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couple of years out of date.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.
