Bristol Rovers manager Joey Barton has taken an extraordinary swipe at the club's previous managers - on the eve of their League One game with Sunderland.
The former Newcastle United midfielder is never one to shy away from sharing his views, and he held nothing back as he took aim at his predecessors in the Memorial Ground hotseat.
While the Black Cats head to the South West looking to push into the automatic promotion places, it's all about survival at the bottom end of the table for Barton since taking over in February.
Ben Garner started the season as Rovers boss but he was replaced by Paul Tisdale, who only lasted three months in the job before being replaced by Barton.
And the outspoken manager feels he has his work cut out, with promotion-chasing Sunderland up next.
“Whatever has gone before me has been negligent," he told Bristol Live. "If they were doctors, they should certainly be struck off for what’s gone on here before, but we can’t do anything about that.
“At some point those coaches will probably want to take me to task on that and I’ll have absolutely no issue in showing them exactly what they got wrong and where they got it wrong, and they’ll be better coaches for it.
“So if they want to get on the phone and have a conversation with me, no problem at all, but the job that’s been done before we got here is negligent and they’ve set these boys up for failure and we’ve got to try to reverse that trend.”
Barton was picked up on the word 'negligent' by reporters during the Press conference held on Zoom, but stood by his assessment.
“It’s not a strong word, they both got sacked,” he said. “It’s facts. Both have been sacked for a reason, same as me at Fleetwood. You get sacked for a reason in our job. Ultimately the buck stops with you as the manager and if something’s not right, you’re responsible to fix it, that’s your job.
“You have a duty of care to your employees and the people that work for you to get everything at a level that they can do their job to the best of their ability to perform, so you do get sacked for being negligent I believe.
“Sometimes you get sacked for political stuff, which happened to me at Fleetwood. Sometimes you get sacked for not signing a new contract, which happened to me at Fleetwood. Sometimes, stuff like that does happen, but usually in our trade you get potted if you haven’t been doing a good enough job and the club hasn’t been getting results and the same thing, I imagine, will happen to me if I don’t get results.
“That’s the volcano we all live on. We all know what we’re doing, we all know football, we all know how volatile this profession is, certainly the managerial side of it, and if you don’t get results, you’re gone.”
“You can’t escape the facts. You’ve seen the managers that have gone before here and you would presume that they do everything right, and it’s only when you get in here and you see it.
“I could show you the footage of the training sessions. They’re a farce.
“We’re racehorse trainers, I’ve got to train the lads for a race and they’re running out of gas and steam before they’re getting anywhere near the final furlongs.
“You can only judge that the way you see it. I can’t protect previous managers and the fact they’re not at the club says what’s gone before.
“I’m not here to ruin those lads’ careers and ruin them, because there might have been a multitude of factors at play that stopped them from doing what they knew to be right or correct, but all I’ve got to go off is it wasn’t done correctly.
“How do I know that? Look at the league table. The league table attests to that. Look at the fact two managers have been removed from the job. They are data points and it’s nothing other than the truth.”
