Comment: Gulf between levels is only getting bigger and bigger

Ipswich, Shrewsbury and Macclesfield have not started the season as they would have liked.

If ever there were questions about the gulf in quality, finance, and a number of other factors between divisions then folk need only look at the foot of the three Football League tables.

Hurst, Askey and Yates are not bad managers. The trio have not suddenly forgotten how to manage overnight.

Quite the opposite, they have all enjoyed varying levels of success.

Askey is a league title winner, Hurst has play-off promotion on his management CV (which he almost replicated last season) and Yates twice took Cheltenham to the League Two play-offs.

Those are all mammoth achievements over 46 game league campaigns which prove the trio’s credentials at those levels of football.

None of the above will be an ounce of comfort to Tractor Boys, Salop or Silkmen supporters as their teams continue to lounge near the bottom. Collectively the clubs have taken 19 points from 99 available this season. Neither’s return has been good enough.

It cannot be a coincidence that the three clubs are struggling.

Paul Cook and Tony Mowbray have taken to the Championship like a duck to water with Wigan and Blackburn – but then they were operating in League One with Championship level cash.

There is a clear step in quality between the divisions and this, perhaps, is the major factor behind the flaws.

Former Shrews chief Hurst was flavour of the year last season and touted for a number of Championship jobs before Ipswich came hunting.

For the most Hurst has brought in players who impressed in League One (alongside players linked with him while at Salop). Ipswich fans were curious and a little cautious about a lack of Championship experience and nous and this appears to be an undoing.

It is not about comparing each club.

Each are at a different stage in their respective divisions. Macclesfield, for all the National League glory of last season on a low budget, were not expected to rip up any trees in League Two.

The challenge at Montgomery Waters Meadow was to ride some momentum and feel-good factor from last season and look up League One rather than down.

That remains Askey’s target but, while wins are scarce, the trapdoor looms.

Ipswich, 16 years a second tier club, felt they would be riding the crest of a wave by appointing Hurst – a fresh manager who had earned his corn by working his way through the leagues.

But the gulf in quality has been highlighted as Hurst’s motivational methods appear not to have translated at Portman Road. Likewise Askey, clearly able to lead a team more than a sum of their parts to greatness, has not yet found a League One success formula.

As more money continues to wash through the leagues with parachute payments helping ‘big boys’, the like of Wigan and Sunderland’s ilk, bounce back with immediate promotion, the margins will continue to grow.

You will always get exceptions to the rule. Take Shrewsbury’s visitors today, Accrington Stanley, a collective group of hard-working and talented individuals riding their own momentum built over the culmination of a number of years under John Coleman.

But that example is Coleman in settled surroundings where he is heralded as a hero at Wham Stadium, under minimal pressure.

Askey, Hurst and to a lesser extent Yates came in expected to settle in their higher, more lavish surroundings.

But as the years go on, this is becoming a much tougher prospect.