Cod Almighty | Diary

Determined as ever to find his lost ted

4 April 2018

During Russell Slade's first spell with our football club in the mid-2000s, your original/regular Diary enjoyed reading the interview in which Michael Reddy described the manager's persistence in persuading him to join the Mariners from Sunderland. Having looked long at Reddy and liked what he'd seen, a determined Slade waged a fairly exhausting campaign of visits and phone calls until the player agreed to join him at Blundell Park.

Back then I liked it when Slade signed players. Sometimes they didn't work out. Ronnie Bull and Anthony Williams weren't the best for Town. But mostly they were good. Reddy, Justin Whittle, both the Joneses, Jean-Paul Kalala, Paul Bolland and Steve Mildenhall were admirable and effective performers. Sometimes they'd even built a reputation higher up the leagues, and you were impressed that Town were able to sign players like Dean Gordon and Curtis Woodhouse.

For the most part, too, you got the impression that he'd signed these players not just off the back of an isolated scouting report or recommendation but from detailed knowledge. He'd done his homework, and he seemed able to identify and recruit not just decent players but good professionals – strong characters who you could rely on to commit to the cause, and leaders who would not give up when times were tough.*

So when Slade came back, while I had my doubts about his style of play and the potential divisiveness of his appointment, I looked forward to watching players who were made of the right stuff. One of Paul Hurst's great triumphs was in building a squad of footballers who appeared to care about their results, which led to a great bond between fans and players. If Slade was still putting in the legwork to research his targets, making sure he only signed players who would give their last breath for the Town, then perhaps we could expect similarly heart-warming determination.

Instead under Slade v2.0 we were expected to get behind an anonymous team which looked like it was bought as a job lot as a favour to an agent. This impression becomes all the more plausible with the revelation that in just 12 months Town have spunked £42,232 on agents' fees. To put it another way, that's one season ticket every two and a half days.

If Slade had arrived during the summer, with just a handful of players under contract, then it might have been understandable if his recruitment had not been underpinned by the depth of research we'd normally expect, and if one or two signings had not worked out. But there was no need to panic-buy. Slade inherited a perfectly functional upper-mid-table squad. And crucially, although many members of the 2016 promotion squad had already moved on, there was still an opportunity for him to retain enough of those talismanic figures to keep the supporters' love alive.

Instead, of course, John Fenty's friend chose neither to retain the proven players already at his disposal, nor to exercise the necessary diligence about those he would unnecessarily ship in to replace them. Let's think about that for a minute. A manager who would later plead for his job by describing himself as "a builder, not a fixer" decided not to build on the solid foundations he already had, brought in a wrecking ball to begin from scratch, and then failed spectacularly to fix the crisis he didn't need to create.

Sheffield United supporter and football manager Neil Warnock was once asked what he'd do if he were ever placed in charge of the Blades' city rivals. The response, predictably, was something along the lines of he would get Wednesday relegated, get a massive pay-off, and retire to his farm in Devon. There is no plausible motive to underlie any accusation that Slade embarked upon a deliberate act of destruction at Blundell Park. But at the very least our club needs to end its reliance on agents, immediately and permanently.

*except at the Millennium Stadium, obvs