Why, why, why Gary Locke? Why Raith, why?

If you’ve ever watched the TV series, Dexter, or read the Jeff Lindsay books that inspired the show, at some point you’ll have wondered, ‘surely he should have been found out by now?’

For those not au fait with the hit series, it follows a Miami PD forensic technician who also happens to be a serial killer. Despite half of Miami seeming to know his secret at various stages, and despite the inordinate number of delicate situations he finds himself in, his dark second life is never rumbled by the authorities.

That same ‘surely he should have been found out by now?’ question can also be applied to Raith Rovers’ newest manager.

While – and let’s be absolutely clear about this – Gary Locke is no secret serial killer, he does happen to be a football manager who, on the face of it, has been incredibly lucky to find himself at a full-time club for the third time.

And yet, here he is, in charge of the side who finished fourth in a strong Championship last season and who will look to repeat the feat (at least) next season.

There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth from Rovers supporters – and lots of sympathy and laughter in equal measure from other fans – about the decision on social media since it broke last night. As fans, we all love to wildly over-react, but there a number of reasons why this seems like such a perplexing decision by the Raith Board.

At the heart of the matter is the belief that Locke was a failure at both his previous clubs and doesn’t deserve another shot.

There isn’t one definitive, easy answer as to what extent Locke was responsible for in Hearts’ relegation in 2014 that ultimately cost him his job at Tynecastle. The 15-point deduction meted out at the start of the season would have made it incredibly difficult for any club to survive, and the squad was painfully reliant on young players too, but there’s a sense that Locke failed to get the best out of what he had available.

Throughout his time in charge Hearts seemed incredibly susceptible to cross balls and set pieces and were generally badly organised. Locke repeatedly re-iterated that it was ‘silly mistakes’ that cost his side points, but at what point do near-identical silly mistakes become a pattern that needs correcting? A good manager should be able to quickly identify issues and work to correct with them…a poor manager will rely on intangibles to defend his record. Hearts lost 65 goals that campaign. Compare it to this season where Dundee United lost 70 and Kilmarnock, 64 and it seems to fit into the argument that his team, regardless of the 15-point deduction, deserved to be near the bottom.

In the first half of the season, Locke chanted the mantra of ‘getting to 0 points as quickly as possible’, as if the league would restart once they hit the mark. Talk of catching opponents never seemed like a realistic concept as far as Locke was concerned and the players were obviously not inspired; it took Hearts until 25^th January to hit a positive points total. By the time Locke was let go, five wins from the final eight (largely meaningless) games left him with a win ratio of 27%.

Allan Johnstone left Kilmarnock in February 2015, with his team in 8^th position and Locke took over, initially on an interim basis. To celebrate the three-year deal he was later given by the Kilmarnock Board, he led his side to seven defeats in a row and some heavy flirting with relegation. Although he secured safety on the penultimate game of the 2014/15 season, he finally resigned in January of this year, after a 1-0 home defeat to Hamilton which left the Rugby Park club in 11^th position; only ahead of a Dundee United side in their Premiership death throes.

In the case of Kilmarnock, there is no points deduction to obscure his performance as manager. Kilmarnock fans complained regularly of basic, route one tactics, the familiar complaint that his side’s lacked organisation and an inability to get the best out of the few decent players at his disposal. Killie conceded 20 goals in the seven games they lost at the back of the 2014/15 season and there was no sign of improved defensive solidity during the first half of 2015/16, when they lost 4-0 at home to Dundee, Ross County and Aberdeen and 5-2 at home to Thistle. Even as they imploded, Dundee United managed to bang five goals past Jamie MacDonald at Tannadice.

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Which all begs the question: what have the Rovers Board seen in him?

Some hint might be given by his interview on BBC Sportsound a few nights ago. When asked about his time at Kilmarnock he blamed the fans, the board, the players and, given another 10 minutes, would have undoubtedly lumped in the groundsman into his game of Blame Roulette. There wasn’t one point where he held his hands up and admitted that he did anything wrong. Presumably he did much the same in his interview with Rovers.

He’s also an ex-Hearts man and, having worked with McGlynn, there’s always a chance that this has made some impression on the Board. The Hearts connection has been fairly consistent over the past decade at Raith and, while it’s slightly nebulous, it’s not unreasonable to think that that has aided Locke’s case in some form.

The only other possibility is that he’s seen as the best candidate to work with a club of Raith’s size. If you ignore his actual record, Locke has two Premiership teams on his CV. Stephen Aitken and Darren Young have none and, despite them having had relative success and appearing to be in the ascendency as managers, they don’t have the experience of working with clubs within the top 15 in the country. This is at odds with the Board’s decision last summer though.

Although Ray McKinnon was not welcomed with overwhelming delight by fans (who is?), he’d had moderate success in the lower leagues and joined with a definite sense that he was on an upward trajectory. The Board were proven to be completely correct and 2015/16 was the best campaign in many years at Stark’s.

With McKinnon we set a template for recruiting managers we should have carried into this summer. Bring in a hungry, young manager with a degree of success behind them, support them and aim as high as possible. There’s no guarantees that it would have worked, but there’s an ambition about that process. Signing McKinnon last summer suggested the club’s desire for improvement; both on and off the pitch. His positivity was something the fans could get behind and his ability as a manger shone through as the season progressed. No one could be blamed for him joining his boyhood club a few weeks back, but it should have set in motion a desire for Raith to repeat the process.

Admittedly, the managerial options were not abundant, but there were some promising candidates. Instead, the board’s decision highlights a poverty of ambition; a sense of ‘this’ll do’. Or maybe they’ve forgotten to do research and been blind-sided by his interview answers. Either way, there’s no evidence to suggest Gary Locke will be a success at Stark’s and the decision threatens to undo all the progress made over the past 12 months.

Written by Andy Harrow