Maynard left exposed?

[Piethagoram 𝕏 @piethagoram]

No director of football

No additional coaching staff

January transfer window signings too lightweight?

Captain lacks vocal authority?

[menzinho]

The loss of the coaching staff isn’t great, argue amongst yourselves whether or not you rate them but now Stuart can only really lean on Joao Alves for advice and he's at the very early stages of his coaching career. I’m surprised we haven’t added another first team coach, it’s been over a month since both Saunders departed.

Richard going is a blow but I can’t see how it directly affects the current on-field issues. Perhaps there’s been a slight downturn in morale, but I’ve no idea how close he was with the current players.

Crowley going for me has been a blow, ok by all accounts some players weren’t overly impressed with him and if he stayed he’d have left for free in the summer. That said replacing a player of his quality in January is far from ideal, we’d have had to have paid over the odds for someone and we know the club doesn’t operate like that. We’ve taken a bit of a gamble with Whitaker who shows promise but I agree that right now he’s nowhere near the same level.

I'm not always sure you need a captain to scream and shout to be honest, no-one has really had an issue with Palmer in that role. We do have a younger squad now though, take today for example Matt Palmer was oldest player in that starting line-up, maybe a tad more experience is needed.

Also I feel we rely too much on individual performances, we suddenly seemed to get back on track when Crowley returned from injury. And now look at us with McGoldrick (and Jones) out, it’s like we are just waiting for them to produce moments of magic. Look at the assists for this season, right now both Palmer and Abbott are joint 1st on 4 (only because Crowley has now left) the rest of our attacking midfielders and wing-backs have got either 2 or 1 - that is shocking, especially when we are 35 games into the season. Same goes for goals, we rely too much on Jatta and McGoldrick, Jodi is still our 3rd top scorer and he hasn’t been fit for months!

[Robbie 𝕏 @Robbie_NCFC]

Yes, the Saunders brothers going & coupled with Richard Montague leaving has been a big blow to Notts.

We have to remember that all those people in authority at Notts would have supported each other when preparing for a match & would give feedback after a match had been played.

There would have been a lot of preparation & plans made on how to deal with a specific team. Plans would have been laid to change the shape of the team during the match if things were not going to plan. The Saunders brothers knowhow would have been important in this preparation.

With these three important people leaving Stuart has suddenly lost all that support & It must be affecting the team to.

But another big thing that has affected Stuart's plans & made it terribly difficult for him, is the number of players that have been injured & that figure seems to remain consistent at around 6 players.

Kudos to Maynard for keeping the team competitive despite all of these injuries, but I do think that these injured players coupled with a poor January transfer window, where the recruitment was very weak, is also affecting Stuart's ability to keep selecting a competitive team.

In conclusion no one is  discussing why the Saunders brothers & Montague may have left when they did, but them leaving for me is the biggest reason why the team may now be struggling, & I'm surprised the Reedtz brothers haven't tried to address this.