Another defeat but......

We travelled down to Bristol Rovers today following a pretty eventful week at Bloomfield Rd.We saw Simon Grayson depart after a depressing defeat by Gillingham. David Dunn was installed as the interim manager whilst the search goes on for a new manager.

Today’s game was Dunn’s first  in charge. With captain Jay Spearing forced to sit out the game due to being concussed in the midweek game, Dunn made three changes with Husband, MacDonald & Virtue in the starting lineup.

After a much improved all round performance by the team and after going 1-0 ahead in the 2nd minute with a Madine strike, we ended up suffering a 2-1 loss.

The sending off of stand-in skipper Ben Heneghan in the 43min for a reckless tackle didn’t help our cause but we got to half time still 1-0 ahead.Unfortunately in the 2nd half we were playing against a swirling wind, but nevertheless we had several chances to increase our lead and nearly squared things up in the last minute when Nathan Delfouneso effort was deflected past the far post. Today’s loss is a continuation of our current luck, not helped a lot of the time by poor officiating, today was no exception. Still, we can’t keep using that as an excuse for the results. 

This next coming week will hopefully see a new manager installed or at least identified as suitable.

Several names have come up including  Nathan Jones & Ian Evatt. The only hopeful who has officially put his name forward is Gary Taylor-Fletcher. It’s surprising how many managers are currently out of work, so perhaps an outsider could still take over the reigns. David Dunn has already indicated he’s not interested in taking the job on permanently. 

One person who hasn’t gone down well with us fans is former manager and favourite for a return to Bloomfield Rd, Ian Holloway.

His recent comments about the sacking of Simon Grayson as being disgusting hasn’t done his reputation with fans any good. In fact I would say any chance of a return here has now gone for good. Perhaps that’s how it should be, because as in the case of Simon Grayson, a return to a previous managed club is rarely the same. 

Looking forward to see how the forthcoming week will develop and who our new manager will be. There’s one thing for sure he’ll be working for a great owner in Simon Sadler, who will back him but who will expect results, after all he’s one of us. UTMP 

A truly Memorable Day.

It was 12 months ago this week when we got our club back and we all marched down to Bloomfield Rd to regain our seats in the stands. A truly memorable day.      

Since then things have changed for the better. We now have a new owner, a local lad, one Simon Sadler. He’s been open and honest with the fans from the off. He’s promised to improve the club but it will take time and money. He will prioritise what needs doing and he wants to see the team challenge for promotion to the Championship within the next couple of seasons. He appointed Simon Grayson as manager and although we made a positive start to the season getting up to 4th place, it seemed we were punching above our weight. We went on an unbeaten run even though our performances were lucky to say the least. This gave the fans a belief we could get promoted this season, albeit with tongue in cheek. I think most of us knew we weren’t good enough to go up.

Since this heady start our results & performances have taken a downward spiral. Fans were getting frustrated with Grayson’s tactics and the lack of improvement, despite having more money made available for new players, more back room staff and better ground/pitch facilities. He only managed one win in the last 12 games. Grayson’s time came to an end after the Tuesday night  2-3 defeat against Gillingham. Sadler had flown over from Hong Kong to attend the game and wasted no time in sacking Grayson on Wednesday morning. This proved the new owner had listened to the fans reaction to the defeat and did what was needed. I think the decision was what the majority of fans wanted. 

We now move to the next stage of searching for a new manager, which is both exciting and wary of who we get. Several names are in the frame already. Former club favourite Ian Evatt currently doing great things with Barrow is a lot of fans choice to take over. I’m not sure it’s the right time for Ian yet. He still has a job to do at Barrow and to get them promoted back into the Football League would be a great achievement from when he took over and great addition to his CV. Whereas if he left them now with the job half done and came here to be our manager there’s no guarantee he would be as successful and it could knock back his managerial career.

Hopefully in the next week or so we should know who takes over.