Cod Almighty | Article
by Richard Lord
10 September 2017
Rich fears we've replaced ambition and hunger with has-beens... and thinks the consequences could be catastrophic
I got very annoyed on Saturday night about the plight of GTFC. I want to get this off my chest now in case we win our next match and people suddenly think all is well again, because it won't be.
The way I see our current situation is this. If you have players in your squad who were good enough to get you out of non-League and who have a desire to stay in the Football League (because that's where they believe they truly belong) then they're going to do all they can to thrive in the Football League. What they may lack in skill will be more than made up for in heart and fight. They have something to prove. Think Craig Disley. Think Shaun Pearson. Look at Jamey Osborne, Sam Jones and where Omar Bogle is now.
I'd rather watch a team of those types of players run themselves into the ground every week because they know how the fans feel. They might not win every week. They might not get us into the play-offs. But they knew what it was like to be in non-League. They went through it. They felt it. They were one of us. And they'd do anything to avoid going back to non-League again.
We let a manager with three promotions leave because we didn't back his vision. We sacked another young, ambitious manager because we didn't bother to check at the interview how he planned to evolve the squad and its playing style
But what do we have today? A bunch of 'seasoned' Football League players going through the motions, picking up another wage packet, nothing to prove, each on a career trajectory which, if drawn on a chart, would decline so steeply that you could bung a couple of flagpoles in it and feature it on Ski Sunday. Players oblivious to the emotions we were put through between 2010 and 2016.
We let a manager with three promotions on his CV leave because we didn't back his vision. We sacked another young, ambitious manager who got a tiny club promoted on a shoestring budget because we didn't bother to check at the interview stage how he planned to evolve the squad and its playing style.
Instead we replaced him with a manager who has never won a promotion; whose sense of loyalty doesn't stretch beyond a couple of seasons; whose track record of promoting youth is pretty much non-existent; and whose teams won't win any awards for their style of play. But he's mates with our majority shareholder, so that's OK.
Then we've got a non-communicative board that has clearly learnt nothing from being in the Conference. It is currently doing everything it can to surgically remove the club from the community it's supposed to be at the heart of, by dumping it on the outskirts of the town like it's Scunthorpe 1989. We even have an embarrassing and non-engaging club Twitter account that is getting shitter by the minute.
It's early in the season, I know. There are 40 games to go, but I'm damned if I'm going to stand by and say nothing if we even come close to being involved in another relegation dog scrap that threatens the future and existence of the club I feel so passionately about. I won't let that day at Wembley in 2016 be ruined by the same people making the same mistakes, all over again.
Has Rich hit the nail on the head? Or is it too early to judge Slade's squad? Tell us