Just how many experienced pros does a team need?
For the level we are at, we already ha :-
John White
Mark Oxley
Tim Dieng
Jason Demetriou
Harry Lennon
Nathan Ralph
Mark Molesley then brought in :-
Alan McCormack
Jordan Green
Sim Akinola
Who all had good experience of FL or at least senior football (Akinola - Conference)
The loan signings of Olyinka, ANG, Taylor all looked, on paper, like good business, so overal it was arguable that we were in pretty decent shape overall.
What MM could never account for was John White playing on game 1 of the season and then missing 11 games on the spin!! Dieng played on game 1 then went missing for 5 games, signing McCormack and then not seeing him for 8 games (and counting!), Akinola signed and while letting Kelman and Humphrys leave we then haven’t seen the fella put his boots on once!
On top of that Harry Lennon is clearly carrying a problem, Demetriou missed 3/4 games with his knee issue, Green looked the part and ends up going back to Barnsley injured, now we have Ralph out for the season......
So from that list of 9 players that arguably all provided some nous / experience we’ve only seen 4 on a semi regular basis and currently only Oxley as the fully fit one who’s been ever present!!
If all those 9 are fully fit and you keep Hutchinson, Kelman and Humphrys then I’m not sure we see Sterling or possibly Olyinka but it’s arguable the squad would be in pretty good shape.
What we are missing is a forward, no question. But did anyone envisage Akinola having these problems? Most on here backed the decision to let Humph leave and again most on here decided that Kelman had downed tools, blamed him for the loss at home to Morecambe and were pleased to see the back of him!!!
So what do we do? Well those suggesting getting rid of the manager are mental!!! When you make a long term commitment to someone like we have with Mark, how on earth does it make sense to get rid and pay off 6 members of staff who are on 3/4 year contracts? How does a club - any club - let alone this one, finance that? Even if you can, what is a new manager going to inherit and how’s he going to improve things?
MM and his staff are here to stay. You’ll be foolish to think otherwise and to try and wish him away. Save yourself the stress and the worry of it and accept he’s here, accept he’s staying and accept he’s working within some pretty serious restraints.
The performances aren’t directionless like I’ve seen before. There are signs of improvement every week. Players will gradually come back to fitness and when they do, you’ll see a very different spine to the side than the one you’ve seen so far and with that a more resilient style to provide a backbone to some of the better football we’ve played in patches and with that will come some more consistency.
Performances v Crawley and Exeter showed promise and some very fine lines in referee decisions and Lady Luck in those games and the ones v Morecambe, Tranmere and Oldham would realistically see us on 5/6 even 7/8 points and we’d all be optimistic about the platform we were building.
The alternative is to scream for his head, pay him and his staff off, as we did with Powell (Matthews and Keen), Bond, Waddock (Toderov), Campbell (HH and Cole) and start over again with a six week wait for a replacement, a few hundred grand lighter, the same players, the same stadium, the same or worse finances, the same owner......what’s that going to achieve?