'%20x='0'%20y='0'%20height='100%25'%20width='100%25'%20%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20xlink%3Ahref='data:image/jpg;base64,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'%3E%3C/image%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Wolves at the door
Almost every bookie has Wolves as pre-season favourites for League One, and understandably so. One benefit of rocketing down the leagues rather than sliding down as Leeds and Coventry did, is that Wolverhampton arrive in League One still receiving parachute payments, estimated to be around £16million, on top of their natural revenue. Attendances at Molineux were generally above 20,000 even towards the end of last season when disillusionment was likely to set in. It’s not a stretch to think that, with renewed optimism, similar figures could be reached this season.
In addition, Kenny Jackett has spent most of his managerial career at this level – before managing Millwall in the Championship the last three years, he’d spent six of his seven years as a manager in the third tier, one year in the fourth. It means Wolves are in the position of having money and having a manager who knows how to spend wisely. It’s a combination that shouldn’t be as rare in the lower leagues as it is.
But money is only useful if it’s spent.
Wolves have so far released experienced players in Stephen Hunt, Christophe Berra and Sylvan Ebanks-Blake, although the latter had a broken leg,which would have ruled him out for most of the season anyway.In addition, Karl Henry, Jamie O’Hara, Roger Johnson and utility player Stephen Ward have all been transfer listed. Of their goalkeepers, Dorus de Vries has moved to Nottingham Forest, Welsh international keeper Wayne Hennessey is being nursed back to fitness after 16 months out. Carl Ikeme seems to be highly rated by people within the game, but has the habit of dropping a few clangers.
Bolton’s Sam Ricketts is the only notable addition so far, although Leigh Griffiths has returned from a loan spell at Hibernian where he was the Scottish Premier League’s second top scorer with 23 goals. Although he didn’t make much of an impact at Molineux, Jake Cassidy scored 11 goals in half a season in League One Tranmere last year.
The decision to clear out experienced players appears a choice, rather than a necessity. New boss Kenny Jackett has said
“They are not part of my plans. … Suffice to say that changes do need to be made as it needs to be a young and vibrant Wolves side coming out well now and coming out fighting.
It does sound like the changes are part of a deliberate shake-up of the squad, whether to inject physical energy into the squad, or remove a feeling of negativity from a club that’s been relegated twice in a row, and been involved in the stresses of a relegation battle for two successive years before that. But, depending on how many other youth products of the quality of Cassidy the Wolves youth system is producing, Wolves will probably require further additions before the season starts.
Bristol City
Bristol City and Peterborough
The same logic supporting Wolves as probably League One champions can be applied to both Bristol City and Peterborough. Both Sean O’Driscoll and Darren Ferguson are experienced in taking clubs up from League One (Doncaster and Peterborough respectively) with less money than they’ll have with their current clubs. Bristol City are a bigger and richer club than Doncaster, while Peterborough have just sold Dwight Gayle for £4.5m.
But backing each for promotion has the same problems as backing Wolves. Additions for Peterborough have so far been relatively thin on the ground. Posh have only made two additions – making the loan of Jack Payne permanent and adding teenage goalkeeper Charlie Horton to the squad.
Bristol City have been relatively busy, signing former England squad member Frank Fielding, Swindon’s Aden Flint, Arsenal product Jay Emmanuel Thomas and Scott Wagstaff, instrumental in Charlton’s title win two years ago. At the time of writing they also have Cheltenham playmaker Marlon Pack on trial, the kind of technical player O’Driscoll’s Bournemouth and Doncaster teams were built around.
Peterborough may not need many additions – a common comment last season was that they were an entertaining and creative side, but lacking an end product for most of the season. Strong form in the second half of the season, collecting 11 wins and eight draws from the last 25 league games, saw them miss out on safety by one point, so the same squad may be enough to take them back up.
Brentford’s Griffin Park home
The Other Contenders
From the outside looking in, probably the most impressive summer transfer work was done by Brentford. They added Walsall’s Will Grigg, the scorer of 20 goals last season, Swindon Town captain Alan McCormack, and slightly surreally, Javi Venta, a right back who was in Spain’s provisional 2006 World Cup squad, signed from Villarreal. The signing of Grigg strikes me as particularly impressive – as a pacey and creative forward he’s in a similar mould to Bradley Wright-Phillips, who joined Brentford on loan for the last three months of last season but never scored regularly. Despite the loss of impressive young keeper Simon Moore to Cardiff, Brentford should be contenders for the League One title.
Tranmere’s excellent first half to last season can be attributed to investment in young talent, but the same can be said about their vastly inferior second half of the season. Seemingly as a deliberate counter, during the summer they’ve invested heavily in experience. Akpo Sodje scored seven goals in the first half of last season for mid-table Preston and six goals in the second half of the season for relegated Scunthorpe.
Ryan Lowe, while having a poor season at MK Dons last year, scored 16 or more for four successive seasons previously, while left-back Evan Horwood was credited with 11 assists for relegated Hartlepool despite the side only scoring 51 goals.
Preston North End have added Kevin Davies – a man as synonymous with Bolton as Nat Lofthouse – to their forward line, and announced that title-winning pest Iain Hume will be kept by the club following his season-long loan at Doncaster. When added to Stuart Beavon (an all-rounder who has been most criticised for his lack of physicality) and Joe Garner, a link-up forward who in the second half of the season seemed to be back near the impressive form earlier in his career at Carlisle, Preston have some outstanding forward options. It’s unusual for a League One side to have that level of depth, and should make them very dangerous in the forthcoming season.
Although Bradford’s most notable star Nahki Wells has been linked with a move away from Valley Parade, his strike partner James Hanson will almost certainly remain at the club. They’ve made some interesting additions – Mark Yeates, a winger impressive in the Championship for Colchester, Middlesbrough and Watford has joined from the Hornets, while Jason Kennedy, the kind of combative but technical player to be expected from the Middlesbrough academy, has been added from Rochdale.
