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Full-transcript: Coventry City owner Doug King drops 'divorce' bombshell as he explains why he sacked Mark Robins
Doug King has explained why he sacked Mark Robins as Coventry City boss, revealing it was a fall out between the manager and his assistant Adi Viveash that led to the “dismantling” of the successful coaching set-up at the Championship club.
The Sky Blues owner dropped the bombshell news at Monday night’s fans’ forum, broadcast live on BBC CWR from the CBS Arena media suite, where he insisted the decision wasn’t necessarily based on results and recent form, but rather the fact that there had been a “divorce” between the two protagonists that had led the club to two promotions and four Wembley appearances over the last seven years.
King walked into the room to sit at the top table along with head of recruitment Dean Austin, with the audience quiet while he sat down before he was asked exactly why he sacked Robins.
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“Before we get onto why, let me pay my respects to Mark, who I worked with closely for two years,” he said. “I am close to the football club, not sitting somewhere in London, I am up here every day. In two years we had some great experiences together and I enjoyed working with him immensely.
“I am very clear with what has happened at Coventry City over the years with the ownership and turmoil that has caused a near bankruptcy, stadium changes... Mark came in in 2017, the club having somehow got ourselves down in League Two, and he did a huge, huge job in getting us back up the leagues.
“He did it on a shoestring, pretty much, and with facilities that were not very good and he over-achieved in that way. And huge respect from all of us as the club and I sent out the message after the decision on Thursday. Listen, I fully understand this is a difficult situation and I fully understand what he has done for this football club and this city and community, but I still made the decision to change the leadership at this point.
“And the truth of the matter is that I could go on and say that 23 points from 23 games, or I could say we have lost nine out of 17 home games or we didn’t play very well yesterday (against Derby). They are disappointing because we have put together a huge deck of players who I think are capable of promotion and certainly being in the top six.
“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 because we have got our recruitment in order and we have got pre-season sorted. We have got a performance director, the facilities (at Ryton) with a new gym coming in and we want to really hit the ground running.
“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. Umm, I was very upset by that because that was the team that had done what we wanted to get done for the football club. It was therefore at huge risk of ‘am I going to get a better coaching set-up to take us forward with the money that I have invested, and with the dreams of where we want to take the football club.’
“Obviously, 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. As you know, Adi left the football club and we tried to replace him with a head of first team coaching. We interviewed some great candidates but we couldn’t get any over the line and, to be honest, I never even had a deal in front of me to get over the line. But we did interview quite a few talented candidates.
King explained that all wanted to be in charge rather than a number two, which is why they couldn’t get anyone to agree to come in.
“As you know we replaced Dennis Lawrence with George Boateng and Rhys Carr and without getting a head of first team coaching in we were effectively going into pre-season with a limited amount of coaches. Mark made the decision to bring back John Dempster and Mark Delaney as the coaching team to go on the pre-season tour.
“It was unclear how the hierarchy would go there but it seemed to me that he wanted a flat structure. We had a pretty good pre-season, to be fair, we were all at the Everton game and I think that was putting us under a false sense of security of what may occur when we got down to the real battle of trying to get out of this very difficult league.
“We then come to this point where we start badly, it’s a little unclear for all of us how it’s all working. Listen. I am talking here very openly. I have got employees who we are talking about who are fantastic coaches and who I respect very much. You saw what Rhys did at Sunderland and so I am putting a disclaimer on that because they are all fantastic people that this club respects very much.
“I had a meeting with Mark on September the 30th, I think it was, where I made it... Well, I shot him a memo and said to him that he has a few options. And the options were that we either keep it as it is or we look to put some hierarchy in. Or we look to, again, bring a head of first team coaching because I said he needs some balance, it seemed to me. That worked in the past, so we went out again to try to find a head of first team coaching and, again, we couldn’t get anyone through the door.
“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.”
