Do Aaron Downes and Harry Pell have what
it takes to take a financial middleweight (apparently) with heavyweight support
and expectations (undoubtedly) back up into the top half of the National League
North table this season?
Well, hopefully!
Hereford FC don’t have a playing budget
at the sixth level of English football that gives them anything other than an
outside chance (25/1 apparently) of getting out of the National League North in
a northerly direction. That’s despite the club having relatively huge gate
receipts at its disposal. It’s been an inconvenient truth for some time and is
going to be the case this season too.
What the club hopefully now has is a
management team capable of taking financial shortcomings out of the equation.
Think Clough, Taylor, Forest and the European Cup. Or at least think that if
you’re incredibly old and can remember it. Maybe think Brighton and Brentford,
two clubs with an H(U)FC connection, being competitive in the Premier League if
you’re less ancient. Money still isn’t everything.
The NLN gets more competitive each
season, hosting clubs with tiny support on financial steroids who are able to
employ players, particularly goalscorers, on terms that are beyond belief and
common sense. Equally, the non-moneyed clubs are getting ever-harder to beat by
being increasingly well-organised, hard-working, unified, hungry and never
switching off during games.
So it’s very competitive, of course it
is, but this season can’t see another flirtation with getting out of the
National League North in a southerly direction. No club enjoying the revenue
generated by 3,000 average attendances gets relegated from the sixth level of
English football - that would be preposterous.
Talk of ‘a great escape’ last season masks
the fact that Hereford were exposed defensively week after week, home and away,
ripped to shreds not just by the likes of Fylde, but by Telford and Marine and
Curzon Ashton. None of that had anything to do with drainage or the state of
the Edgar Street pitch. There was no glory in limping (just) over the line at
home to Peterborough Sports, a club who had spent the season getting beaten by
everyone, and one with a tenth of the home support of Hereford.
Hereford FC should aspire to be, at the
very least, the best part-time club in English football, not the biggest basket
case in the Southern League.
Last season’s bitter pill would be
sweetened this season if soft goal after soft goal isn’t conceded by a side, not
just the defenders but the side as a whole, that can defend with some steel and
nastiness, and considers gifts to be something for Christmas rather than
something for bang-average NLN strikers who then proceed to celebrate in front
of the Meadow End like it is indeed Christmas.
I’m conscious that this all sounds a bit
negative rather than ‘waheeey it’s a new season, let’s go for it using nothing but
blind hope’, but I don’t want to finish fifth bottom again, or worse. I promise
that I try very hard in this space when writing about the season as it
progresses to pounce on anything positive and big it up, and downplay the
negatives as much as possible without ending up writing a happy-clapper fiction.
The latter seems pointless.
Aaron Downes knows all of the above and
lives it daily much more than any of us. He has the steely determination of a
Graham Turner. The latter would not have been able to dredge up any pleasure in
drawing with Peterborough Sports as manager (quite rightly), and GT, as someone
with a continued vested emotional interest in the club, will be hoping that the
Australian can get the club smartly, sleekly and efficiently punching above its
weight rather than being a paunchy resting-on-its-laurels-and-gate-receipts sleeping
giant permanently on the ropes getting beaten up.
One giant leap forward in terms of intelligent
and progressive management is the approach being taken to loan players. The
scattergun who’s-available-regardless-of-who’s-needed month-by-month loan
policy of Gowling and Caddis seems to have ended, in favour of the approach sensibly-run
clubs in the north take in employing decent and sometimes exceptional players
for half or even a whole season.
That Gowling/Caddis approach brought
some highly watchable players briefly to the club, and some highly tubby ones
too, but that short-termism was consistently outdone by opposing sides with a
telepathic understanding born of squads comprised of players on long-term
contracts and season-long loanees.
Home and away Hereford have been regularly
ripped to shreds by sides with that make-up for their entire time in the
National League North. That exposed naivity can’t continue, and there are signs
that it won’t be under the new management.
Putting good players on two-year
contracts is something else that seems to be a huge step forward in terms of
the club starting to finally be run like its peers, and therefore being able to
compete on a level-ish playing field with those peers. It’s still important to
note that most of those peers are run at a huge and underwritten loss of
course.
The side that the new manager has built should
be able to dominate games at home at this level this season rather than being torn
apart by a host of smaller but hungrier clubs, who start a game at Edgar Street
looking a bit tentative in front of a crowd, and then after ten minutes realise
that they can actually boss it. That shouldn’t be the case and we’ve all got a
part to play in countering that. They need to start tentative, move on to
feeling intimidated, and end up comprehensively beaten, in all senses. We’ve
put up with mediocrity too readily and for too long.
It has been hugely refreshing that Aaron
Downes has reacted angrily when the side has switched off at times during the pre-season
friendlies. For at least the last couple of seasons the Bulls have been prone
to sometimes spending whole 45-minute chunks of games ‘off it’, whereas
opposition NLN sides nearly always seem to be very well organised and solid and
concentrating for 90 minutes.
If that concentration flaw can be erased
it could comfortably see a ten-, 15- or even 20-point difference in the final
column of the final league table against Hereford’s name. 21 points was the gap
between the Bulls’ miserable fifth-bottom finish last time and the play-off
positions.
Flat periods of five minutes during
matches are of course inevitable over the course of a season and totally
understandable, but there’s huge room for improvement there and it seems that
Downes is absolutely on it.
To finish outside the play-offs should
be considered by all parties to be an under-achievement for Hereford FC. To
claim a tenth-placed finish as a success because it’s an improvement on
finishing 20th would insult the intelligence of supporters, who know that
finishing 20th was, to put it politely, very careless indeed, and an
absolutely awful experience to witness over the course of nine months.
We’re not far off being a decade into
the club’s NLN tenure now – it’s high time a high-placed finish was secured.
COYW
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