Ex-Portsmouth coach announces League One departure as Fratton Park comparison made

A former Pompey assistant manager has announced his departure from League One side Bristol Rovers following the conclusion of the 2023/24 campaign.

Kevin Bond, who enjoyed his first stint as Fratton Park assistant manager under Alan Ball in 1998, joined Rovers as first-team coach on a part-time basis in November, assisting Andy Mangan during his period as caretaker manager before Matt Taylor was appointed in a permanent capacity in December.

The club has concluded the season in 15th position with Taylor confirming he would be having conversations with his backroom staff and goalkeeping coach Anssi Jaakkola and Head of Data and Analysis Adam Mahoney have already confirmed via social media accounts they will be departing Memorial Stadium.

It was Bond’s decision to depart from BS7, despite being handed an offer to stay by Taylor, and the former Bournemouth and Queens Park Rangers manager believes it to be the right time to leave a club to which he will be ‘eternally grateful.’

Speaking to Bristol Live, Bond said: “It’s come to the end of the season and I feel like the time is right for me to call it a day at the club. My time is done here. As you know I came back initially for Andy Moangan who had asked me to come back. He was obviously trying to get the job on a full-time basis if he could. He was short staffed so asked me to come which I was happy to do. I like Andy, I think he’s good at his job, and I think one day he’ll go on to be a good manager.

"I came back for him but in reality he was never going to get the job. I can see that now. I think the owners wanted to make a bit of a statement in terms of making, what they saw, as their own signing in terms of the manager.”

Bond confessed that the thought he would depart along with Mangan in December but stayed on to help the incoming Taylor.

“It would have been new to Matt”, Bond continued. “Obviously everything and everybody was new to him and I’m sort of familiar with everything so I agreed to stay on and enjoyed my time working with him.

“Supporting him and trying to help in whatever way I could, whether that was on the training ground or in any other way talking with the coaches who were great and all of the players who I obviously knew anyway who have always been brilliant with me. I sort of think Matt’s well and truly got his feet under the table and understands Bristol Rovers now and I think it would be the right thing to do so I’m happy to call it a day really.”

The Gas are now set to endure a huge summer of change with a ‘new-look’ squad expected over the coming months and Bond has compared the upcoming summer to his time at Fratton Park.

“(It's a) Massive summer," the former Rovers coach announced. "Funnily enough, in one of my first coaching jobs in the early 2000s, Harry Redknapp took over the reigns at Portsmouth in the Championship and in the space of one summer changed the entire team. He must have signed, I don’t know, 10, 12 players, more than that perhaps, and assembled a completely brand new team which, in our experience, very rarely works.”

Highlights of Bond’s CV include a second stint with the Blues under Redknapp before joining Glenn Roeder at Newcastle in 2006. Bond then once again re-united with the ex-Pompey head coach Redknapp at Tottenham Hotspur before enjoying a double cup win as manager of the Hong Kong Premier League side Pegasus.

The 66-year-old then headed back to the UK where he was appointed first-team coach of Aston Villa in 2016 before once again teaming up with Redknapp as assistant at Birmingham City.

Bond was also a key figure in Rovers’ League Two promotion season in 2015/16 - in which The Pirates scored 7-0 in the final game of the season to seal third place - and in his departure from the Memorial Stadium, he has reflected on those achievements.

“I thought I had seen most things in football until I tumbled across that last day of the season which if I ever explain it to people who never heard about what we did. It’s properly like a story you could make a film out of; it was bizarre. I remember standing on the touchline when the seventh goal went in and I’m sort of thinking to myself, ‘really, has that just happened?’ It was absolutely unbelievable. So I’ll never forget that.

“I enjoyed my time there so much”, Bond concluded. “Everyone was fantastic to me, really brilliant. Some of my best football experiences have come at Bristol Rovers so I thoroughly enjoyed my two stints there and I will be eternally grateful. “