Quote: Wanderer "I still don't seriously understand, even allowing for the lack of experienced players recruited in pre-season, how we can go from 4th last season (even if that slightly flattered us) to being incapable of beating anyone including a Championship One team. It simply beggars belief!'"
Agreed. It really is hard to understand why things have gone into decline at the rate they have.
I suspect it's a combination of things, rather than one thing in isolation. A turning point seemed to occur when Mick Butterfield left the club. I doubt he had a crystal ball that he took away with him and I doubt that had he stayed everything would have been alright but this is the point I trace our change in fortunes back to.
The club decided to adopt the policy of youth because they thought it was the right thing to do. It turned out to be the single biggest mistake they could have made. In hindsight, I'm sure they know that now. You can't develop players without a proper youth team. They didn't go down this route because they wanted us to fail. They did it because they genuinely believed it was the right thing to do.
The problem in sport is that development must always come second to what's happening at the present because if the present goes wrong, the money dries up, and the future seems almost irrelevant, or even non-existent.
The lack of a fit Paul Cooke on the field is probably the single biggest other contribution to our decline. Whilst appreciating his on-field contributions last season, we probably didn't credit him enough for what he did. Time and fitness naturally becomes tougher as you get older and he wasn't able to do the same this season.
From the players' perspective, it must be hard to play to your full ability when confidence is low. You become afraid to make mistakes and you must start to wonder what you've got to do to get a win, especially after the successes of last season. It's not as though they were previously used to losing week-in, week-out.
From the club's perspective, putting right the wrongs isn't easy either. Do they throw a boat-load of money at the problem now in order to try to save us from going down, or do they save the money they have for a re-building programme next season?
We have to remember that spending money in sport doesn't guarantee you success, but done wisely it can certainly help.
None of us connected with the club, whether it's fans, players, chairman, CEO, or half-time draw ticket sellers, want us to be in this position. The club need to have a financially mapped out plan to deal with the problems, which hopefully will begin with the announcement of a coach, with experience, who can start to turn things around.
In the meantime, we need to all try to stick together and back the team (and club) to help us get back to where we want to be.
