Cod Almighty | Diary

Dave Moore's Black and White Army

25 October 2016

Wicklow Diary writes: Recently I cursed a lack of midweek diary filler. This week we've been hit by an avalanche. Be careful what you wish for now that we're all up to our necks in it.

With Paul Hurst in charge, this season promised to be a stress-free jolly for the fans. We'd bounce along with a perhaps a play-off push and a shot at division three. The unbearable and oppressive fug that hung over us in the Conference was gone. Hopefully for good.

From Hurst's perspective, his stock was rising with every game and just a month ago we had the Kenilworth Road uppercut. His audacious rebuild of a promotion winning team was beginning to look justified. A similar if slightly muted celebration greeted the win at Cambridge. This was in front of fans that sang his name for half the game including one exhilarating 22-minute stretch. The win left us sitting pretty in the play-off positions. This is on. Just eight days later Hurst sat in his new Shrewsbury training top and spoke of a 'fresh challenge'.

What the hell happened? Our local media are performing admirably to filter the avalanche for actual fact and news. However the "pursuit for truth" as Matt Dean put it hasn't caught the Pulitzer Prize judges attention just yet. The most successful manager for twenty years has left and no one really knows why.

Maybe Hurst has got masochistic tendencies. Having spent years in partnership next to the Shouty One, this can’t be ruled out. With promotion sealed, he missed the stress and misery of having Scott or several hundred Town fans screaming in close proximity. The Matrix kept falling apart when people were too happy – maybe Hurst is the same. Accordingly, he traded in his win-win promotion tilt to be mired in a relegation battle with a commute that will leave him on the phone to Martin Butler looking for a good chiropractor.

A less facetious and more likely explanation is the nuclear option. The Telegraph strengthened it's own case for a Pulitzer by running an article yesterday asking What would happen if a nuclear bomb hit Grimsby? You'll have to visit the comments section for the inevitable wag answering with "a million quids worth of improvements". In a footballing sense, it's easy to suggest something nuclear must have happened behind the scenes at Blundell Park. Hurst couldn't even hang around for a decent job near his Sheffield home. He had to get out and fast.

Obviously this suggests an involvement from the majority shareholder. Cod Almighty has a reputation for being overly critical of John Fenty. We're not. We're usually just stating facts. Every time Fenty intervenes there's a good chance for everything to go tits up. When he goes quiet, you can nearly forget he's not around. But he is. He's the strange clicking from the central heating pump. It just about works but if you don’t get it sorted it might one day blow the house up.

Perhaps we're getting our knickers in a twist over a simple explanation that fits with Hurst's conservative approach to tactics on the pitch. The inner workings of GTFC are not what they should be. Have we gone from being a League club stuck in non-League to a non-League club in the League? Great offers from Sheffield Wednesday or Rotherham might one day come for Hurst but they might not. It could be said that hedging his bets and picking Shrewsbury might represent his own career Parslow Point.

Putting the reason for his departure aside, I wish him all the best and thank him for stabilising a club that was in freefall. A club that has in the past needed either a genius or an insane amount of talent to get promoted. Those aforementioned conservative tactics could sometimes be frustrating. The temptation is to blame defeat to Cheltenham on the distraction of his imminent departure. However, the display followed a familiar home pattern of miss chances, concede, scratch head for remainder of game.

One thing he brought was stability. As I've mentioned before – some credit lies here with John Fenty and the board. When you look at Town's history, stability is something you underestimate the value of at your peril. Whenever I've considered the possibility of Hurst leaving and us appointing a new manager, I thought of Brad Pitt knocking out Goodnight Anderson in Snatch. "Now... we are fucked." The unsuccessful appointments in our history far out-weigh winners. I wanted Hurst to get us at least a one division buffer above non-League before he left.

There are lots of opinions on Hurst's time and I'm not going to debate them all. One that needs knocking on the head though is that he took too long to get us promoted. Too-big-for-the-conference Wrexham got another new manager today. He's their sixth since they fell into the conference in 2008. They are 14th in their league. Of course we could have sacked Hurst after one of his gradual improvement 'failures'. Maybe we'd have caught lightning in a bottle and romped to the championship under the new guy. More likely is that we'd be vying with Wrexham for 14th in the conference.

Let's look to the future and beyond caretaker Dave Moore into the dirty world of cheap options, contacts and Steve Evans' no questions asked guaranteed promotion. Dave is getting another physio in to help, and Stuart Watkisses has been spotted helping out at Cheapside this morning too, by the way.

Matt Dean's report that the club had "drawn up a shortlist of six and have a preferred candidate" has been denied by GTFC. This could be seen as an attempt to dispel any notion of competence at the club that might be difficult to live up to in the future. Another possibility is that the club want to quell the notion that they were already drawing up a shortlist last week.

Nigel Adkins has been mentioned by well-known Town fans Will Hill and Vic Chandler. That seems as far-fetched as Hurst joining Shrewsbury. We don't know how much compo we received from Shrewsbury but I'd assume it will give the club some help in attracting a manager like Adkins. By the way, if you're having a bet on the next manager and you're not John Fenty, cup your ears like Hurst did at Wembley and you'll hear every bookie laughing at you.

The name Steve Evans has been thrown in by the type of lads who probably have a Premier League bit on the side like Chelsea or Man City. As original/regular Diary said last week, you don't always win. I'll add a corollary to his proposition. When you lose, do you want to look in the mirror and see Steve Evans looking back at you?

We didn't always win with Paul Hurst in charge but he's a thoroughly decent bloke. He gave us a team to be proud of again and when we eventually won, we won big. Doing it in one season wouldn't have been the Grimsby style anyway. Above all, I'll remember who was in charge when the phrase "We've got our club back" became popular.

Thanks Hursty and UTM.