Candidates jockey for Town hot-seat

Simpson going wasn't a surprise and in my opinion it was the right decision, writes

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After a disappointing campaign which has seen the club go backwards since last year, Simpson's dismissal was inevitable.

Instead of building on a decent campaign last year, we have gone from being one of the promotion favourites to mid-table mediocrity.

Quite simply the man lost most of the fans, he made some strange tactical decisions and his business in the transfer market was poor. For example, Kris Bright replacing Grant Holt – need I say more?

Despite fully agreeing with him going and thinking he had taken the club as far as he could, I felt he might as well have stayed on until the end of the season.

And let's not forget his time here hasn't all been bad as he got us to a play-off final which for periods last season didn't look possible.

Some will say two years wasn't long enough for him to meet the boards and fans' expectations, but that is how things are in modern day football and in my opinion he had all the facilities in place to take the club further than he did.

He was in charge of a club with a good fan base, decent transfer funds and a quality stadium. Mid-table proved to be not good enough for the chairman and rightly so.

So who would fans like to see as Town's new manager?

Whoever he is he needs to be a man with managerial experience, especially of the lower leagues, and someone who has got good contacts within the game who can attract players to take the club forward.

Let's look at some of the early candidates:

Mark Venus – No managerial experience at lower league level.

Paul Ince – Good shout although doubt he would want to manager in League Two again.

Graham Coughlan – Fans like him, but not ready to go into management.

Graham Turner and Jimmy Quinn – Managers should never return to former clubs.

Jim Gannon – Wants to find a club close to the North West.

Paul Sturrock – Good shout.

Stuart Delaney – No chance.

Expectations about Saturday's game were probably not high amongst fans and with Morecambe desperate to win to maintain their promotion push, the 3-2 result wasn't a big surprise. Mathematically we could still have been promoted with a win, but realistically our season was already over.

Town reject David Artell scoring two goals and McIntyre missing a second half penalty summed up our season, but on the positive side youngster Tom Bradshaw showed us his goalscoring ability again and Van Den Broek broke his duck for the club.

So one game to go in this year's disappointing campaign and for me the season can't end quickly enough. The sooner it ends the sooner the chairman can get a new boss in to sort the club out and plan for a promotion push in next year's campaign.

The final game sees us visit Port Vale where Town will be looking to restore some pride and get their own back on the team that beat us 1-0 in the reverse fixture in October. It would also be nice to ruin the promotion chances of one of our local rivals.

Now that we have got nothing more to lose, we might as well blood some more youngsters in the game and see what future stars we might have in our mix.