I’ve said it before, but his initial success came when we had a team with leaders on the pitch and a lot of quality players with something to prove.
Even back then we hardly seemed to have a plan b, but we were lucky that our players made plan a work so well more often than not.
How much of that success came from Wilder and how much game from having those players at the time?
I’ve questioned before whether that also effected our overall fitness, we had several players back then who openly went above and beyond in terms of getting themselves fit especially between seasons and I’m sure they will have rubbed off on the rest of the squad and driven them all to push themselves.
Take for example a lineup of, Henderson, Baldock, Basham, Egan, Oconnel, Stevens, Norwood, Coutts, Fleck, McGoldrick, Sharp… you could realistically pick 8/9 (if not all) of those to be captain without question, I doubt they needed much motivation from the manager.
Maybe Wilder was great, or maybe he stumbled upon a system that suited the players we had and those players would have run through brick walls for each other.
He hasn’t been able to replicate this kind of team in any of his more recent spells as manager and when he’s been required to be tactically astute he’s been found lacking on many occasions.