So, farwell then, Terry Brown

When it comes to getting rid of TB, Defra have got nothing on AFC Wimbledon. Just seven league games into the new season, after a home defeat to Torquay that left us with one point from the previous six games, the board decided that enough was enough and gave Terry Brown and assistant Stuart Cash their marching orders.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get to any games so far this season, so much of what follows may well be palpably ill-informed and about as much use as 99% of all blogs anyway, but that hasn’t stopped me before (unlike pure laziness which constantly thwarts my blogging efforts) so I’m going to throw my two penneth into the mix.

I’m gutted that Terry is leaving. Or rather, I’m gutted that it got to the point where the board felt they had no option. It obviously wasn’t just the poor league form (and two cup defeats) that did for Terry – a disastrous pre-season didn’t help, and the memory of the nightmare run of form at the end of 2011 will have left many fans keen to see a change at the top sooner rather than later. It’s a shame, though, that fans choose the start of that poor run as the starting point of their analysis of Terry’s reign. More logically, and rather than choosing a starting date that suits the ‘Brown out’ argument, we should look at last season as a whole, in which case a 16th place finish (averaging just over a point a game) in our first league season on a small budget is no disgrace. If we want to blame Terry for the bad run, we should also give him credit for the good run at the start of the season when a win at Morecambe put us in 3rd place after 12 games. Or we should look at the second half of the season, when we still averaged just over a point a game, but without the rollercoaster ride of the first half.

Terry had - somewhat infamously given our current struggles - asserted that there was plenty of ‘dead wood’ in league 2, which would make our survival in league 2 an easier task. Unfortunately, his assessment was a couple of years out of date. Now that the ‘2-up 2-down’ arrangement between League 2 and the conference has been in place for a while, and with a certain amount of money being invested in non-league clubs such as Crawley and Fleetwood, the supply of dead wood is drying up. As an example, last season saw the very poor Hereford and Macclesfield replaced by affluent, ambitious Fleetwood and a rejuvenated York City. Of course, in some ways, that underlines what an achievement it was to achieve promotion from such a tough league as the Conference, especially when Crawley had effectively bought first place, leaving it a race for the relative lottery of the play-offs. I believe that if we hadn’t won against Luton, a team stripped of Kedwell, Mohammed, and the prodigal Gregory wouldn’t have been promotion contenders the following season. Even this season, with Luton surely due to go up sooner rather than later, and the financial clout of Newport County and Forest Green, and strong teams like Mansfield, Wrexham and Grimsby in the division, it’s tempting to conclude that there’s still just enough dead wood around (I’m looking at you, Barnet and Dagenham and Redbridge) to make it easier to survive in League 2 than win promotion from the Conference. Fortunately for us, we took our chance and last season we saw a combination of a miracle start, some inspiration from loan signings that snapped us out of a bad run, and the presence of enough remaining dead wood combine to keep us in league 2.

Personally – and I admit this is partly influenced by the facts that a) I think Terry is a decent, honest bloke, and b) I haven’t witnessed first-hand how bad we’ve been this season – I’d have liked him to have been given longer to put things right. As a general rule I’d make ten league games the minimum before sacking a manager, and wouldn’t have complained if Terry had been given an extra five games on top of that to allow for the fact that he was rebuilding the team and had suffered from a series of injuries to key players. 15 points from 15 games would have represented a reasonable target to set Terry and his team. Whilst fans can afford to be subjective about such things, for the most part those running a football club - and therefore responsible for managing the manager - should set objective and measurable targets, as would/should happen in most other industries. “Play nice football” doesn’t come under either “objective” or “measurable”, and any manager would tell you that the last thing they want is a chairman or board of directors who think they know how to manage a football team.

So what could justify pulling the trigger at such an early stage? Firstly, there is the fact that for all my talk about objective targets, the people running a football club are normally fans as well as directors (which is more true for us than any other club), and if the performances of the team really have been as dire as some reports suggest, and the performances of certain of Terry’s signings (I’m looking at you, Warren Cummings) have been as bad as some reports suggest, then I wouldn’t blame the board for deciding that there is no realistic prospect of TB and his team achieving their targets. Secondly, there’s the possibility that the board already have a replacement in mind. Any good company will know how they would go about replacing a key employee should the need arise, whether it be because the person has been sacked, resigned, or walked under a bus. It may be that the board acted quickly so as not to miss out on the opportunity to recruit the person already identified as Terry’s successor. If that is the case, we might have a new manager in place fairly quickly. Conveniently enough, Andy Scott - who managed Brentford to the League 2 title in 2009 - was in the ground last night as a guest of Torquay boss Martin Ling. “It would be disrespectful to talk about Terry’s position until anything has been confirmed," he was reported as saying by the Croydon Guardian. "But I am out of work and would be interested in any job that became available in League One or Two. I dearly want to get back into the game." Read into that what you will.

