Less than a week into the job and new manager Chris Hutchings’s “Things to Do” list is already filling up.

After his low-key entrance at the Banks’s Stadium on Saturday, Hutchings has his first point as Saddlers gaffer from an entertaining clash with Hereford which might have gone against his team.

It could have been worse. It can be better. Hutchings has some immediate tasks to accomplish especially if his to deliver on his optimistic, first day pledge to rescue a play offs challenge from this fading season.

First item of business must focus on that big so-and-so he’s got keeping goal for him. Clayton Ince should be invited into his office at the first opportunity, before the door hinges are nailed down and the giant keeper is refused exit until he signs a new contract.

Easier said than done and not just because Ince is bigger than a door frame.

His outstanding form at the moment, which on Saturday included a world class save in a League One setting, is sure to bealerting higher grade clubs while Walsall’s frail finances suggest this is not a good moment to ask chairman Jeff Bonser to push the boat out on one player’s contract.

But in this difficult period for the club, Ince has emerged as a figure of authority and leadership to go with the outstanding performances which are proving vital to the team keeping its head above water.

The Saddlers without Ince at the moment makes you shudder. What next? Oh yes, centre of defence.

Against Graham Turner’s spirited and reviving team, Anthony Gerrard and Manny Smith had a torrid time against Hereford’s front two Stephen Guinan and Andrew Williams, with the junior partner in the pairing getting himself into aerial tangles which frequently put his side under pressure.

What former centre-half Hutchings would do now to be 20 years younger. But in the absence of a miracle of nature, some calls to his contacts to dig out an experienced defender, one able to help and guide Smith especially, are urgently required.

The Saddlers ‘grapevine’ has already suggested Wolves’ Jody Craddock might need some games after a lengthy injury struggle and it is right – he is just the type of figure Walsall need.

Having correctly concluded that if Troy Deeney is to profit anywhere it is as an out-and-out goalscorer, the manager and coach Martin O’Connor will relish getting to work on this young player, because there is a talent there which is far from fully realised.

If they could somehow bring a goal threat to the otherwise excellent link play of Jabo Ibehre – the Emile Heskey of League One football – then Walsall would have a real player on their hands.

At the moment, Ibehre does so much right in threading together the Saddlers forward play, only for his game to be diminished by the absence of any kind of promise of a score.

Plenty to do then for Hutchings, even as he reminds Saturday’s goalmaker Sofiene Zaaboub that he needs more consistency to go with that undoubted touch on the ball and tries to settle down the transfer-listed Gerrard.

But most of all the new Saddlers boss needs to get out and about and do all he can to re-energize a dispirited, slumbering public.

Walsall fans – and you can’t blame them for this – display the tell-tale signs of supporters driven into a kind of sullen indifference by the events of the last 12 months.

The chance to shake them out of their apathy before kick off was declined by the new management team.

Hutchings and O’Connor did not want to make any kind of fuss of their arrival and took their place in the dug-out without the customary on-pitch introduction.

While their reasoning – they wanted the players focus to be total – was sound, the decision removed any chance the club had of garnering support and symbolically marking the start of a new era.

The Saddlers put some decent stuff together in the first half, but it was to the noisy accompaniment of 800 or so Hereford fans.

Walsall’s supporters, it seems, are suffering from a crisis of identity, still scarred by the twin sales of Scott Dann and Daniel Fox which destabilised last season and left many questioning the purpose of the club in the modern era.

The hard-core fans sticking with them – about 3,500 on Saturday – do so out of a sense of devotion and they desperately need to see a way forward again. With their club stalled on the hard shoulder, Hutchings and O’Connor have turned up like AA men carrying jump-leads to fire the entire Saddlers community back into life.

Let’s hope they can do it. Having sealed his recall by performing impressively in the reserves on Hutchings’s first day, Zaaboub was a key figure in many of Walsall’s best moments.

His calculating, rolled pass to Deeney gave the young striker the chance to remind us his instincts for goal are sound, but the middle period of this match would be dominated by Hereford – and Ince.

The goalkeeper clipped enough of the ball to deny Williams a goal in a desperate one-on-one opening, which the Hereford camp are entitled to think was a penalty.

Then came a truly memorable save to deny Karl Broadhurst in the second-half – a point-blank header, directed downwards which the big man somehow reached with agility defying his 36 years.

But Hereford were well worth their equaliser, executed from the penalty spot by Guinan just before the hour, even if Walsall were themselves bemused by the referee’s reading of Mark Bradley’s challenge on Matt Done as he turned away from goal.

Equally Hutchings will have liked the way this young team gathered themselves to turn the flow of the game back towards Hereford’s goal, where goalkeeper Craig Samson also distinguished himself in beating away Zaaboub’s late effort, before Bradley failed to take a glorious headed opening as added time arrived.

By Martin Swain