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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