Whoever the new man (or woman, let’s not be sexist) is, he/she will face the task of pulling the team together, and getting the most out of the players who remained from last year, and those brought in this year. The good news is that he (let’s be realistic) has plenty of time in which to do that. There are 39 league games left, in which he has to keep us ahead of at least two other teams in the division, whilst also giving us confidence that in future seasons we can do better than simply relying on being not as bad as dead wood in order to prosper in the division. Even with such a bad start, that shouldn’t be beyond a squad that includes the likes of Mat Mitchel-King, Pim Balkestein, Steven Gregory, Sammy Moore, and Jack Midson. Not all of Terry’s signings have been a roaring success (yep, you again, Cummings) but let’s not forget that all the good players of recent years, including the remaining players I’ve just listed, were all TB signings.

So – was it the right decision to sack Terry? I hate coming to this conclusion, and much as my heart says we should have given him more time, it probably was. Today is all the sadder because it’s impossible to overstate the contribution Terry has made to this club, and if ever anyone deserved to be able to walk away from a job on their own terms, it’s Terry Brown. But football is a results business, and as much as any of us wanted Terry to succeed, he wasn’t producing results. Even a club with as friendy an image as the fan-owned AFC Wimbledon can’t allow sentiment to get in the way of tough decisions, as we’ve seen today. Terry has said he’ll be at Wycombe on Saturday, where I’m sure he’ll get a fantastic reception from the travelling Dons fans who will appreciate everything he’s done for the club.

By guiding us to three promotions in four years Terry Brown has earned a prominent place in the history of Wimbledon football as a decent, honest, and above all hugely successful manager who led us back to where we belong - the Football League.

If the benchmark of success for a football manager is that he leaves the club in a better position than when he arrived, then there are surely very few more successful tenures than that of Terry Brown at AFC Wimbledon.

We found a team even worse than us! (Dons 2 Daggers 1)

Some match reports contain dull things. Like facts. Fortunately, because I don’t take notes during a game (though that might have relieved the simultaneous boredom and tension of having to watch this god-awful excuse for a football match) and because I’m writing this 2 days after the game, raw facts are few and far between. Besides, if that’s the sort of thing that turns you on, there’s the OS report or the brief highlights and report on the BBC website from where you can find out that we had more of the possession, but they had more shots on and off target, and more corners. At which point there’s probably room for a cliché about “the only stat that counts” being 2-1 in our favour. 

 

But, enough facts, and time for some opinion. As you may have already gathered, I wouldn’t put this game forward as a great advert for the beautiful game. It was tense, nervous, and scrappy. So I suppose there’s another cliché to roll out, which Terry Brown duly did in his post match interview: “it didn't matter about the performance, didn't matter about anything other than gaining our first three home points for a matter of time”.

So, given that we have three points to celebrate, I won’t dwell too much on how this performance was easily as poor as those against Herford and Plymouth, and how although players didn’t do too badly individually, they really didn’t look like a team, for which TB’s selection must take a lot of the blame. I’ve previously posted on how Jolley and Harrison don’t seem able to play together (see Team for Daggers ), and whether you call Saturday’s formation a 4-4-2 or 4-3-3, it didn’t look remotely cohesive.

Instead, I’ll concentrate on the positives, which are:

1. Everyone rolled their sleeves up and got stuck in, with Billy Knott and Sammy Moore putting in a hell of a shift in the centre of midfield. The effort, and enthusiasm for a challenge really couldn’t be faulted. Which leads to...
2. Judging by the way the players went to the bench to celebrate the goals, TB certainly hasn’t "lost the dressing room"
3. Jack Midson – another tireless effort, lots of intelligent movement, and a cracking left foot finish for his 18^th goal of the season. Other teams might get more chances than us, but with a quality finisher like Jack in the team, we’ve always got a chance.
4. Sam Hatton – best I’ve seen him play for a long time, and just shaded Midson for my man of the match.
5. Kieran Djilali – let’s hope his return can give us a bit more creativity so that that Midson chap doesn’t have to continue feeding off scraps for the rest of the season.
6. Pim Balkestein looks a quality defender. He and MMK (if they can last more than 45 minutes together) should make one of the better centre-half pairings in league 2. All we need now is a similar quality central midfielder...
7. Three points! 9 points clear of the relegation places.
8. And last but not least, the fans. From my viewpoint in the KRE, I couldn’t detect anything other than whole-hearted support from another big crowd. By now, Blackburn fans would have run out of paint and sheets with all the banners they’d have made calling for the manager, the board, the kit man, uncle Tom Cobley and all to be sacked if they were in our position. So give yourselves a pat on the back.

