard stated that, since being named as Williams’ permanent replacement two months ago, the job “has been tougher” than he had anticipated [quotes via Nottinghamshire Live]:
“With the results that we’ve had, it has been tougher than I first expected. I do feel there is a very fine line that we work on because this is a very tight division in terms of the strength of the teams throughout.
“For that reason, it is fine margins that decide games, and we saw [against Accrington] that we ended up with a point, but we quite easily could’ve come away with three,” he continued.
“We always go game by game, we’ve got to pick up as many points as we can and see where it takes us. There has been a lot of frustration because when you’re on a losing run, that usually means you’re not performing well, and we saw a level of anxiety in our players [at the weekend].
“We had the lead, and you could tell that none of our players wanted to be the one that made a mistake, either giving the ball away or not quite making the pass, which can lead to a goal for the opposition.”
Writer’s View
Notts County have failed to win a single game in six league matches. While they still have two games in hand on seventh-place Wimbledon, a nine-point gap seems far too big to claw back this late in the campaign, particularly with this current run of form.
However, Maynard is on a big contract and the board will want to stick by him. The wheels had begun falling off under Williams before he left, so this dreadful spell had seemingly been coming regardless of who was in charge. It’s important now that the head coach gets the players playing as a collective to end the season strongly, putting them in good stead ahead of the following campaign.
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