When you add in their League Cup experiences last year, winning games they logically shouldn’t have won, and putting in an impressive late run to the playoffs when all seemed lost, there’s a more than decent chance of Bradford doing what Swindon did last season, and challenging for promotion in their first year in League One.
Odds are that you’re familiar with this story, so I won’t dwell on it.
In brief, the terms of Coventry’s rent were overbalanced to the ground owners’ side, with ACL getting more money than similar clubs were playing, and keeping money from food and drink sold at the ground. SISU, Coventry’s owners, decided to stop paying rent altogether, effectively squatting at the Ricoh Arena for 14 months and ACL, running the club on behalf of it’s 50% co-owners, the local council and a local children’s charity, responded by offering a less unfair rate.
Rather than accept they had their backs to the wall and make the best of a bad situation, SISU (or Otium, a different branch of the same company who are Coventry’s new owners after a bout of administration) decided to move the club to Northampton for the next three years while they build a new stadium in Coventry. Which will presumably involve applying for planning permission to Coventry Council, who have first-hand knowledge of the club’s willingness to disregard contract law when it’s inconvenient to them.
As if all that wasn’t shambolic enough, City have, according to a report in the Coventry Telegraph on Friday, sold just 300 season tickets for the new season. It’s hardly surprising of course. Using Google Maps’ definition of ‘Coventry’, Northampton Town’s Sixfields is 31.4 miles away. Even if it wasn’t for the possibly unprecedented bad atmosphere created by the club, many fans would find it impractical to make that kind of journey regularly for a ‘home’ game on a Sunday, never mind a Wednesday night. (Coventry’s matches will be the ones to move when they clash with Northampton’s.)
Resource-wise, it would appear that Coventry should be in with a chance of making the League One playoffs this season. But, with a combination of the negativity around the club and the possibility that they’ll be blocked from making January additions because of their status within the financial fair play rules being affected by low turnover, a relegation battle is entirely possible.
While I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bradford do a Swindon, it appears pretty clear that Swindon themselves won’t be challenging for promotion from League One. While I’d say that Paolo di Canio’s demanding management and the fitness and technical coaching under the Italian’s management deserve praise, it’s also clear that the Italian was heavily financially backed beyond the Robins’ natural wealth.
di Canio’s exit was caused by the sale of star winger Matt Ritchie against his wishes, but that was only a hint of the sales to come. This summer club captain Alan McCormack moved to Brentford, Joe Devera and Simon Ferry moved to Portsmouth, while Gary Roberts also turned down first team football to drop a division to Chesterfield. Most notably, James Collins, signed for £140,000 and three payments of £20,000 from Shrewsbury before grabbing 18 goals last season, was sold to Hibs for £200,000. From a distance, it does seem more like a desperate fire sale than anything more logical and controlled.
It’s not really a surprise then that during pre-season Kevin MacDonald, di Canio’s replacement as manager, quit during pre-season, with the club being linked with Les Ferdinand, Glenn Hoddle and even Peter Schmeichel. It doesn’t seem that McDonald, a former Aston Villa assistant manager and caretaker manager, will be missed by fans – he won only four of 14 games – though this could be down to an inability to control the disruption caused before he arrived.
It’s a shame that things have fallen apart at Swindon – a few days after Paolo di Canio quit in February his side went top of League One, so it’s easy to argue that back to back promotions were within their grasp. More than that, they were a flamboyant but tough team, one I enjoyed watching. Is the failure down to di Canio’s rotating door transfer policy? The fault of former chairman Jeremy Wray for backing the manager so heavily, rather than investing the same money into a longer term vision? Perhaps the new owners should have held their nerve and kept hold of Ritchie, and pushed for the bigger rewards of Championship football. The blame could even be placed at MacDonald’s door for failing to make the transition from coach to manager.
Football’s full of what ifs, and last season looks set to be a notable one in the history of Swindon Town.
Walsall’s Youth Go Their Seperate Ways
Whoever is ultimately responsible for a talented Swindon team being picked apart, it’s almost certainly down to mistakes made by someone within the club. The same can’t be said about Walsall. A year ago, after surviving a relegation battle two years in a row while playing a combative and pragmatic style of football, the Saddlers’ manager and former youth team boss Dean Smith made a bold decision. Rather than investing in the kind of reliable, proven pros who’d be guaranteed to ‘do a job’ but thrill no-one, the decision was made to base the team around youth talent and gambles from lower divisions.
The bold choices paid off, with Walsall’s 9th placed finish being fuelled by young local lads. Will Grigg scored 20 goals; Jamie Paterson grabbed 13 and George Bowerman scored seven, all three being youth products aged 22 or under.But during the summer, Grigg joined Brentford, Paterson moved to Nottingham Forest, and Febian Brandy, snapped up on a free transfer before grabbing seven goals cutting infield from the right wing, moved to Sheffield United.
Investing so much playing time in young players will always be a gamble, and the massive inconsistency the Saddlers went through last year could be seen as an almost inevitable consequence. Walsall had only two defeats in the first nine, followed up immediately by six defeats in the next eightas part of a 13 game winless run. This in turn was followed by six victories in eight. I’d forgotten how bizarrely quick their shift between excellent and poor form was, and the inexperience in the squad could well be a factor.
Ideally, last year’s inconsistency would be considered part of a learning curve, with the young Saddlers learning not to get knocked back too hard by losses. It’s a real shame to see one of the division’s smaller teams, already with the odds stacked against them, doing all of the ‘right’ things we want our clubs to do, then a year later forced to start again from scratch.
On that cheerful note, good luck to all the teams in the forthcoming season!
