The wonder is he lasted so long. Back in 2008, a 14-match winning run at Brunton Park bought John Ward precisely eight months of self-protection at Carlisle United. In the north-east, Mick Wadsworth lost seven home games on the spin and is now Hartlepool’s ex-manager.
The reflex response to the Monkey Hangers’ stringing-up of United’s 1995 leader is to ask what on earth they are playing at, sacking a boss who took a modestly-sized club to 13th in a division where giants stalk the land.An alternative question to throw at the Victoria Park high command is: what kept you?
At surface level Wadsworth’s dismissal is bananas. If the 61-year-old was capable of leading Carlisle’s second-closest geographical rivals on a nine-match unbeaten run from the start of the campaign, how can he now be unfit for office? Surely Pools overachieved in August and September and have simply now settled into a more realistic position?
Take Charlton, the Sheffield clubs and Huddersfield out of the maths and are Hartlepool not, more or less, doing as well as could be expected, if not better? Three points south of United, who have genuine designs on a play-off place? Leading a ‘gaffer’ to the door in such circumstances seems crude.
Maybe, maybe. Maybe not. There is a sharp message in the fate of League One’s first fallen trenchcoat-wearer of term and it applies just as readily to the Blues as to any other club in the land. Wadsworth’s Carlisle links add local poignancy to the tale but Hartlepool’s actions deserve examination before we all rush off to condemn the treatment of an old favourite.
None of us who read Tuesday’s news and called it madness had to endure those seven home losses. None of us neutrals was parked on a chilly seat inside Hartlepool’s ground every other week, hoping they’d produce something to lift civic spirits but seeing only grey, repetitive failure.
Normally one defeat at Brunton Park is enough to set alarms off in some quarters. Imagine seven of these off the reel? Seven successive weekends of inadequacy, with one penalty in all that time your only reason to cheer?
The apocalypse: that’s what I envisage if something like that ever came to pass down Warwick Road. Inquests going long into the night. Computers short-circuiting through the stampede of enraged fans onto internet forums. And a dark raincloud over Greg Abbott’s head.
No information is available here on whether Hartlepool’s trigger-pullers attended all the away games where Wadsworth coaxed some better things out of his team. But I’ll put money down that they sat through the prolonged slump by the North Sea.
What is now inarguable is that playing and prospering at home is so much more important than thriving in alien stadia. Home is where a team can define itself in front of friendly thousands, instead of a few hundred travelling die-hards.
Home is where a team is supposed to set down its identity, its patterns and its shapes, before taking these ideas off to other places. It doesn’t always work like that, of course, but that seems to be a spectator’s instinct. And, now we know, a director’s, too.
This column is not in the business of supporting strange sackings. The nomadic Wadsworth gets due sympathy as he searches for yet another home. The more you stare at the sequence that did for him, though, the more excruciating it looks.
Given another Cumbrian spin, that accusing stat of seven-in-a-row at home was never achieved by the least-admired of Carlisle’s own bosses. Roddy Collins never lost seven in a row at Brunton Park. Nor did Martin Wilkinson.
Nor did Paul Simpson, even though he took zero points from 12 games in 2003/4 before his genius for rebuilding kicked in. Even that hollow Carlisle team got a home win early (3-2 against Rochdale) and then, after losing their next six, beat Torquay 2-0.
Ward, whose historic 14 successive Brunton Park wins took United to the brink of promotion four seasons back, stayed bulletproof only until he lost nine from 10 (home and away) the following autumn.
Here we learned that a man can assemble a formidable body of work at home and then find it offers him no armour against a couple of hideous months down the line.
In a sensible world (and in most businesses, surely) a success rate like Ward’s would guarantee something more than just a stay of execution. Yet how many fans were assembling placards to protest against his exit, when it came?
It is the way of things, even though it must make managers wonder what’s the point of it all, if the best they can achieve by winning at home is to keep the mob silent for another short stretch of time.
The alternative, though, is to enter a world of recrimination, doubt and, then, eventually, the guillotine – a planet Wadsworth arrived at on Tuesday afternoon after taking training a few hours earlier, oblivious to what was coming.
The advice to Abbott is simply to recognise the job-preserving value of winning at Brunton Park, as often as possible, not to howl pointlessly at the sight of a fellow boss receiving his cards on debatable grounds.
A debate, of course, means hearing both sides. It has been argued, in the last four days, that Wadsworth was a victim of his own success. Not at home, he wasn’t.
by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment