Lower League Fortnight – Pay Up Pompey

Religious schism as Pope gets Abbott sacked

Although it wasn’t announced until Monday, Saturday’s 1-0 defeat was the final straw for Carlisle manager Greg Abbott. It’s hardly surprising given their start to the season – four goal defeats in the first three league games, 15 conceded in six games and only two scored. The last three results have been an improvement. Draws against a decent Colchester side and Brentford, who should be close to automatic promotion at the end of the season, preceded the Port Vale match. The lack of benefit of the doubt is understandable.

Abbott was the third longest serving manager in the Football League, behind Arsene Wenger and Exeter’s Paul Tidsdale. It can seem a kneejerk reaction to sack a manager six league games into the season – especially with Carlisle having beaten Blackburn in that time – but the problems have gone on for longer. As mentioned previously in this column, Carlisle had the division’s worst defence last season, but summer transfer activity instead focused on attacking talent.

Most of the reaction I’ve seen from ex-pros and the national media has criticised the ‘knee-jerk’ nature of Abbott’s sacking, but the wider context of last season has to be taken into account. Looking in from a distance, I’ve admired Abbott for a few years – he’s kept the Cumbrians consistently safe from danger in League One and won the Football League Trophy while playing an attacking, cultured game. But it does seem to have been the right decision to let him go.

Are the Blades the Lower League Man City?

Although Sheffield United’s start to the season has been pretty poor, more focus has been on the club off the field, with chairman Kevin McCabe selling his 50% stake in the club to a Saudi Prince. Although I’m far from an expert on the Saudi royal family, Prince Abdullah bin Mosaad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is apparently a former president of Al-Hilal, Saudi Arabia’s most successful football club, as well as build the Saudi Paper Manufacturing Company, which produces ’tissues and an assortment of other related products’.

Sheffield United have claimed (as is always the case when extremely rich people take over a football club) that big money will be spent, though the moves made by the Blades at the end of the transfer window seem to have been financed by the departure of Kevin McDonald to Wolves.

Jose Baxter has come in from Oldham, and perhaps just as impressively the club have signed Florent Cuvelier, a key part of Walsall’s unexpected play-off push last season, on a permanent deal from Stoke. United also made enquiries to Coventry for both Callum Wilson and Leon Clarke, but given the importance of the strike pair to keeping the Sky Blues in League One, they were understandably fruitless.

Coventry now in positive figures

At the weekend, Coventry’s strike force showed why they attracted Sheffield United’s interest, with Callum Wilson’s strikes taking them into positive figures after their ten point deduction. On Sunday, Coventry hosted Colchester and took the lead when Callum Wilson took advantage of a spilled shot. The second was totally different – Wilson played an excellent one-two with Clarke, raced through the defence and rounded the goalkeeper.

It was bound to happen at some point this season, but the crowd of 1789 was the lowest in Coventry’s history. Despite the quality of football on display, Coventry’s fans don’t seem willing to take the journey to Sixfields. It seems that Coventry’s story, which is dramatically different on and off the field, will diverge even further apart over the course of the season.

Pompey will pay up

The extent of money owed by Portsmouth to former players has been revealed this week – despite going through two spells in administration in recent years, many non-football creditors will get only a small portion of the fees agreed for their services and former players are owed £6.7million in total, with the club committed to paying £110,000 a month for the next three years.

Of course, it’s more a problem with football practices than Portsmouth as a club. I can see the logic of the football creditors’ rule to prevent clubs underpaying on agreed transfer fees, for example. But the current situation means that small local businesses and charities are further down in the pecking order than some players who contributed relatively little to Portsmouth, picked up bigger wages than they could have hoped to get elsewhere.

That’s not to say footballers as a whole are the villains. Luke Varney has spoken of how he remortgaged his house to take a paycut and help the club going, and there will be at least some others who did the same. Essentially, the situation is a mess, which will require at least a few more years of stability to sort out.

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