I think that pretty much covers it, but I’ll throw in some player ratings just to pad this out even further:

Brown:  Keeping 8 Distribution 4. If only we could somehow transplant Jack Turner’s distribution skills onto Seb, we’d make a fortune when we sold him in the summer.

Hatton: 8

Gwillim: 7.

MMK: 6

Balkestein: 7

Toks: 5. Not his best game this season. Strangely, for such a left footed player, he seems more comfortable playing on the right.

Knott: 7.

Sammy Moore: 7

Jolley: 6. Looked more threatening when moved up to partner Midson, and may well be just one goal away from the confidence that will get him back to his early season form

Midson: 8

Harrison: 5. Not sure what the problem is here. Let’s hope it’s not that we’ve bought a pup.

Subs: Johnson 6 (did OK without looking quite up to the pace of League 2); Djilali 7 (6 for playing OK, plus one for scoring the winning goal, even if their keeper should have saved it)

And that's about it, except to say that having seen this game, and tried some team selection myself in my aforementioned Team for Daggers post, it's not central defenders that we need, it's central midfielders. No really, how many genuine central midfielders have we got? Sammy Moore, er, Ricky Wellard? Maybe loanees Knott and Moncur can play there, as Knotty did to some effect on Saturday, but I don't see them as genuine central midfielders. But maybe that's for another post, as this one feels like it's been going on for long enough.
Next up, Bradford. Which will probably be dire as well, but that probably won't stop me easing myself out of my armchair (which currently resides on Hayling Island during the week) and up the A3 to witness another League 2 relegation 6-pointer in all its glory. Come on you Dons!

Team for Daggers

OK, I know it's been fucking ages a while since my last post but there are very good reasons for that. Mostly they involve laziness, but getting a job has also used up a lot of time that could have been better spent pondering the subtle nuances of such things as the diamond formation, Terry Brown's future at the club, and James Mulley's Twitter feed.

So, now that I've bothered to put pen to paper fingers to keyboard, here, complete with some dodgy formatting after a disappointing effort to copy-and-paste from Microsoft Word, are some thoughts on team selection:

Every football fan likes to do the manager’s job and indulge in a little bit of team selection every now and then. From the safety of the home/office /pub/rehab clinic, free from any repercussions should their team actually start a game, they offer forth a selection of selections that range from the eminently sensible to the wildly optimistic which - while initally sounding brilliant - often do, on closer scrutiny, actually contain 15 players without a left back among them. From intricate Christmas trees to dynamic diamonds to stifling defensive formations, the fan can let his creativity run riot, safe in the knowledge that the bumbling fool of a manager whose job the fan could do oh-so-much better if given the chance will never actually field the eleven that the fan selects. But even if the manager does select the fan's team and, by a series of unlucky bounces, one-in-a-million goals from the opposition, misjudged substitutions and dodgy refereeing, the fan’s team loses, the fan can quietly skulk away from his proudly announced selection, safe in the knowledge that no-one will remember what he said in the first place any longer than it takes someone to ask what the travel arrangements are for the next away game. And if, joy of joys, the team actually wins, the fan has a free pass to smugville until at least the next game.

With that in mind, I’m going to be foolish enough to commit my team for the Dagenham and Redbridge game to writing, and post it on the Great Source of Truth that is the Internet, so that all and sundry can come from miles around (figuratively speaking, obviously) and mock my pitiful attempts at football intelligence.

But – I’ve decided not to settle for just one team. I’ve picked a few, each with their own pros and cons, just to explore what different options are available to Terry Brown. And quite possibly, when they all turn out to be bobbins, to highlight just how deep in the Brown stuff we really are.

First up, solid and defensive:

                                              Brown

Franks                  MMK                    Stuart                  Gwillim

Hatton                  Moncur                 S. Moore             Bush

                             Midson                  L. Moore

I could easily have chosen C-Mac or Brett Johnson to partner MMK, but I’ve included Jamie Stuart just for an extra bit of determination and psychosis. And I wasn’t sure as to who would partner Midson up front. Christian Jolley has shown an ability to launch himself into the occasional ill-advised lunging tackle, but he’s not disciplined enough to win a place in this team. Euell staked a claim with a Jolley-esque lunge that bought him a yellow card on Tuesday night, but I’ve gone for Luke Moore on the basis of the consistently waspish nature of his performances this season.

