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.

Chester Podcast

The Chester podcast is now up at www.wrexhamfan.co.uk featuring Dean Saunders, Chris Maxwell, Silvio Spann and Gareth Taylor.

Prepare For A Test

I can’t help fearing Sunday’s game. Maybe it’s a fatalism born from realism: I’ve suffered so many disappointments and false dawns over the last few years that I expect to be let down by Wrexham.

It’s a shame, because I really want to be carried away by Tuesday. In fact, for twenty-four hours or so I was. We absolutely hammered the side the media have assured us is much too good for The Conference to the extent that Chris Maxwell didn’t have a save to make in the entire match! It was terrific! We looked balanced, competitive, dangerous. How could a struggling side like Chester be expected to deal with us in that sort of mood?

But that’s where reality started to kick in for me. A big part of the reason why we were all so delighted by Tuesday’s performance is that it came so completely out of the blue. We’d looked poor for the previous month, and hadn’t approached the form we showed pre-season since things got serious, so it was understandable that we got carried away.

Anyway, it was just one game; when did we last follow up a good performance with another? And who knows if Dean Saunders will decide to stick with the same line-up or rotate again on Sunday?

Also, anyone who thinks Chester will be pushovers are kidding themselves. We all know the cliché: no derby is easy. However, the thought that poor old City, marooned at the bottom of the table, aren’t competitive is a false one. Before Tuesday they had earned nine points, just one less than us. Not much of a gulf there then! And anyway, even if they can’t save themselves from relegation against impossible odds, they can surely raise themselves for their two derbies, scrap like hell, and give their fans something to sing about for years to come?

It all reminds me of that season in the 1990s when Chester were cut adrift at the bottom of League One while we were riding high. When the derbies came around city’s fate seemed sealed...but they still emerged with two draws from the games, which punctured Wrexham’s play-off hopes and gave Chester’s fans bragging rights even though their weak side sank pathetically into League Two. The second match, when we threw away a lead against a side that had been reduced to nine men, was particularly awful.

There’s no way Chester are going to be lambs to the slaughter, but we did perform in a manner which most Conference sides wouldn’t be able to live with on Tuesday. Fasten your seatbelts on Sunday. It’s going to be a hell of a ride!

New Dragon Talk Podcast

A new Dragon Talk is now up at www.wrexhamfan.co.uk featuring an interview with Paul Whitfield and a look at Chester City's plight.

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

Now we've only got four weeks to go.............

and things are certainly starting to move towards that first BSP game on 8th August. Wrexham have been installed as 12/1 to win the BSP this season which could well be worth a punt if Deano continues with his policy of waiting for quality and getting the right man. The news that Mani Assoumani is due to fly in later to day is a good indication of this as the guy looked good in the games he played last season. From the look of the pre season training regime the players have been through Saunders is obviously planning on the high energy football killing teams off in the final quarter that served us so well when he first arrived. I bet the players can't wait for tomorrow and a chance to kick a ball in anger against Coventry just as a change from running on beaches, forests and rivers!

The biggest shock of the week had to be the decision to switch the local derby against Chester to Sunday lunchtime. Comments on various fans forums on this ask the question as to why North Wales police cannot look after 5,000 fans the vast majority of whom are well behaved on a traditional Saturday afternoon kick off and to be brutally honest I do not know why either. Far higher profile games take place on Saturday afternoons each week with far bigger crowds, imagine if every London derby had to be a Sunday morning! This season in the Premier League we have Bolton, Blackburn, Wigan and Burnley together with the two Liverpool and two Manchester clubs so I wonder how many of these games will be moved on police insistence rather then for TV.

Good luck to the two remaining Welsh clubs in their European ventures next week. I witnessed The New Saints exit last night at the hands of Fram Reykjavik and Llanelli fell to Scottish Premier side Motherwell. This leaves Rhyl playing the once mighty Partizan Belgrade with the first leg next Tuesday and Bangor City playing the Finnish side Honka. Bangor's second leg is at The Racecourse in a couple of weeks time and the close proximity of our pre season friendly against them to the first leg has resulted in the match being called off. This is the second Welsh Premier side to pull out of friendlies against us on the particular Monday evening. Still plenty to look forward to as the season's build up continues to gather momentum.

Steve

Five weeks tomorrow.........

We kick off our campaign to regain Football League status with a home game against Eastbourne Borough. Now not being particularly superstitious we won at home 5-0 twice last season, once on the opening day of the season and once against Eastbourne so surely lightening cannot strike twice or is it three times as the omens point to a good start to the season. Let's hope so!

Other dates to watch out for are probable Sunday lunchtime kick offs against our old rivals Chester in September and on Valentine's day (thoughts of a massacre come to mind!), Altrincham are our Christmas derby double act at home on Boxing day and then away on New Years Day. The run in, he says being optimistic, does not on paper look to difficult with the last 6 games being Histon (H), Mansfield (A), Gateshead (H), Grays (A), Rushden (H) and then the travelling red army is set to invade the great footballing outpost of Hayes & Yeading on the last Saturday of the season.

