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Championship owner lifts lid on 'divorce' behind controversial sacking of Mark Robins
Coventry City owner Doug King has pointed to a fall-out between Mark Robins and his long-serving assistant Adi Viveash that ultimately led to the manager's controversial sacking.
The Championship carousel of managers rarely stops turning for long - and there have been seven exits since the end of last season. including Steven Schumacher's departure from Stoke City after only nine months - but the departure of Robins from Coventry caught a lot of people on the hop considering his success over the last seven years.
Robins had pulled Coventry up from League Two to the Championship play-off final and FA Cup semi-final but in a bombshell fans' forum at the CBS Arena on Monday night, King gave his version of events at great length about how it came to an abrupt end over the last few weeks.
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He pointed to Robins's recent record of losing nine out of 17 home games and added: “The reason why I have made the decision is that he (Mark Robins) has dismantled the coaching staff at this football club. I haven’t dismantled it, he has done that. That’s the thing people don’t realise, they think I am doing lots of things with my spider’s web and all these things, and it’s strictly, absolutely not true.”
Explaining further, he added: “What happened is that Mark and Adi Viveash were the heart and soul of this football club, they dragged us up through the leagues and were very successful in that. And then it just seemed that in March/April last year that something went down. You know a simple thing as an article in the Telegraph by Andy Turner about a certain marriage, and a difficult marriage. The guys have been together a long time and I don’t know, I think it provoked something.
“Adi gave another big interview and he wasn’t authorised to do it and then everyone got a bit excited and clearly, the fall-off after the Wolves game was pretty startling. I know everyone said we were knackered after the heroic FA Cup semi-final but the reality was, it looked like something was wrong.
“I had a meeting with both of them individually at the end of the season and I said, ‘Look, I came in here and gave you four year contracts, I want you together because you have shown me that as a team you make it happen here. I am going to get you the deck and you, I hope, will hopefully out perform the way you have out-performed with this deck. I told them to take time out, go away, have a holiday and come back recharged... and effectively, I had a phone call from him about two weeks later, where he said, effectively, he could no longer work with Adi Viveash.
"I was particularly angry about that because I did not want to break that up. Adi Viveash is a hugely skilled coach who develops players, which is my model and the model of the football club. And so, weirdly, I was trying to keep it together whereas Mark had made the call that after seven years a divorce was what was needed."
He added: “The senior team of the club, myself, Dr Claire-Marie Roberts, Dean Austin and Mark met for a first quarter review to look at the situation on October 30, I think it was, and went through all the aspects of the football club. Anyway, it became clear that at this level, with this deck of players, we are lacking an elite coach/tactician to support the manager.
“I wished that we could have got one in for the manager because had we done that then maybe we wouldn’t be having this discussion tonight. But the reality is, I can’t get one in. And I am not going to go and sit through another ten games, trending at one point per game and putting at risk this football club the threat of relegation. I’ll tell you what happens when things go wrong, if you get to Christmas with 26 points the pressure will be triple, the players will be thinking about the summer, ‘the season has gone, we came here for promotion to the Premier League and the big Coventry project - all gone wrong’.
“And it would have got way, way worse and put this football club at risk and that’s why I acted as I did on Thursday.”
Frank Lampard is favourite to replace Robins. Coventry are 17th in the Championship, nine points off the top six and one point above the bottom three.
