JOSH Earl admits Barnsley’s players have probably let outgoing head coach Conor Hourihane down this season and that the Reds have ‘underperformed as a club this season.’
Hourihane told the players on Saturday morning that he would be leaving at the end of the campaign.
Defender Earl told the Chronicle: “I had no inkling at all. It was a surprise to me, especially at this stage in the season.
“I’ve got a good relationship with Conor. I’ve enjoyed this season with him. We’ve not had the success that everyone would have wanted, but it’s been an enjoyable season working under him, so it came as a little bit of shock.
“I always look at: have we let him down as players, potentially?
“It’s never nice when you build a relationship over a long period of time.
“I see Conor as the gaffer every single day when I come into work.
“It’s never nice to hear that someone’s leaving. But it’s just one of those things that happen all the time in football.
“You get used to it.”
Earl admits the Reds should be higher than 13th in League One.
“It’s not just Conor.
“It’s not just the players.
“It’s a whole collective as a club. We’ve underperformed as a club this season.
“And there’s probably been times where, as players, we’ve let the coaching staff down and we’ve not performed to the best of our ability. It’s football at the end of the day, it does happen.
“So we can’t really look at it that way. It’s more of a whole collective.”
Earl arrived at Oakwell in January 2024 when the Reds would finish in the play-offs before two mid-table seasons.
“It’s football. We’ve got as good of a squad now as we did then, in my opinion. We’ve got a younger squad, potentially. We’ve not got maybe as many experienced players.
“But the quality in the squad we’ve got at the moment is frightening.
“There’s a lot of very, very good young players coming through.
“And for whatever reason, we’ve just not performed well enough since the first season that I came here. We can always hope and there’s definitely going to be a chance next season again to rebuild and to get new ideas.
“But this club deserves to be higher than the position we’ve put it in at the moment.
“There’s only us that can change that next season.”
Earl missed Tuesday’s loss at Stevenage due to injury. The Reds made a series of defensive mistakes.
“You’re going to have days, unfortunately, where we don’t perform as well as we want to. It happens a lot.
“I’ve had many performances in my career which I’m not proud of.
“We’ve just got to brush it under the carpet and crack on.
“We’ve got that many games. It’s difficult to keep the high performance.
“It’s not easy on people’s bodies.
“We’ve not got the biggest of squads. So there’s not been a massive amount of rotation.
“So there’ll be some tired bodies.”
