Too Many Chiefs at Hereford?

Earlier this week Jamie Pitman was demoted from manager to coach at Hereford United. Three journalists, who each write for a national newspaper, have given their views on what's been going on at Edgar Street.

First Jason Burt of the Daily Telegraph:

"The stakes are very high because teams can’t afford to go down. They decide to make often knee-jerk reactions to bad runs of results, and they can get rid of managers easily nowadays because of the kinds of contracts they’re on. More and more managers are being offered short-term deals to the end of the season.

"Hereford is quite interesting. Quite a fascinating sort of set-up they have got there.

"They seem to have an awful lot of chiefs but not many indians in some ways. They have an awful lot of people behind the scenes who are former managers, coaches and players who presumably have their own ideas.

"Pitman they lost faith in quite quickly, they got O'Kelly in who's very experienced, been there before. Again only to the end of the season and they've got Pitman on as his assistant.

"And there's Gary Peters in the background, another former manager.

"They are obviously a very ambitious club but they do seem to have a lot of different voices not necessarily pulling in the right direction."

Martin Lipton of the Daily Mirror:

"It certainly seems like an unstable regime at Hereford – there are enough problems at clubs with one director of football, let alone four or five wannabes!

"You can only have so many voices setting the direction. If you have too many people - no-one knows where they are going.

"Everything could change potentially if Portsmouth go “pop!” and vanish from the Football League, Hereford’s worries would have been halved, with only one club set to go down. It’s a possibility, but still an unlikely scenario."

Tom Hopkinson of The People:

"I was with Jamie Pitman at a dinner about a year ago. He had just done a great job in keeping them up so he must be looking at it thinking well we've just beaten Wimbledon, yes we've had a run of six or seven results before that but I've just won a game. I did it last year why not give me a chance this year. It's difficult situation."

Quotes taken from 'Life's a Pitch'.

---