Conference Board hold your heads in shame.......

So we now have the situation in late February that to everyone with a nose on their face was inevitable in July/August with Chester City suspended from the league awaiting the final cut.

The Conference members now have to vote to confirm the expulsion of our oldest and nearest rivals. The problem is by now Chester have played 25 odd games won a few, drawn a few and lost many so different clubs have built up different points totals and as such the loss of these points will have bigger effects on some than others.

The fantastic little club Chester City used to be is dead - the majority of their supporters know it and want to be allowed to rebuild their own club without the cancer that is their owner. I am devastated to see our great rivals in such a predicament but feel that despite the self interests which all clubs will feel at this late stage of the season the club must be expelled.

The Conference need to look at themselves very carefully for breaking their own rules at the start the season and allowing Chester to start the campaign. In the meantime the decision is more difficult for clubs to make because an element of self interest takes over and the likes of Cambridge will if they vote for expulsion will lose six points and immediately drop themselves into a relegation dog fight.

Conference board hold your heads in shame for allowing this farce to continue for so long. We await the next episode in this farce.

Histon Podcast

The Histon podcast is now up at www.wrexhamfan.co.uk featuring Dean Saunders, Frank Sinclair, Mike Williams, Marc Williams and Gareth Taylor.

Tugay or Not Tugay?

So now we're signing a player who last season was looking good in The Premiership, eh? Forgive me if I contain my excitement.

Don't get me wrong: I'd love it to be true. It's just that I don't see a single shred of evidence that it is.

There are two basic truths about these types of stories:

1. Usually they're not true.

2. When they are true, nothing comes of them.

I'll stand by point number one through thick and thin. Show me one piece of information to confirm the story beyond an assumption based on Tugay reportedly being at Collier's park last week and has worked with Dean Saunders.

As for point number two, you might argue that the signing of Andy Crofts was, on paper, a "too good to be true" transfer story as he was clearly out of our league in terms of his pedigree (if not in actuality!) However, I'll see your Crofts and raise you a Savage and a Musampa.

The main source seems to be a thread on Red Passion. Now we all know that such threads can be hijacked by wind up merchants, but there's a lot of sense spoken on this one-certainly more than in The Mirror's flimsy excuse for a story. It raises a question which is worth considering, and the answer to which will solve the conundrum: why aren't The Leader and The Daily Post asking about this? My gut feeling is it's because they know it's not a story.

Hope I'm wrong though!

The big day has at last arrived...........

Well tomorrow anyway when Eastbourne Borough and their hardy band of followers travel up from the South coast for the first league game of the season and I for one can't wait.

I always go to the first game of the season with a remarkably optimistic approach when you consider that in over 30 years of following Robins and then Dragons there have been far more dismal or mediocre seasons than good ones but this year will be different! Let's look at why?

1. We have a progressive, young and highly rated manager with an infectiously enthusiastic approach to the game. He now has BSP managerial experience on his CV and I'm sure will have learnt a lot from last year.

2. The players, many of whom have and could play at a higher level. Deano has put together a smaller but far better quality squad than we had last year. The icing on the cake for me was the signing of Curtis Obeng who only two weeks before had been on trial at Premier League Wigan Athletic and had reportedly impressed Roberto Martinez. The Latics loss is surely our gain. From back to front we now have competition, genuine competition, for places in the squad so if one player loses form we will not have to play another out of position to cover.

3. The youngsters at the club, those of you who witnessed the game against Wolves will know what I mean. Kai Edwards, Rob Pearson, Ed Moss, Jamie Morton, Lee Roberts amongst others are all names to genuinely watch out for and with Saunders coaching and supporting them I am sure most will have a future in the game.

4. The off pitch development to leave Wrexham FC debt free. I am not in to the politics of WST, Dismal Jimmy etc but I am confident that there are enough genuine fans without their own political axe to grind to watch the proceedings and ensure that the club will be left on a sound financial footing with no more Hamilton's in the woodwork.

So I am positive about this season and on a final note delighted to see that our friends from up the road will be competing in the BSP this season. -25 points is one hell of a handicap but at least the real Chester City supporters will have a club to follow, I still remember the gloom and despondancy I felt when travelling up to Blackpool a few years ago wondering if this was the last time I would watch my beloved Wrexham play. We may be non league but at least we have a football team to love, hate, follow, moan about and discuss.

Here's to a great 2009~10, but I do wish we had a 2~3 somewhere in the date as in 92~93 and 02~03 our last two successful promotion campaigns!

