Well, if we only learned one thing from Ben Boycott’s first (seemingly of two) statement, at least we know who is in charge. Blessedly, there was much more to digest and learn than who makes the decisions but the unequivocal nature of the way Boycott spelled his intentions out let everyone know that he’s now in sole charge at the Football Club.
The circus has a new ringmaster folks and the clowns risk being fed to the lions.
In terms of content, Boycott gave plenty of indications of what is to come. Whether you take the sections around strategy and future plans at face value or wait to see the proof of the pudding is a choice we all have but openly publishing the basis of a vision feels pretty much like a decent step forward for this club. There are things missing that aren’t directly linked to the playing side of the club such as the sharp price increases, site development, commercial strategy and board structure but hopefully some of these will be referenced in part two of Ben’s communication.
Refreshingly there was also plenty of reflection, honesty, acknowledgment of past failure and ownership of issues. Being fair, Leigh Pomlett was always open and transparent with his summation of events and looked to communicate regularly, but much of what Boycott published was/is new ground. Even as a summary, the statement contained more detail than I can previously recall.
I also felt that the more opinionated and inherently personal parts of the letter added flavour and a transparency to the information provided. And the opinions included were often really telling.
“It starts with me personally looking in the mirror, asking what has been going on at the club, asking what mistakes I myself have made and what mistakes the club has made, and asking how it is going to be different going forward.” is arguably the most self-critical sentence to come out of the football club in decades.
“Blaming poor luck, however, is cheap and weak. The poor luck turned into a losing habit, which was allowed to snowball into the demise of a once-promising season.” is another brutally straightforward comment that I don’t feel would have seen the light of a club statement pre-Pomlett.
Similarly, “We need to understand why and make strategic changes as we make this critical next decision” is as fundamentally transparent as an acceptance of systemic failure and the need to change gets.
Boycott’s public admission of inner searching, his willingness to be seen being vulnerable and what was essentially a recognition of a season failure is so far removed from the past it’s almost difficult to comprehend. The suggestion that if you don’t like it, then do one to Luton or Bournemouth or Rotherham doesn’t really feel like it’s from a different era, because it feels more like from a different galaxy. If there was any doubt that this is a different time, then the personal aspects and opinions within this letter spell it out as clear as it’s possible to do so. Evidently, Boycott understands that trust and respect is hard earned and easily lost.
What also feels like something entirely fresh is the open publication of a strategy. For too long this football club has given the manager the keys to the first team and hoped they could drive. Dean Smith was the last appointment that could be considered successful and that was more than thirteen years ago. The new appointment will be our eighth attempt at trying to find a manager who can take us forward since Smith failed to finish the job he’d started.
Boycott’s reference to not taking the easy way out by laying the sole blame at the manager’s door is the first of many welcome indicators around this issue. It is abundantly clear from the seven managerial casualties since December 2015 and the continued lack of progress on the pitch that the issues that have stopped the football club achieving the results and league position it is capable of run far deeper than the choice of manager(s). In appointing men that are League 2 course and distance proven, the local lad, the known quantity, the internal promotion or the experienced pro with experience of developing young players it could be argued we’ve tried sailing every type of managerial ship in order to find calmer waters. All have been found with their vessels listing amongst the rocks.
On the day Michael Flynn was appointed I tweeted that should he fail, we could be sure that the issue wasn’t the manager and I stand by that. The fact that Swindon acted so decisively once Flynn became available should also be telling. By their actions, they’ve completely discounted Flynn’s record here, just as Burslem Carol chose to do with Clarke. Both Vale and Swindon appear to have overlooked the lack of progress that their identified men made here, which arguably suggests that they felt it was the club rather than the manager that was the issue. I sense that Boycott has also recognised this. His reference to eight managers in eight years and the need for strategic changes suggest that after 12 months of listening and learning he has identified what he thinks are the issues.
Albert Einstein famously said that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” This is mirrored in Boycott’s reference to identifying “the singular individual who is the right fit for that moment, and empower them to implement their process, their style of play, their staff, and their playing squad to get the formula just right. When that hasn’t worked in one situation or another, we’ve terminated the manager, hired a new one, and gone again.”
Boycott and his partners are no fools, their investment in a football club with little assets and competing on a different continent suggests plenty of ambition and a strong competitive streak to untap the potential they believes that they have identified. There would have been plenty of softer challenges much closer to home. Some will rightly question why Walsall and what is the pay back, and in truth that hasn’t really been fully answered but the only way Boycott and Trivela get a worthwhile payback on their investment is to improve us and move us forward. That will involve taking a lot of tough decisions and getting most of them right. Evolution or revolution? Both involve risk.
