Steve King has left Gloucester City after guiding them to the National North Play Offs for the first time in their history.
It is a no brainer to get straight on the phone and beg him to come back to PVR.
He plays an exciting and entertaining brand of football (the polar opposite of the dross weve put up with this season) and has a book of contacts second to none at this level.
The amount of time and money the clubs wasted on substandard rubbish is absurd, the football has been dire, the manager is blatantly simply not good enough despite his self assessments and if we have any genuine ambition to progress then they need to act nowbecause I assure you he wont be unemployed for long.
The whole club situation is bizarre, as none of it makes any footballing sense.
The key to everything is recognising the owner has an intense personal attachment to the manager, and commitment to that attachment stops the owner from seeing things in a football commonsense way - that the manager is below average, league results underperformed, early cup exits cut back revenue, all round attendances and revenue suffered as a result leading to financial problems for the club, and sticking with him as a manager risks bankrupting the club, so for the long term future of the club the safest thing is to change manager.
This is all indisputable, shown by results and attendances and income, that anyone but the owner can grasp, as football is meant to be a results business, but this owner demonstrably puts his personal life before the club good.
There are all sorts of warning signs the owner ignores. Normally a manager has lots of people he can draw on as assistants, but no one came along with Warren. That red flag suggests there aren't assistant managers or coaches out there who would want to work with him again.
The same red flag applies with players, he managed a lot before, but only Jamie and Medy rejoined him at Welling, and now Jamie has already gone. So it doesn't look as though players want to stick or work with him, already Chi, Ade, Rob, Aaron and Jamie have gone, and no one is yet announced as staying. I expect a couple will stay, but that is a long way from the solid core of 10 players that extensions were planned to be offered to, or maybe were offered, but were rejected.
The problem with this is that other clubs are miles more stable than us, and dont have our mess of continually rebuilding each season. Ebbsfleet for example have got promoted, but only released 4 players, as they know the benefit of having a tried and tested squad. Other teams have announced their retained list and are filling on the few resulting gaps. We on the other hand look like we are having a major rebuild because of the player stampede to get away from Warren, and avoid wasting a second season with him, so we are clearly scraping around for players.
We underperformed and finished 9th from bottom, yet the women's team are top of their league and the U23s are second in theirs and play in really nice atmospheres, unlike the toxicity of the first team under the toxic manager.
There are all these better managerial options out there, but we won't look at them, as the owner has superglued Warren to the managerial role. It is all a recipe for disaster, and the reality of the financial losses from sticking with Warren are already evident. You start to wonder if the misguided owners will end up with a club with no players, no fans, and then no club. Sticking with the manager looks too high a price to pay.
Given the lack of communication from the club Im not sure if the various statements from JH are based on fact or conjecture?
But at this level the owner, whoever that is, is probably involved as a hobby rather than as a business, so I can understand him looking after his inner circle.
Also, at this level, a number of the players have agents to negotiate better packages, or identify better opportunities.
so although I found last season very disappointing / frustrating (and Ill not be renewing the season ticket), we do need to be realistic.
Not sure you can compare where the womens and u23 finished in their leagues. Am pretty sure we would finish above both of them in they played in our league and if we played in their league
Just to explain the point, I was thinking it is about making best use of the resources one has, at whatever level one plays at, so the womens and U23s have clearly done that very effectively, and entertainingly, the first team didn't.
I saw a Steve King interview, and loved it, he talked about a game they fell behind in they needed to win, so he changed formation to 4 2 4, which is bonkers in a way, but also makes sense if the priority is to try to get a goal. But I am still scarred from all the games last season, where we took off an attacking player to put an extra defender on.
Oldoak2, it's cool, a risk of sticking ones head out and commenting very clearly is sometimes one gets proven wrong by later events, but that is fine, a risk worth taking if one is wise or experienced or says what is based on what one knows at the time. So inevitably I'll get some things wrong from time to time, but overall in time nearly everything I say turns out to be shown as accurate. It is just frustrating that we aren't improving, getting bigger crowds, so able to offer better packages to keep our better players, so are stuck in this bad cycle of near total rebuilding each season.