Pros: Solid. As full-backs themselves, Bush and Hatton would know to track back and help out FF and GG. Sammy Moore has been excellent in the holding role, and if he and Moncur can forge any sort of understanding, we should have a very well protected defence.

Cons: FF isn’t totally comfortable at right back – he didn’t exactly cover himself in glory when he played there at Port Vale, being substituted at half time. Three of the four midfielders would be playing in positions they don’t normally occupy. Very little attacking threat. 'Solid' by Wimbledon standards is the same as 'Normal' by most other teams' standards.

Who’s missing? I think Toks has been one of our better players this season, and has been unlucky to lose his place with the arrival of the loanees, and he’d miss out again in this team. And there have been times when Billy Knott seems to be playing a different game to everyone else on the pitch, such is his quality, but there’s no place for him if we’re trying to grind out results.

Next up, the super attacking dazzling diamond formation:

        Turner

Hatton                  Johnson                C-Mac                   Bush

                                             S. Moore

          Yussuff                                                             Knott

                                             L. Moore

                               Midson                 Jolley

Now that everyone is fit again, TB has, for the first time in a long time, the option of selecting what is essentially the team with which we had so much success for the first twelve games of the season, but with MMK in place of Jamie Stuart, and Billy Knott in place of Lee Minshull. Which isn’t a bad swap really, is it?

Pro: If it all comes together, we’d run rings around Dagenham and Redbridge

Con: Given our poor form and low morale, it probably wouldn’t come together. And it’s just too lightweight – Daggers would bully us off the ball before we’d even got to tiki, never mind taka.

Pro: There would be goals

Con: For Dagenham

Who’s missing? For the purposes of this exercise, Jack gets the nod ahead of Seb for his better distribution skills, although Seb is always going to be the first choice keeper. GG could easily come in for Bush as Billy is more attacking than Minsh ever was, but I’ve gone for the more positive option. Again, the centre back pairing is a tricky one to call but I’ve chosen the two that I think are the best ball players. And let’s face it, our defence has looked pretty shonky whoever we’ve had in the centre and this pairing’s only outing ended with a 3-1 victory over what was then an in-form Gillingham team. So captain Stuart and big signing MMK miss out in favour of a giraffe and someone who’s played very little league football for us. Toks gets the nod over Moncur, though in my mind there’s very little to choose between them, nostalgia for the early days of the season just clinching it for Toks.

The Wellard 4-5-1:

        Brown

     Hatton              MMK                     C-Mac                   Gwillim

                                            S. Moore

Yussuff                                                     L. Moore              Knott

                                Wellard                    

                                            Midson

As you can probably tell, I had trouble working out how to show this formation but, in broad terms, it revolves around Wellard playing “in the hole” with midfielders getting forward to support Midson whenever possible, or holding back if we’re protecting a lead. Yeah, right, as if we’d ever take the lead.

Pros: Looked good for 45 minutes against Oxford, to be thwarted only by Andy D’Urso’s refusal to award blatant penalties. Even though his contribution when we haven’t got the ball isn’t strong enough to get him a place in a four man midfield, Wellard’s link play, passing, and close control means we should be able to have the lion’s share of possession.

Cons: With just Midson up front, and goals from a shot-shy midfield a rarity, we might not make much use of that possession.

Who’s missing? Again, Toks edges it over Moncur and with Knott on the left, the more solid GG edges it over Bush. No place either for Christian Jolley, who’d be an “impact substitute” in this team. Or he could play wide left in place of Billy Knott in a team that didn’t include any loanees.

4-3-3 with both Harrison and Jolley:

Anyone who saw the Hereford game will understand why I won’t even bother writing this one out.

Conclusions etc:

Jason Euell doesn’t get a place in any of the teams. While his arrival created a buzz and lifted spirits, I haven’t seen or heard of anything that justifies him getting a starting place ahead of, say, Luke Moore. And neither does Byron Harrison feature. Not because I don’t rate him, but Midson is the first name on the teamsheet and if you’re going to have two up front, then it’s got to be Christian Jolley, no?

So, after all that, what would be my selection? I really don’t know. I’m just glad I don’t have to make the decision for real. Oh, all right then, I’ll stick my neck out and say that I'd go for the Wellard 4-5-1, but if it turns out he's not fit enough to start, I'd go for this:

                                                Brown

Hatton                  MMK                    C-Mac                  Gwillim

L. Moore              Moncur                 S. Moore               Knott

                             Midson                  Jolley

Subs: Harrison, Toks, Johnson, Turner, Wellard

Which means Euell, Djilali, Stuart and Bush would miss out altogether.

Discuss.