And so to the Trivela vision, the meat and potatoes of this communication.
“We’ll be working with a fresh plan and a fresh vision from here on. I believe in building a structure, a system, and a culture where a manager can come in if (and only if) they fit that strategy, and be a part of our building process.“
There are things in here that Boycott doesn’t say that are probably as important as the things he does. Despite the record of 1 win in 21 and absolute loss of any recognisable playing style the parting of ways with Flynn and Hatswell wasn’t universally expected. Continuity and particularly getting to that 3rd transfer window felt important and worth the patience to many. It’s worth noting that Flynn’s much heralded and welcomed arrival did come at the cost of a Director of Football. Jamie Fullarton might not have been the right appointment but it that doesn’t mean that the creation of the position was a poor idea, and it seems from Boycott’s letter that this is the intended direction of travel. Whether they gave Flynn the option of working this way or simply decided that he wouldn’t or couldn’t, the structure where the manager is no longer in complete charge of the football club could well have been as much of a breaking point as our desperate run of results since the Leicester cup tie. I really don’t underestimate the power of the (and only if) in the quote above.
Selecting a manager to fit into what the club wants, rather than the club sacrificing parts of itself to fit into what a manager wants to be seems so blatantly obvious to me. As the bookmaker bingo got into full swing and names shortened an anyone who’s used Hilton Park Services in the last few weeks, the club appears to have positively used the time that Mat Sadler has taken the reins, rightly stepping back and reviewing requirements rather than racing towards another poor appointment.
Finally, blessedly, the plan is more significant than the man.
And I really do like the plan. Coincidentally, I asked a couple of friends at the last home game (before this letter) to tell me something positive that the football side of this club currently does well. The silence and subsequent shrugging of shoulders was deafening. Have a think yourselves – in terms of the football side of the club, what do we do well? What do you see that others might want to replicate? The list isn’t all that long.
I’ve also long bemoaned the lack of identity that the football club and in particular the first team have, so the reference to a clear playing identity was great to see. It is really important. As was reference for our core values as a club – Service, Discipline, Excellence and Ambition. These, in reality, should be at the heart of any professional sports organisation but saying and doing are fundamentally different processes. Whilst not directly related to what happens on the pitch, what part of the Poundland Bescot Stadium experience has felt like excellence in the past decade? If you can’t get toilets, catering or stadium access right, what chance of you got of building a solid football infrastructure?
The constant change of manager also increases and empowers the prioritisation of short-term thinking. Of our last five managers, only Darrell Clarke has enjoyed the scope of recruitment across three transfer windows (his fourth window was probably the catalyst for his departure). This has to be part of the root cause of why we have quite so many summer squad overhauls and precisely why the implementation of strategy and recruitment plan driven by a DoF, or the somewhat grandiosely titled Trivela’s VP of Global Football, is key. Someone has to think long term and that is never going be a manager who lives and dies by the final score every Saturday and Tuesday..
The fact that the intention to build our recruitment structure on analytics and data is interesting. I’d have hoped, and expected, that we already did character and culture fit checks as part of the current recruitment process. It’s from where this blog got its name of course, but there have been squads, groups and individuals, past and present, where you wonder what due diligence was actually done. Recruitment via analytics and data seems very much to be in vogue and you only have to look at Brighton, Brentford and Southampton (over a decade) to see how effectively it can work. That said, in a post Brexit environment it is so much more difficult to recruit non-British players into Leagues 1 & 2 due to work permit requirements. Brighton and Brentford can make it work effectively as they’re recruiting current international footballers from clubs in top-flight football and European competition. However the days of raiding Feirense for Jorge Letaio or Logroñés for Zigor Aranalde are long gone and the restrictions will make recruitment from data much harder and potentially more expensive – the pool of players at our level will be significantly smaller and we’ll all see the same data, right?
Intuition is also referenced and still has a significant role to play – I seriously doubt that you’d have taken any of Kyle Lightbourne, Troy Deeney or Tom Bradshaw on pre-Walsall in-play analytics alone and I suspect that seeing what others don’t is where the real value lies.
There were a couple of items, indirectly associated to recruitment but not mentioned in Boycott’s message that I genuinely hope are areas given more focus.
