Saddlers blog: History tells us . . .

‘Who do you want to be the next Walsall manager then?’ (Or alternatively ‘Who do you think will be the next manager?’), writes blogger Mark Jones.

Collectively Saddlers fans everywhere must’ve been asked that question about a million times in the last ten days. My answer is a resounding … don’t know.

Whoever gets to sit in the coveted hot seat will have to face all the same issues DD had to face, an easy ride it ain’t.
Second guessing Jeff Bonser isn’t exactly the simplest of tasks either. However one thing that I’ve noticed more than once is there’s always been a definite contrast between each of our owner/chairman’s appointments and his predecessor.

Kenny Hibbitt/Chris Nicholl:

Hibbitt was a nice enough bloke, a bit of a man of the people; he was well liked by fans and players. This probably helped him stay fairly immune from stick as the worst Walsall team of the last 50 years laboured through two dreadful seasons in the pits of Division Four; and then again after the nightmare of Gresty Road ’93.
Nicholl had no time for such niceties. He was single-minded about promotion and he didn’t care who he upset along the way. In hindsight this was exactly what we needed as Hibbitt was never going to be quite good enough. Nicholl got us out of the basement and established us in the next league within two years.

Chris Nicholl/Jan Sorensen:
I always felt Nicholl lost his way in his final year, maybe he regretted not putting up more of a fight to keep Martin O’Connor. The football was functional, team selections were predictable, the transfer market was avoided and we mounted a kind of non-threatening challenge for the play-offs.
Life under Big Fat Jan was anything but dull. Heralding the dawning of a bold continental approach (stop laughing), the portly fuzzy-haired bloke from Tamworth had the sublime talent of Jeff Peron to work with for a year and the phenomenal Roger Boli for six months (and the couldn’t-be-arsed one for the rest of the season). Tholot was ok in patches and Eydelie for literally minutes; we won 12 cup matches and got to play at Old Trafford. Yet the season ended in freefall amid rumours of Jan losing the dressing room.

Jan Sorensen/Ray Graydon:
The dressing room was always safe in the hands of  Ray Graydon . A strict disciplinarian, he knew exactly what he wanted on and off the pitch and vowed to work on the training ground to get the best out of whatever squad he’d got.
And he was true to his word, 98/99 remains my favourite season of all time. We stayed the course and won automatic promotion to English football’s second tier for only the second time ahead of the big spenders, notably the Charlies of Man City. Every time when it looked like the wheels were coming off during that year, back we’d come-harder, stronger, better.
Despite this mini-miracle, Jeff and friends decided we should have a go at retaining our hard-earned place in the First Division by basically crossing our fingers and hoping for the best. Even Sir Ray couldn’t achieve the impossible, although that didn’t stop him having a monumental go. With the acquisition of some better quality players in the second half of the season, we took it right to the wire before going down with dignity at Ipswich.
Not content with that, Sir Ray went again and lead a better Walsall team to promotion in the fantastic surroundings of the Millennium Stadium. Happy days.
Given peanuts and monkeys for a second time, we were always gonna struggle again and Graydon paid the price. A modest and honourable man, he took responsibility for failings that weren’t necessarily down to him and ultimately carried the can.

Sir Ray Graydon/Colin Lee:
Modesty was certainly never in Mr. Lee’s vocabulary, he seemed to emit an air of ‘you should be grateful to have me’ throughout his ill-fated reign. The eagle-eyed reader may have spotted that I’m no fan of Colin. I could never see why anyone should’ve got excited about his empty C.V. and thought that we stayed up despite, not because of, him.
By Saddlers standards he had a huge amount of funds to spend yet the football served up was dire and uninspiring. For all the years as a Walsall fan I’d longed to see us operating at a higher level, I’d never imagined it to be so dull.
Even to the last, in the disgraceful capitulation at Gillingham, he seemed to view us fans with utter contempt. Never was the bond between supporters and team (a strength of the Graydon era) so distant.

Colon Lee/ Paul Merson:
Yes it was a disaster. Yes he made mistake after mistake. There was Slough, there was a revolving door of players, and his legacy was probably relegation to the fourth division. However I always felt that Merse at least wanted to make a go of it, he just lacked any semblance of the skills required to be even a half-decent manager.
The fact that he was a self-confessed alcoholic, drug-taking, wife-beating, gambling addict should really have been a bit of a pointer to how things would work out. If you can’t manage your own life, how can you really manage anything else?

Paul Merson/Kevin Broadhurst:
Personality-wise there couldn’t have been a greater contrast between these two bosses. Kevin and his wife gave up their spare time to give respite care to disabled children.
Unfortunately being worthy doesn’t make you a decent manager (or Jeff would have snapped up M. Teresa from Calcutta F.C. 20 years ago). We won one game in the brief Broadhurst regime as we went from dangerously close to being sucked-in to the relegation zone to being eaten alive.

Kevin Broadhurst/Richard Money:
Credit to Jeff (see, I can do it) for bringing in a proper manager to stop the rot two years back. A hybrid of Nicholl and Graydon upgraded for the 21st. Century, Dicky Dosh did a brilliant job to win promotion last season. The title (clinched 363 days ago!) was both a bonus and a reward for the years of disappointment that had preceded it, and this season has seen so much progress yet will probably always be remembered for the crushing disappointments of the last two months.

All of which suggests we’re unlikely to end up with Dicky Mark 2. Just cross your fingers and hope we don’t get another Jan/Colin/Paul/Kevin Version 2.0 either.