Statement from Board

[jackal2]

After 10 years of permanent panic and the revolving managerial door of the previous 2 owners, which brought us incrementally downward from L1 through the trapdoor into non league and a hair’s breath from bankruptcy, I’m happy to go with cool heads and metrics.

Yeah. Taken on the whole it's certainly worked better so far than the approach of several previous owners/boards!

I think in terms of choice of words the board have made better statements in the past - I'm not sure 'metrics' is going to connect with the average fan in the pub - but on the flip side you could say they're not being condescending by dumbing down the message - it assumes a decent level of intelligence in the reader (wisely or not!).

The underlying message for me is unchanged from the club's basic position for the past three years. There are no silly five year plans, there is no panic in the pursuit of success, we won't be breaking the bank or making any knee-jerk decisions (on Head Coaches or anything else) just because we have a bad or indeed a good run of results. The aim is basically very steady, calm, incremental improvement, whilst acknowledging that there are ups and downs and variables in football that you can never completely control (which is why five year plans were always nonsense).

The first aim this season was always to consolidate and we've achieved that. They acknowledge it would have been nice to achieve more, like reaching the play-offs again, and they're disappointed it isn't to be, but there's no panic because we haven't. We simply take what we can out of this season and try to learn from and build upon it.

The football fan mentality isn't necessarily interested in 'sustainability' (until a club spends itself to the brink of bankruptcy and then fans cry on the pitch and blame the chairman for the financial mess!) but that's precisely why football club owners shouldn't think like fans or become too obsessed with being liked by fans all the time - that's where Trew and Hardy's egos overtook them and led to bad decisions. Sometimes you have to accept that fans won't always be happy with the short-term situation, but that doesn't mean its right to abandon an overall strategy.

If I have a disagreement with an aspect of the statement it's regarding the defending. I actually think the number of goals we've conceded is mainly down to the lack of natural and good quality defensive players, both in defence itself and in midfield, and if that isn't the focus of our major upgrade work in the summer then we could have problems. We're a soft touch when we're not in possession - far too 'nice' to play against. Currently we have an imbalance: too many creators and not enough destroyers, so I'll be interested to see who we bring in during the summer. I want to see a lot more bite and snarl in the team next season, and some more players who are proper defenders. If we don't conceded as many goals next season, we'll definitely be on an upward trajectory, because we've certainly got attacking talent.