Scottish teams Hearts and Alloa, under the Scotland 1 Division, have faced each other seven times, with Hearts winning six of the matches, thus leaving Alloa with just a win. With both teams about to lock horns together in a few weeks, it is important to assess the coaching style of the teams’ coaches. It is important to note that Hearts is first on the table while Alloa sits at the base of the table (10th position). Hearts’ coach is Robbie Neilson while Alloa is currently coached by Peter Grant. These teams will match-up against each other sooner than later. Now if you’re betting, you can either go for the underdogs and reap good profits or you stay on the safe side and go for the champs. For your convenience, Online Betting Guide provides a list of bookmakers that cover this match-up.Before we move forward, you may want to explore a list of online bookmakers as provided by OLBG.com.
Robbie Neilson is a Scottish professional football manager and ex-player. As the current head coach of the Scottish Championship club, Hearts (or Heart of Midlothian), the oldest and most successful Scottish capital’s football club, he was determined to get Hearts out of the Championship. As Hearts' head coach in 2014, he won the Scottish Championship title in his first season. He had since then moved to Milton Keynes Dons and Dundee United before returning to Hearts in 2020.
During the 2015-16 Championship, the team won their opening five games to attain a top position in the league in September. Though it was unable to sustain the rising pace, Neilson was able to guide them to a comfortable third-placed finish to qualify for the European League during the first time of asking.
In his second spell in Hearts, the team was already on relegation to the Scottish Championship after the truncated 2019–20 season, in June 2020. Neilson led the team to the 2019-2020 Scottish Cup Final upon defeating Hibernian in a 2-1 victory. This victory led to the team’s qualification for Scottish Cup finalists for the second season on October 31st, 2020. Not only that but he also led the team into winning 9 out of 9 competitions in the 2020-21 Scottish League Cup.
Back home in Germany, Neilson had a poor record. Nevertheless, many people at Hearts still hold him in high esteem. This is not unconnected to the numerous honors he had received as a result of his efforts as a manager of various teams. In December 2020, he was named the Scottish Championship Manager of the Month.
Apart from being a composed man, Neilson always strives to be a professional and it is the same energy that he brings to the team. He focuses on fitness and double training sessions as well as engages in long periods of analysis prior to a game. This, of course, is to increase his team’s winning chances. At times, he would hire out an Astroturf court. This was to help his player adapt to surfaces. He is renowned for paying great attention to details and his meticulous approach to coaching.
He would make sure he has a good training ground, squad, board, and fanbase, all of which are critical to getting the job done – winning. He is always working to make sure that players are coming and going around him while also enjoying training and winning matches. Any time the atmosphere wasn’t too good for training, he would give his players a bit of structure and stability. Beyond this, he would also be on the ground to address any issues they might face in the process of adapting to an ugly situation during training. The disappointment he met at MK when he moved out a group of players that had been together for a long time taught him great lessons.
Overall, he loves taking on new challenges as this is evident in his track record and coaching efforts.
Peter Grant is a Scottish football player and coach and is currently the manager of Alloa Athletic. Apart from having great playing years, he currently exhibits high capacity as a football coach. Prior to his arrival to Alloa, he had been Norwich City manager and Fulham caretaker manager. The fact that he went straight from being a player to become an assistant manager denied him the opportunity to garner enough experience to manage a team seamlessly. Nevertheless, with his stint as a coaching staff in Bournemouth, West Ham United, West Bromwich Albion, Celtic, and Birmingham City, he could have said to be brought up in environments where winning was the custom.
He was appointed manager of Alloa Athletic in July 2019.
According to him, he never had a managerial philosophy other than the players on his team. He always makes sure he puts them in the right position to bring out the best in them. While he would love the team to play like FC Barcelona in an attacking sense, he also prefers Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid style without the ball. His team has enjoyed wins as well as suffered defeats. He attributed a few of the defeats to his inability to poor time management.
During his first role since his July appointment, he faced great challenges involving adapting to a new type of player. This is because he no longer coaches stars that have been placed on wages; rather, he has to manage a squad that is only functioning on a part-time basis. This is because most of them are actively involved in policing the streets as well as spend a significant number of days in the insurance trade. While everyone else saw the team as cannon fodder, he was able to motivate the players as well as give them the mentality of always going into every game with the resolve to win.
His irrefutable coaching pedigree was reflected in the team’s dauntless display against Dunfermline. It was a story of an overwhelming victory by part-timers that had to overcome cases of injury. Grant was unable to name the team’s starting lineup until an hour to the kick-off. This was as he awaited the availability of skipper Andy Graham and talisman Alan Trouten. The team beat all odds to win the match. Grant, of course, attributed the win to the determination of the players as they had to assume unstable positions to secure the win.