Complete Reset

Hereford FC host Alfreton on Saturday. That, at least, is a fact. Everything else concerning the club at the moment is slightly up in the air.

I’ve really appreciated the honesty Paul Caddis has shown as this season has continued to fail to start/fall apart. Cynics would suggest that wearing your heart on your sleeve will come back to bite you on the bum, but I’d take owning stuff you’re responsible for rather than deflecting responsibility any day of the week.

Caddis suggested that a massive overhaul would be undertaken immediately after the Radcliffe defeat, and I wondered if that rapidity would be possible in practice. Well, true to his word, the manager has rid himself of Chris Wreh and Kai Williams. Wreh looked nowhere near fit, which probably should have been identified when he was signed in the summer, but one can optimistically hope that the money he was on accounted for 99% of the playing budget, which would give Caddis a good bit of wriggle room as he rebuilds the squad for an autumn reset. If so, don’t be surprised if Alexander Isak comes in before this game.

Despite those players being jettisoned quickly, any sort of total reset of the season will realistically have to be done over the course of the next few weeks or even months rather than ahead of Alfreton, but it’s a reset that is utterly and obviously needed. One silver lining to the start of the season is that everything has felt so wrong that it’s the only solution. The board, the manager and the fans know that tinkering around the edges won’t cut it, capable senior players such as Theo Richardson, OSJ, Kyle Howkins, Matt Preston, Lawson Dath and Andy Williams know it too. That’s over half of a capable play-off quality team, so there’s plenty of baby to be preserved as the bathwater is discarded.

However, quite how Caddis and the board will be able to find and finance the calibre of player they didn’t find and finance over the summer is unexplained. Heavy reliance on the loan market may have to be resorted to, which is of course a lottery.

As for Alfreton, the innocent bystanders in this unravelling Edgar Street soap opera (and I bet that’s the only time I’ll ever use ‘Alfreton’ and ‘innocent’ in the same sentence), they seem currently to be Alfreton but slightly less so - unleaded Alfreton, Alfreton-lite. In their pomp they out-Southported Southport when it came to winning games they had no right to win by bundling in an early goal from a huge punt or set piece and then unleashing a depressing array of time-wasting and falling-over weaponry that bafflingly never fails to fool NLN referees.

However, they finished 14th last season, the best part of 20 points off the play-offs, which under Billy Heath is unheard of. Billy gets them into the play-offs, that’s what he does, and he used to do it really well.

They started this season where they left off last season by drawing or losing their first four games; unprecedented poor form compared to how they’ve been generally over the last five years, years in which they would have bulldozed their way through three of those four games 1-0. They did then beat in-form Marine on Monday as Hereford meekly surrendered to Radcliffe.

Defender Adam Anson said after that win: “We go to Hereford, win the second and third balls, just be a horrible team to play against, the same as we’ve always been.” That has too often been enough at this level to beat decent Hereford sides. This is very far from being a decent Hereford side. When a team like Alfreton has that togetherness and a mutual understanding of what the gameplan is, even if the gameplan in Alfreton’s case is anti-football, it’s powerful, and they’ll win this from corners and throw-ins slung in to the right areas, hopeful long diags, or huge free kicks punted in from all over the pitch, unless Hereford start defending properly. It’s unfortunately inevitable at the moment. It will be crucial for Kyle Howkins and Matt Preston to be at the top of their game.

It’s also telling that Alfreton have that consistent identity referred to by Anson: “…the same as we’ve always been.” Hereford lack that consistency, having seemingly brought in a batch of new players in the summer who are either not fit or not capable, or both, for whatever reason.

For what it’s worth, Adam Lund is their big threat in that he hurls the long throws in for them that will cause inexplicable havoc in the Hereford penalty area (inexplicable in that it’s so one-dimensionally predictable). I’ve said this before I’m sure, but it could be worth someone putting a heavy tackle in on his arms somehow in the first minute, not that I’d ever advocate something so cynical.

The club won’t be relegated, so from second bottom in the table the rest of the season could be quite fun when the autumn recruitment programme kicks in and is, by some way, more clinically and professionally executed than the summer one was. However, to quote the song: “How do we get there? I don’t know.”

Over to the manager and the board, but get the ‘Isak’ lettering added to your replica shirts just in case.

COYW