Scouting being one. On Twitter, I highlighted the 2nd Crewe goal as a goal that should never happen with a strong scouting system. It was basic stuff that we should never have fallen for and made we wonder how thorough our pre-game research had been. It wasn’t the only time I’ve thought this. Similarly, the amount of pre and at half time double substitutions we have made in the past 3 or 4 years is symptomatic of us setting up wrong and being forced to correct in order to stay in the game. It happens too regularly to not be linked. The visit to Barrow in August was probably the most obvious example I’ve seen of a team either not scouting the opposition well or just ignoring the reports. We’d lost that evening before we’d worked out how to set up against them. Maybe the days of sitting in the stands taking notes and compiling dossiers are over, maybe not. But whatever we do in this area appears weak and requires a review to my eyes.
Secondly the January window. I referenced Clarke’s exit earlier and the probable link to the January window. That the last 7 managerial departures have happened after the closure of the January transfer window is, in my opinion, not unconnected. Sure, there have been exceptions – O’Driscoll being an obvious one but even the likes of Brian Dutton, who never got a transfer window, inherited a squad undermined by January departures. I genuinely can’t recall a positive January window, and that includes the infamous 2016 window where we celebrated standing still (shutters rolling down) whilst everyone around us improved their options. The January window hurts us almost every season and until we address this, expect much of the same.
Returning back to what is in the strategy, the paragraph given to player development and academy integration identifies possibly the most critical element that needs to be significantly improved and Boycott was right to identify this. EPPP (the Elite Player Performance Plan) has impacted clubs lower down the pyramid with the system favouring the Cat 1 (usually Premier League) academies and I sense that this has had a chunky impact on us. How we recover and restart the conveyer from a system that is heavily loaded in the favour of those at the top of the pyramid is a task form someone with far greater understanding of the mechanics of youth player development than me. I take heart in the changes and introductions made in recent times and I’m genuinely pleased and relieved that topic was referenced in Boycott’s message. Getting this area right and delivering footballers to the first team is vital to long term growth and stability and I genuinely hope that it’s front and centre on Boycott’s radar.
Similarly the process once our young talent has broken through needs some serious consideration. The falling away of players like Alfie Bates and Sam Perry, the lack of any real opportunity given to Tom Leak and the preference of signing Danny Cashman over providing Ronan Maher with game opportunity are all somewhat disconcerting. Maybe Leak wouldn’t have been good enough but was Joe Low really that much better? The decline in performance of players such as Bates and Perry once they’d got to 20 games really needs to be understood as it happens all too often. The managerial mis-trust of our own young players also needs to be addressed. Additionally, whoever signed off on Danny Cashman, needs to recognise the impact this had in side-lining Maher’s season. It was such a pointless loan. Again, maybe the manager felt that he wasn’t 100% ready for the handful of minutes that Cashman got but the experience Maher would have gleaned from them would have been really valuable. Its another example of short term thinking overriding long term aims.
In summary, I’d have welcomed any sense of a plan given what we’ve experienced over recent times but I sense a decent amount of logic, thought and determination to get things right within Boycott’s letter.
“And it’s not just about the next manager or the next player or the next match – it’s about us as the club, and putting one brick on another, over time. The next manager that we hire will be one absolutely critical component of this – but as a part of a thoughtful plan, not as the “be all, end all.” They will be coming into an increasingly well-defined Walsall Football Club, rather than coming in and redefining Walsall Football Club for themselves.“
There is obviously much to do and what feels like a real appetite at the top of the football club to address issues that either haven’t been seen or overlooked in the desperate scramble to exit League 2 in an upwards direction. That scattergun approach has failed and failed and failed and failed and finally we seem to be learning from our errors. That has to be positive.
Boycott also references the process taking time but doesn’t mention the need for patience. That omission may be in order to not negatively affect season ticket sales but it is a trait that I suspect that we will all have to demonstrate, again. Having a plan is one thing, and it’s a decent starting point. However, rolling it out will take time, courage, an eye for detail, collective belief and a decent chink of patience. League 2 will be a tough division next season, strengthened by both promoted and relegated clubs. There may be no instant fix to the problem we have failed to solve for too long.
I wish him well. We all win if Trivela get this right and whilst this feels like a fairly complex build, every part of it makes sense. Time, patience and holding our nerve will be the key to successful deployment. Rome wasn’t built on one managerial appointment or a solitary transfer window.
I was in the second year of my PhD, and had just emerged from a winter spent in the York Minster archives and the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research in York. York in the winter is one of my favourite places, and who doesn’t want to spend their time researching the role of the clergy in 18th-century elections? Plus, I got to see Walsall win away at Bootham Crescent in the rain.
The No Nobhead Policy 