Steve

Second String Returns At Last

I must say I'm delighted to see that Dean Saunders wants to resurrect the reserves next season. I thought the decision to abandon the second eleven last Summer was an awful call, and I was quite glad when I looked back at what I blogged at the time to find that what I'd feared has pretty much been borne out. We need to give players a chance to play in competitive matches to get them fit or see what they're made of.

The latter point has been particularly relevant this season as Dean Saunders has tried to run the rule over a plethora of triallists without offering them anything more than a string of friendlies against variable opposition. He pointed out that Mani Assoumani played five trial games and kept five clean sheets, but the only way to workout if he was able to cut it in a more testing environment was to throw him into the first team.

Mind you, we hopefully won't have to run things in quite that way next season. Something which amused me when I looked back at that blog was that we were promiswd a first team squad of eighteen! As we've smashed the record for most players used in a season this time round, I think it's fair to say that idea went out of the window!

A Crucial Stage

An excellent point made on the Red Passion Messageboard by Drury-red. By the time Stevenage, already well ahead of us in terms of games played, take the field in a league fixture again, we'll have played four Conference matches, away to Woking and Northwich, then at home to Crawley and Kidderminster. It's a great opportunity to pull ourselves back up into the frame, despite the table's current unpromising appearance.

They're the team we're chasing, in fifth place nine points ahead of us having played three games more, so it's in our hands to climb above them by the time they get a chance to register another point. The one problem with the theory's whether we can pull out of our current nosedive ad actually do it!

Reading The Signs

Well, I'm just making my way down by train to Woking-just opened the blind to be greeted by the site of a huge field of manure-hope that's not an omen!

I feel like reading the entrails a bit, to divine just what's going to happen, so I'm encouraged by a sight I'm looking forward to seeing in Woking once I arrive. The town's the setting for H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds", and I want to see the big sculpture in the middle of the town commemorating it-it's a Martian Attack Vehicle, which must rank as one of the least orthodox examples of public sculpture to be commissioned in this country!

Remember the stink when there was talk of a sculpture being built on the roundabout by Sainsbury's in Wrexham? It couldn't happen because so many people were against it, so the good folk of Woking must be particularly enlightened to embrace this idea! Can you imagine the debate?

It's particularly open-minded of them to allow it to be built when you consider why Woking was the setting for the novel. Wells lived there, didn't like it much, and therefore decided that it should be the location of the Martian landing so the aliens could lay waste to the town! His desciption of the town being annihilated is written in loving detail, but Wokingites still embrace the book with pride! Good for them! Let's hope that, as in the book, the match ends with the invasive Red Weed triumphant!

Hang on, another way to interpret the ending is that the invading force is routed! Maybe using literature to find omens about football fixtures isn't as good an idea as I thought!

Williams Loss Leaves Gaping Hole

On Saturday morning I was chatting to a few friends about how desperately we needed to bring in a striker as we were rather short on options. Little did we know how dire the situation would become just a few hours later!
The loss of Marc Williams is an immense blow. For me, he's the runaway candidate for player of the season at this point, but quite apart from that, we are indeed horribly threadbare when it comes to attacking options.
With Michael Proctor clearly not rated by Dean Saunders, Shaun Whalley shipped out on loan for the same reason and Patrick Suffo having at best an hour in him, the Wrexham manager's options are rather limited.
The problem is that, as I understand it, Saunders has been as aware of the problem for as long as we have been; of course he has! He's been aggressively pursuing new strikers, but has yet to find one who is willing to come to us and is of a high enough standard to actually improve the squad. If that's the case, the chances of him finding the right man in a matter of days seems rather slim!
So what of the other options available to him? A change of system's obviously a possibility, but would that be wise when a youthful side seems pretty much in the groove of playing 4-4-2, and Jeff Louis-a striker who it appears requires careful guidance-is used to having a partner? I've heard talk of Silvio Spann being tried out on training behind a solo striker, which is perhaps the one position on the pitch you'd feel comfortable playing him as you'd be able to tell him to forget his defensive reponsibilities to an extent, although I'd have thought that would work best with a striker making darting runs in front of him for him to hit. Like Marc Williams.
The other possibility, of course, is the forgotten man of The Racecourse, Steve Abbott. He appears to be most comfortable in the hole and was brought in to boost our goals total from midfield, but has faded from view. I wonder if Saunders will give serious thought to throwing him into the void?
Otherwise, we could always fall back on this guy!!!!

Never Mind The Bollands

Phil Bolland's return to The Racecourse was anticipated by many of us with a great deal of curiosity, but like many things you look forward to, it didn't turn out as one might have expected.

