Gulliball wrote: ↑16 Feb 2018, 16:25
He has split opinion amongst Torquay supporters, so I’ll try to give a balanced view (albeit quite positive). He was a very popular player and retained that as a manager – which in itself was how a lot of it started, as the previous (paid) manager, Chris Hargreaves, was his teammate as a player and wasn’t overly successful in management – not saving us from relegation out of the Football League in 2013/14 and then 13th place in 2014/15, so this was seen as the club doing the same thing again with a popularist choice. He was also seen as the cheap appointment, which he almost certainly was, but that was the position the club was in.
It’s a simple fact that when you're at the bottom of the table and losing a lot of games, you are going to come in for stick – his successor here is finding that out now as well. It doesn’t matter what restraints or circumstances might be there, if you lose games for a long enough period, you’ll come in for criticism, so by the end of his two year spell this had built up - anyone in his position would face the same. A few comments he made also got ridiculed, which is the same issue, as when you’re losing games, anything can be turned into mockery. Again, his successor is finding that out now, that when you try to say positive things (we’re not rubbish anymore, will be out of relegation zone by Christmas etc) you leave yourself open to looking stupid when you lose most weeks.
You’re probably aware that there’s been several off-field issues at our club in recent years. Put simply, and particularly in Kevin Nicholson’s spell here, there was no money. The lottery winner had left, leaving behind a club over spending by £2k per day, and no-one wanted to buy the club, so in the end a local board of 4 people invested £30k each and bought the club. That money didn’t go very far and so everything was cut back to the barest possible bones. The headline grabbing stories were things like players driving themselves to games because we couldn’t afford a coach, or Nicholson himself driving the players to games in a minibus.
That is the background to his spell in charge here – and why despite losing so many games, he is still well liked by a lot of fans here. Once the immediate rage at 5pm on a Saturday subsides, most fans have the knowledge of the club to realise the constraints he worked in and factored this into judgement of his time in charge.
It was his first management job, at a club with no money and off-field battles, so thing’s weren’t perfect, and his win % floated around 30-35% for his spell in charge. With any teams that are losing games there will be things to criticise, but with the infrastructure of the club there simply wasn’t the money for dedicated staff or resources to run the club professionally.
I think the best way he can be judged is against those he directly succeeded and preceded, who were working under reasonably similar situations. He had a far better record on the pitch than his predecessor, and far more experienced, Paul Cox. He’s also got a far better record than the man who replaced him last September, despite the increase in budget that Owers has been afforded. Owers still has time to turn things around, but at present he’s not been able to match the results that Nicholson achieved, and at best from here he’s only going to match what we’ve done for the last few seasons.
It may be a case for us that you don’t quite appreciate what you have until it’s gone. In comparison to where we’ve been as a club in the last 50+ years, pulling off a ‘Great Escape’ from the National League may not be something people want to see as a success, but for the position of the club now, maybe with hindsight those weren’t so bad after all. We’re currently staring regional football in the face - something we haven’t seen since the first half of 1927.
It will be interesting to see how he does in a new role, and I wish him well if he does take over at Halifax. I think in general he showed signs of being a very promising manager in his time with us.
If you do the same as other clubs, only with less money, you’re guaranteed to fail, so you have to take some gambles when you’re poorer than the other teams. In his 2 years here Nicholson tried most of them, with varying success. We signed young players with potential, and they got bullied at times, but over time he developed players. When he was able to attract players of a decent calibre, he got the best out of them, and there’s a lot of them that have gone back into the football league as a result of their time here.
We’ve signed hundreds of players on loan, signed free agents, non-contract players, and filled the squad out with local non-league players in order to concentrate resources on the starting XI.
This summer we tried to add some experience to the squad, which meant you take on some other defect, so we signed players on a downwards trajectory like Pittman and Klukoswi, or with an injury like Gowling and Davis. In general these might not work out every time, but as with for example Jason Fowler, you simply have to accept that if the player didn’t have this defect, he wouldn’t be at the club in the first place. Whatever route you take, there will be a downside that you can be criticised for, but that was the job he had here.
By sacking him after 4 games we left a new manager with the squad he’d assembled, and supporters were quite optimistic for, for the new manager to inherit, which made no sense. Quite a large chunk of our starting XI now is still players Owers inherited, despite signing 15 players himself since September, but an expensive chunk have been wasted as a result of the change.
One of the things I think fans liked was that he kept up the engagement with supporters despite criticism, kept on promoting the club around the bay, and persevered in the role because he was a fan of the club and wanted to make a success of it. Despite results on the pitch for large spells, he was a very popular manager with the majority of the supporters and did a lot of work with the club in the community. The benefits of this might not be seen until we have to sell season tickets based on the back of a relegation battle, but without the galvanizing effects of the manager in the club shop selling season tickets himself. From what I have seen of games at Plainmoor I would imagine that our attendances are based on ‘tickets sold’ rather than fans there on the day, so there’s a huge potential for these to drop away if we don’t have the positivity of a great escape to build on in the summer for season ticket sales.
Think that’s long enough now. Basic summary - he had a very tough situation for his first management position, and did what was asked of him on the pitch, whilst doing a lot in the community off it. He has the potential and work ethic to do very well in management, and a lot of Torquay fans will follow his career closely and wish him well.