After having time to think about it my thoughts are these.
On the face of it, this is a harsh decision. Sanderson had a great year in 2012, some of it due to a good draw, but the players seemed to like playing for him. Then we lost Tippett, the draft picks, and Walker to a recon early in 2013. We also have had a pretty bad run with injuries to key players such as Crouch and Lynch. This made it really tough for Sando.
Dean Bailey’s unfortunate death obviously removed an extremely good resource.
2013 and 2014 were poor years but can be explained for the above reasons to some degree.
Many of us however have noted that Sando’s game day coaching, tactics and indeed selection have fallen far short of what we (experts that we are all) consider to be optimal.
Even more frustrating from my perspective is that in parts of games we could play awesome football, but in other parts, diabolical football, which led to our terrible inconsistency.
I put this down to mental weakness when the pressure was on. Is this a coaching issue or a players issue?
This is now informed by the knowledge that it seems several senior players had lost confidence in the coach and told at least Roo of this and possibly other board members.
For mine, a lot of the responsibility lies at the players door. Their performances have been unacceptable, and soon as the heat comes on, they run to the board and complain about the coach. They need to take some responsibility.
Having said that, we have no idea about what is happening internally and how Sando’s coaching and communication have affected the playing group.
The unfortunate reality is that at the end of the day, you can’t replace the players but you can replace the coach. Whether we have someone lined up is almost irrelevant if the decision has been made that Sando has lost the players and can’t do the job (no matter how much the players are also responsible).
Any replacement however will need to lay down the law to the players, and many of them will be on notice. We must be very careful not to have a club where the players make all the decisions, as which coach would want to go there?
This leaves the Board. They reappointed Sando in March and have now sacked him. Someone needs to take the bullet for that, and it can’t be Trigg. Mr Chapman is surely on borrowed time, his ineptitude has been there for all to see.