Temporarily homeless

In the latest instalment of a season that has already presented plenty of challenges, Hereford FC travel to Peterborough on Saturday, as ongoing issues with the Edgar Street pitch currently make it impossible to stage a game at home. The last game of the season will now be a home one, ie the reverse fixture against Peterborough.

So the Bulls will be looking to get their season moving again pre-Christmas after what’s been a bit of a stop-start few weeks, largely due to what sounds like busted or blocked tubes underneath the sacred Edgar Street turf. That’s hopefully easier and cheaper to fix next summer than entirely replacing a system that’s reached obsolescence several years earlier than it should have done, which has been another possible reason given for the issue.

Sports are a tiny club now thoroughly established at this level. So established, in fact, that they’re considering going full time. On crowds of 300ish this would appear to be brave, but it’s the sort of thing that’s ceased to be a surprise.

One big change for them is that co-manager/player Michael Gash, something of a club talisman, was sacked a month into the season. He was absolutely superb at Edgar Street last season in marshalling the defence and masterminding a draw - dropped points among others at home that ultimately cost the Bulls a comfortable play-off place. He’ll play no part here though.

The Turbines seemed to do very little business over the summer in terms of player arrivals, instead relying on continuity and the togetherness of the squad, which is no surprise as it’s an approach that’s served them very well in their NLN tenure to date. However, they’ve certainly made up for that lack of activity on the pitch by going big on changes in the dugout, as Gash’s replacement is none other than colourful ex-Kiddie boss Phil Brown. Brown’s experience extends of course to top-flight management, and further afield too - his two years managing in Hyderabad were presumably a picnic compared to the year he spent in Barrow.

He'll be working under ‘keep them up’ instructions this season as opposed to the ‘get them up’ requirement he had with Harriers last season (falling just short of doing so), and it has to be said that he’s had an effect, taking Sports from bottom to two points clear of the relegation places, and they’ve won their last two games. They beat Bedford 3-1 and Radcliffe 3-0, both at home. Their last away trip ended with them being on the end of a 5-2 thumping at Darlington, and their overall record on their travels is poor, which I was clinging to as a good sign before this home game became an away one.

They lost their main goal threat Michael Gyasi in the summer to Kings Lynn, a player now slightly oddly on loan at Kidderminster (how incestuous this division is!). Their goals have instead come from 20-year-old midfielder Luca Miller, a youngster they plucked from Kettering in the summer, and with six goals already clearly something of an inspired signing. Just the sort of signing, in fact, that the smaller clubs make to remain competitive against the full-timers and hybrid merchants who now apparently make the current Hereford FC model something of an anachronism at this level.

The Bulls will be hungry for this. Hungry to prove that the way things have panned out this season isn’t representative of the quality in the dressing room. Hungry to plunge into the growing backlog of fixtures with a winning mentality, hoping to demonstrate either side of Christmas that ‘doing a Spennymoor’ isn’t impossible, ie gatecrashing the play-off party on the final day of the season having won multiple games back-to-back. Given that Spennymoor aren’t bothering to do that this season, instead starting well and now petering out, there’s a vacancy to take their place.

If that’s too fanciful a notion, and I accept that it may well be, they can’t afford to drop too many more points to fellow strugglers if they’re to do anything this season other than survive. We’re told that we need to consider the tenth-placed finish last season to be ‘over-achievement’. Given everything that’s said about playing budgets elsewhere, maybe that’s accurate, but it needs to be something that’s said for the whole of the calendar year, ie including when season tickets go on sale in summer, so that people have an accurate idea about what they’re buying into.

Finally, in light of what Paul Caddis has said recently about threats made to him and his family from an individual who clearly must have considerable difficulties in their own life, we’re lucky to have such an honourable and respected man as manager. That’s worth a lot in an industry that takes its lead from the morally bankrupt Premier League. He deserves our support and a performance here from his players. It could be the start of a run of success and a string of post-match interviews that don’t start ‘Where did it all go wrong?’, which I’m sure he’d appreciate.

COYW