With the players returning to full time training earlier this week and more new signings in the offing this particular correspondent is feeling extremely optimistic about the season ahead and with the first pre season game due on 11th July the season is getting ever closer. Five weeks and counting...

Drewe Love!

Drewe Broughton is eager to see his two old sides, Wrexham and Chester, return swiftly to The Football League, and I half agree with him!!

Of course Broughton's record of playing in teams that get relegated is well known. yet he manages to do exactly what we aspire to: he consistently remains in the Football League.

I was about to suggest he splits Wrexham fans' opinions, but realised I'd be lying; it seems most people didn't like him much. Yet is that fair? He's certainly a more steady character than Jeff Louis; you might shoot back that Louis scores more goals, but who wanted to retain him at the end of the season?

By way of contrast, there are plenty of Football League managers willing to employ Broughton. This might not be the most widely-held notion, but I reckon we'd have been better off if we'd held onto Broughton. And he's six years younger than Gareth Taylor!

Man Overboard!

Who can blame Mark Wright for bailing out at Chester?

The drama around the football goes from bad to worse and you can understand why Wright is reluctant to spend a year of his career dragged a troubled club through a season in The Conference with a ten point handicap which surely means the best they hope for is an outside chance of a tilt at the play-offs.

An interesting sideshow in all this is that the local media has reported that the return of Phil Bolland to link up with a manager he has worked well with was a foregone conclusion. Surely that's all up in the air now?

Cheshire Solidarity Saves Chester

Did Northwich Victoria inadvertantly save Chester from demotion to the Conference North last week?

It looks that way to me.

The FA decided last Friday to overturn the Conference's decision to relegate the Vics a further division as a punishment for an "insolvency event". (Can you remember the good old days when football fans had never heard that phrase?)

And the F.A. were right. Basically, the Conference had two contradictory edicts in their rulebook. the newer one said a side which has a conveniently-timed "insolvency event" in the Summer must drop a division, and that was the punishment meted out to Northwich.

The problem is, there was already a rule saying in those circumstances you'd have to start the next season on minus ten points in the same division. They were caught bang to rights.

So how does this link to Chester? Obviously the original punishment meted out to Northwich is the road the Conference want to go down, and the chance to make an example of a "big" club would surely have been hard to resist. But it would also have triggered another humiliating slap on the wrist from the F.A. Which is great in terms of earning us a couple of juicy derbies in the midst of our long treks to Sussex and the North East, but isn't much consolation to Woking.

Conference Nod Chester Through

So City are in, thank goodness, with a ten point handicap. Now the fun begins!

Another D Day for Chester

Having crowed excitedly about the return of the Wrexham-Chester derby, then suggested our neighbours could be reprieved if Darlington collapse, I'm worried we might lose out on a resumption of cross-border hostilities after all today.

The Darlington issue never came to anything; their continued membership of the Football League was nodded through at their AGM yesterday in such a lowkey manner that it didn't even merit a mention on Darlington's website. The threat to our derby at today's Conference AGM seems more real though.

Woking, in a desperate attempt to save their skins, plan to object to Chester's membership of the Conference, citing the double relegation of Boston United as a precedent. I suspect they'll fail: the parallels are circumstantial, I feel, and I can't imagine the Conference, after the hammering it received last season over points deductions, has the appetitie for a similar fight.

No-one thinks City's sudden escape from administration feels right, of course, but their fans don't deserve to suffer further as a result of whatever happened behind the scenes, and we desperately want to renew acquaintances anyway!

Still, the last few years suggest that anyone who tries to speculate on which way the Conference is going to jump at any particular time is likely to get their fingers burnt. Watch Google News carefully today-it could get interesting!

No Chester Derby Next Season?

So were we premature anticipating a renewal of hostilities with our chums from over the border?

There's a real chance Chester could be offered a reprieve after they were relegated to The Conference; in fact, reading between the lines it seems a very likely outcome.

The issue is the financial disaster which has overcome Darlington. It's sounding horribly like The Quakers will go under, or at the very least won't be able to satisfy the Football League that they have a route out of administration planned in time to be included in League Two next season.

Their meltdown perhaps isn't an immense surprise considering the way they were catapulted outside their comfort zone by former owner George Reynolds, with their pursuit of Faustino Asprilla and Paul Gascoigne and the building of their white elephant of a stadium. It now looks like they'll pay the ultimate price.

Should they go out of business the highest level a phoenix club woud be allowed to start in would be the Conference North; should they survive, time is running short to avoid demotion anyway, as the Football League will be keen to avoid starting the season with another basket case on their hands after starting the last season with three sides suffering a massive handicap.

Mind you, two of those sides still managed to finish above Chester, who suffered the most abject of campaigns. As they might well have to start next season ten points behind the rest of the field anyway, the Football League would be saddled with an uncompetitive team anyway!