Bolland was a steady presence in Brian Little's doomed side last season; indeed, he was one of the few players Little signed who could be judged a success. Thus Little's decision to release him was something of a mystery to many, although with hindsight it made sense as Little's decision-making was hardly the most reliable!

His performance at The Racecourse last Thursday raised a few eyebrows. His angry reaction to Andy Fleming's high tackle is open to interpretation-I wouldn't be too bothered if one of our players reacted like that to a poor challenge, but he went in with his studs showing too. The ref probably got it about right in showing them both the yellow card.

His forearm smash on Marc Williams was a totally different matter, a nasty attack on a player when the referee's back was turned which, if it had been spotted, would have been an easy decision. If only this was the Premiership, where the TV evidence would have brought him the retrospective he deserved. At least he was punished when his moment of clumsiness teed Jeff Louis up for our second goal.

He played like a man with a chip on his shoulder, and perhaps that's explained by the fact that apparently he has been telling people at Cambridge that he wanted desperately to stay at The Racecourse but couldn't because of his serious differences with Brian Carey. Well, judging by what we saw on Thursday he's welcome to feel that way; Westwood and Williams look like more than adequate replacements!

Is this one of the triallists?

There's a cryptic comment on the bottom of the TNS match report, which saw us field a raft of triallists, about one of the triallists being a German who'd been at Red Bull New York and Arminia Bielefeld.

Well, trawling through the internet initally turned nothing up, but then I found some stuff on a guy called Sahr Senesie. A German website (I knew doing that O Level would come in handy one day!) said he had a trial in New York, and Bielefeld were interested in him. He never signed for wither, but his pedigree is good-quite apart from playing for Borussia Dortmund he scored at The Racecourse three years ago for the German Under-21 side, playing alongside the likes of Michael Rensing, Moritz Bolz, Marcell Jansen and Patrick Helmes, and played in the Under-20 World Cup.

He sounds a bit rich for our blood, but had a trial at Nottingham Forest at the start of the season, so maybe there's something to it!

Admittedly the thing about him having a father from Merseyside seems to blow it out of the water, as it seems to contradict his wikipedia entry, and who would dare question wikipedia's veracity? My gut feeling is I'm day-dreaming, but everyone else enjoys some daft transfer speculation, so stuff it; I'm going for it!

Are We A Smith Light?

So did we miss out on a bargain in Adam Smith?

He arrived on trial, virtually out of nowhere according to Brian Little, alongside Christian Smith in pre-season, and frankly didn't make all that much of an impression. He did little to suggest he'd earn a contract in the friendly I saw him play in, his performance being rather inispid and anonymous.

That didn't mean he wouldn't get a contract though, as Little seemed to offer rather too high a ratio of triallists a contract for my liking-I feel there's a lot to be said about the Tom Taylor fiasco which hasn't come out yet for example, but that's just the most glaring example. However, he decided Smith was not for him, although he did haul his namesake in.

With hindsight it looks like Martin Foyle might have been the prime mover behind Adam Smith's trial, as he was a virtually immediate signing once Foyle was bizarrely appointed as boss at York City. And he has been delivering. He has a couple of goals to his credit already and they were good ones too.

I suspect he won't turn out to be someone who we look at with a certain regret. Having said that, football's hardly the most predicatable thing in the world is it? Perhaps we passed up a gem.

What's Going On Wes?

So what's going on with Wes Baynes then? He's managed, in the space of one day, to promise to knuckle down and fight for his place, hand in a transfer request and apparently offend Dean Saunders!

It's an odd story, and hard to work out just what's going on. In The Leader Baynes says he's going to get his head down and work for his place, although he's the man in possession as he played in our last game, against Woking.

Yet by the time of his transfer request he's complaining he should be given a chance in the team. Let's trace back his recent appearances then; he was a regular under Saunders until the win at Stevenage, when he had a poor game and was subbed at half time. That was Saunders' seventh league game in charge, and Baynes featured in every one of them. He was then injured and returned for the Woking game, which as far as I can work out was the first one he was available for once he was fit again.

So why is he frustrated at not getting a chance? Has someone expressed an interest in him? Is his agent agitating for a move?

If it's the latter he's being poorly advised, I'd suggest. Looking round the Conference I don't see too many better young talents than him, and he has a chance to gain valuable experience at the heart of a side pushing for promotion, under a coach who appears to place a lot of importance in what happens on the training ground, and who has excellent facilities at Colliers Park at his disposal.

Saunders' comments are consistent with how the situation appears from the outside. He knows ability when he sees it, and has not only consistently picked Baynes but has made the most of his delivery from set pieces. We look more organised from dead ball plays than we have done for a long time and Saunders isn't stupid; he recognises the crucial role Baynes plays in that.