Of course, no story involving Stephen Vaughan would be complete without a bizarre plot twist. I'm not sure what to say about the possibility of Vaughan buying The Quakers. Suffice to say it would be a shock if something as odd as that didn't happen at some point.

Tremendous News!

Surprising but terrific news-Carl Tremarco stays! I didn't expect that to be the case for a moment, but it's a heck of a boost as we look forward to our step into the unknown. I think it's fair to say that if Tremarco didn't have the injury record that he has then he would never have ended up with us in the first place. He's a good full back, full of energy and positive intent, and if he can stay on the pitch he'll be a huge asset, no question.
However, his injuries were surely the reason that only Chester and Rotherham were willing to take a chance on him, and that was fortunate for us as you can see why he turned them both down. The two sides with the most downward momentum in the second half of the season (ourselves excluded) were probably those two, though for differing reasons.
Chester need to get things sorted quickly if they aren't to have a disaster next season, and I don't say that with any sense of pleasure. They capitulated after such a strong start-who'd have thought when they were in second place in November that the points they'd accumulated weren't a basis for a promotion push but, like us the season before, an insurance against relegation? You can see why Tremarco was wary of joining them.
The Rotherham story is a terrible one. There were rumours going round at the end of last season that they were going out of business; thankfully that doesn't now seem to be the case, but they suffered terribly from going into administration.
The Millers side that thrashed us at Millmoor looked set for promotion; they certainly were a class above most of the teams we played last season. However, they were devastated by the docking of ten points and commensurate loss of confidence, coupled with that awful injury picked up by Brogan, a gifted attacking left back who was terrific in that match against us and, I assume, was the player Tremarco was earmarked to replace.
Bearing all that in mind, United are a side to be worried for next season; Tremarco has first hand knowledge of how administration can lead to a downward spiral on the pitch, and naturally decided it was better to stick to the devil he knew.
Tremarco's decision might just be the boost we need to kick-start Brian Little's Summer of reassessment. A key player committing himself to the cause might make players mulling over contract offers look more favourably at us. Fingers crossed that this is the start of the successful Summer Little needs.

Good News on the Tremarco Front-sort of

As I can't honestly believe that Carl Tremarco won't be playing in the Football League last season, the news that he currently sees us as the front runners-albeit in a field which only contains one horse at the moment-is as encouraging as it could get.

I'm not getting carried away-clearly there's a long way to go in this saga-but he has always been impressively honest about his future, so when he speaks positively about what we've put on the table I'm inclined to feel just a twinge of hope.

You Can't Help Gloating!

It was a perfect case of schadenfreude on Sunday.

Chester could have scored a few but were repelled by a goalkeeper they released at the start of the year. Ward showed City what they threw away with his virtuoso display, which included one save right out of the top drawer.

Oh, did I forget to mention that the save in question was made from a player who turned down the chance to sign for us six weeks ago?

And to my eyes the other outstanding performances came from Phill Bolland, also released at Christmas by Chester, and Drewe broghton, one of five ex-Cestrians who were on the pitch for us at The Deva!

Factor in scoring our opening goal within a minute of a City goal being disallowed when some refs would have deemed it legal, plus the fact that Chester must have seen a chance to play their greatest rivals at home when they're bottom of the pile as a real chance to break their dismal run of form, and Sunday couldn't have been much sweeter!

There's still a sense of confusion in realising I've never felt so happy at being three points behind Macclesfield though!

Brian Little at Chester

Chester podcast

Click here for the podcast, featuring Brian Little, Michael Proctor, Mike Williams and hero Gavin Ward.

Great result-now let's get back to business!

It's odd to feel we're still bottom after a fighting win at Chester like today's! I suppose it shows that the Chester game is something separate from reality. As I've suggested before, it's a game which feels different from the others, a game where the usual rules of engagement don't apply. Thankfully it fell in our favour and even if there is a sense of the Chester derby being unlike any other league game, those three points feel real enough to me!

We rode our luck as Gavin Ward's excellence kept Chester at bay. City didn't play like a side which had suffered such a bad run of results as they kept plugging away despite things going wrong-most notably the first half turning point where a possibly generous decision to disallow their goal turned into a lead for us within a minute!

The thing is to keep going now. We've halved the gap to Macclesfield, but now we must build on that achievement. We only have a day's recuperation before the long trip to Wycombe, and on the same night Macclesfield slog down to Dagenham. We mustn't let them get out of our sights again; as long as we're within a game of overtaking them, especially as we've three games in hand over them, it's all there to play for.

Too Bad To Be Easy

Let me tell you something which worries me. Chester are in awful form.

I know I should be glad, but it seems we have a horrible habit of breaking teams' bad runs.

Chester have certainly been in an awful state lately. In their last fifteen games they've won one and drawn two. Their last clean sheet was straight after they'd drawn 2-2 with us in Brian Little's first game as our boss, eighteen games ago in early December, and the only time they've kept the opposition at bay in twenty-three matches, stetching back to early November.

However, the last time we played a side in such grim form was when we went to Dagenham, and look what happened there!