I hope this gets sorted out the right way, although Saunders' comments in The Post don't necessarily sound promising. Baynes is only just twenty, and the club's the right place for him to develop. I remember Neil Wainwright making a fine initial impression, being badly advised and leaving too soon, only to go backwards on the fringes of Sunderland Reserves when he should have been developing in the first team at The Racecourse.

From a selfish point of view it would clearly be for the best for us if he stayed, and most importantly of all, he's my lad's favourite player and we bought him an away shirt with his name on it for Christmas. If he leaves I'm billing him for the replacement; if I get Williams on the back of that one we should be pretty safe-we've got dozens of them!

The Soap Opera Ends

So Clough has finally gone to Derby. That's a relief; for now! If Saunders continues to succeed, teams will continue to be interested in him, but I'm happy to pay that price and live with the anxiety if we continue to be on the up!

Say It Ain't So, Deano!!!!

And little did I know, as I was wittering away a couple of hours ago, that I have more of a vested interested in Clough getting the Derby job than I realised!

Dean Saunders on a four man shortlist for the Derby job? Dear God, what did we ever do to them? After they vetoed the Robbie Savage deal, they're going for the kill!

The article isn't totally clear. That's what it says, but it also says Geoff Moss is confident Saunders is going nowhere-so how could he be on a shortlist? I think-or perhaps hope-the use of the word shortlist is sloppy journalism.

It looks to me like Derby want Clough, odds on favourite according to my last fab blog posting remember, and have other names in reserve should they fail to get him. Mind you, it sounds like Clough's pretty happy where he is, and Darren Ferguson is in charge of a wealthy club that is on the up.

I wonder what Nottingham Forest's courtship of Clough did to him last week. He must have come given it serious thought, as he was clearly close to getting the gig, so did it make him realise it was now time to move on, or did he return to Burton knowing he had a job to do there?

I hope Moss is right, as the loss of Saunders would be absolutely catastrophic. I don't want to think about Saturday's game being 1 A.D. (After Dean). The upheaval of yet another managerial change, not to mention the impact on the players, would surely end any hopes of promotion, not to mention probably saddle us with yet another squad reshaping which hardly helps stability. I don't mind Saunders doing what he sees as necessary this wondow, then retooling the squad for League Two in the Summer; I don't welcome a new man coming in and hoping for the best.

Or Maybe Not...

Clough is now a hot tip for the Derby job, although The Independent suggest he won't take it if offered. However, having taken stock I think I should ditch my obsession with the bloke and his side's possible collapse. They're so far ahead of everyone else that a more realistic attitude to strike is to give up on the title, I suspect, and focus on the play-offs. If Burton implode then I might revise that, but with no sign that this will happen, I'll be adjusting my stance and rooting for them to beat Torquay tomorrow night.

Dean's Striker Dilemma

Dean Saunders could be forgiven for thinking this management lark's not as tough as people ,make it out to be, given the tremendous start he's enjoyed at the helm at Wrexham. However, he's now confronted with a nice little conundrum to get his teeth into. What do you do if you have a problem taking chances, yet your team's one of the top scorers in the division.

It's an odd situation isn't it? Our strike partnership have twenty-six goals between them, obviously a tremendous total for halfway through a season, and only league leaders Burton Albion have scored more in the Conference this season, yet we clearly have a problem converting superiority and chances into goals.

So what do you do? It's hard to conjure with the idea of a change up front as an option when your two strikers are doing so well; I certainly wouldn't advocate that solution. Having said that, if Saunders can attract a striker whom he thinks will tuck away a good proportion of the chances that fall his way, then it might be hard to resist him.

In fact, after hearing the way he spoke after the Woking game I suspect that's what he'll do. So what about the Louis-Williams combination? Saunders has used Williams in a more withdrawn role, putting his energy to good use in midfield, and I suspect that might be something which he will look to do again if he's able to attract a striker that fits his requirements.

Woking Podcast

The Supporters Association podcast is now up at www.wrexhamfan.co.uk featuring Dean Saunders, Andy Fleming and Woking boss Phil Gilchrist.

Eastbourne Podcast

The Supporters Association's podcast is now up at www.wrexhamfan.co.uk featuring Dean Saunders, Marc Williams, Gavin Ward and Eastbourne manager Garry Wilson.

Kettering Podcast

The Kettering podcast is now up at www.wrexhamfan.co.uk featuring Dean Saunders, Jon Brown and Kettering keeper Lee Harper.

Kettering Preview

The official press preview for the Kettering game, distributed to the press before home games, is now up here.