Saddlers Social: Walsall fans have their say

Ian Newbold

Painful. Out-thought and out-fought at home by struggling Barrow. You could see what it meant to them, the togetherness, the attitude, the fight towards a collective goal. They weren’t very good, but my they very much deserved their victory on Friday night.

We are poor, amongst the worst teams of our Bescot era even, but we have enough to compete with Barrow et al, but just aren’t showing it enough.

Brian Dutton may have been conveniently placed, but perhaps not the right man at the right time. We may perversely have acted too quickly and decisively.

It’s a massive job at Walsall, and I mean that in the sense of there being a lot for a manager to do or control within a small team. Recruitment, contracts, scouting as well as all the training, monitoring, researching opponents, preparation, tactics, game management. It’s a lot.

We may need more semi-permanent ‘football’ expertise at Walsall. Leigh Pomlett and the board seem to be doing a good and ever improving job on the non-football side of things, but could need help in running the football side of the business.

And leaving it all to a novice manager, perhaps any manager, we’ve learnt that it may not be the blueprint for repeated success.

Rob Harvey

Two more games to ‘look forward’ to this week, and I have no faith that we will get anything from either of them. It’s a sad time to be a Walsall fan, and this is by far the worst period the club have had since I myself have supported them, which is coming up to 25 years. It’s possibly been a lot worse for others who have supported for longer than that, but it’s got to be up there still.

Let’s face it, 90 per cent of us expected we were going to lose against Barrow on Friday night, and so it proved. We look devoid of ideas in defence, midfield and attack and that isn’t a good recipe for success in any league. We are beaten before we go on the pitch most of the time and you have to wonder why. The mess we find ourselves in now is a result of at least the past ten years where, barring the reign of Dean Smith, we have been scrimping when it comes to ‘improving’ the football club and that goes for both on the pitch and off it as well.

Something needs to change, drastically, in order for our club to start looking up the tables again rather than down them. If we do not get relegated this season it won’t be for the want of trying, it will be down to other teams being somehow poorer than us. At the moment I think we are bottom of the form table, with ONE win in the last fourteen games. It’s disgraceful.

Now I don’t like to accuse people of not giving anything less than 100 per cent in their job roles, but with all but about four of our squad out of contract at the end of the season can they all honestly say they are giving their all for the football club? A lot of them probably won’t be around next season, and some will probably, unofficially, have moves lined up so why would they care where Walsall FC finish this season? The final part of this season is starting to have shades of the season we got relegated out of League One.

This has been written before Leigh Pomlett speaks to the fans on Monday, and I can only hope that he will answer a lot of the questions that have been put to him in the wake of the defeat on Friday, and that he gives us some proper truths about the situation at Walsall Football Club on a financial point of view. Something doesn’t add up and it’s about time the club were more open and honest with their supporters, before they lose many of them for good.

Roberto Petrucco

Just what is going on at the moment? The players look lost, and very low on confidence. The constant tinkering of line-ups and formations is not allowing them to grow in that system. I would like to see the team going back to basics. A good ol' fashioned 4-4-2. Last season, Caolan Lavery and Josh Gordon played their best football together in this formation, and they were linking up well too. It would also allow Wes McDonald and Tyreik Wright to be out and out wingers, without having to worry about other responsibilities, and variations on this, they can be a proper left and right mid.

I'd like to back Leigh Pomlett. I think he has been dealt an awful hand since taking over. More of his spell has been in a Covid restricted world than out of it. He was tasked with a rebuild of many areas of the club (which he had begun to do), and now that has had to be put on hold, to ensure the clubs survival, which he has done. But the threat of relegation is growing, and he must act quickly to improve the state of affairs on the pitch.

Nick Etheridge

In some quarters, the game on Friday was seen as must win. In others it was very much a must not lose. The fact that we did neither shows how much trouble the club is in at the moment. I’m not not just talking about the playing side either. From top to the bottom the everything seems a mess.

Good will gestures and shrewd PR stunts like the third kit reveal will only go so far. Other clubs seem to be thriving in the current climate, yet we were told that “well run clubs” will be those who prosper. The evidence suggests otherwise as we have regressed massively in the last twelve months where others have really improved around us. Mr Pomlett is really in a rock and a hard place but the next couple of months are absolutely massive for the future of the club.

Brian Dutton seems like a nice chap but for me he’s been too much of a cog of what the Darrell Clarke machine was all about. Personality wise they are chalk and cheese but being in the culture that DC created for such a long time will be ingrained in Dutton, as is currently being shown with the constant tinkering, particularly on Friday that saw a complete formation change against one a few sides below us, on the back of one of our best performances (albeit a loss) of the season. Time for a fresh start for me.

Chris Saunders

Mid table mediocrity, boring end to a season and what is left to play for? These are often things we have moaned about over the years, what I would give for that to be the case right now! Barrow was a very poor performance and all things considered it has worried me. I try to stay relatively optimistic but I am really struggling after that game and really worried now about the threat of relegation out of the league.

An update from the chairman on Monday and will he stick with things and hope we survive, does he hedge his bets and get some experience alongside Dutton or does he fully gamble and replace him now to give us some fresh ideas and try and drag us clear that way? Whatever his choice it’s more important than ever that it works.

Whilst you can’t guarantee results on the pitch we can do much better with some short term structure and continuity for the next few games and try and make ourselves hard to beat and pick up some points this way. The attempts to play proper football are welcomed by me but let’s park that idea until we either have enough points on the board or in the summer once the dust has settled.

Crawley is our next game and it’s a tough one, so by that logic it would be the Walsall way to go and win it. Add in that last time we played them we were on a poor run and beat them – I’m clutching at straws now I think!

James Kenealey

I always wondered what my breaking point might be when it comes to Walsall FC. I think Friday night may well have been it. That game represented the absolute, complete and total manifestation of everything that has been going wrong at this club for the past 15 years – quite possibly a last crescendo of ineptitude before the curtain falls on our big football league show.

Brian Dutton, I’m sorry but no. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Walsall side offer less. Just, nothing. That set of players looked like they’d never met. Why would you change something that worked the week before? We’re in the fourth tier at home to Barrow, why are we still trying to confuse everybody? Not even Kelly or Wrack could make sense of any of it.

Broadly speaking now. I’m not getting personal but there are key individuals at this football club – and you know full well who you are – who have presided over a publicly failing organisation for far too long. Quite how this can be allowed to continue is beyond me. Nothing has changed with the back room of this administration, just a series of ‘we’ll look into that’ platitudes. Half the time we can’t even get flags right, and yet we’re encouraged to stick together and invest our money in this place. This is all relevant because everything cascades down onto the pitch. We’re fighting for our Football League status and the blame lies club wide. Can someone please ‘look into that one’ for us?

I can take losing. What I can’t take is this situation. I’m sick of watching this club roll over and die with a whimper and a shrug, being dragged into nothingness, watching fans left right and centre disappear, even die-hards who would follow the club into any division.

By the time people read this column, Leigh Pomlett should have addressed the fans. I hope it’s something drastic. It was my great pleasure to leave my money in the club during all the recent struggles, but I can say this publicly and clearly: there won’t be any more money from me until I see substantial change.

Stuart Cox

That was painful. One of the poorest performances that I can remember and I’ve been a supporter since 1981.

No ideas at all going forward. I don’t think we would have scored has we played for the whole of Saturday as well. These are worrying times, short term and long term.

Short term – what happens to Brian Dutton? Is he the man for the job? There have been times when I could see what he was trying to achieve in terms of playing football, albeit with limited resources, but Friday night was a Darrell Clarke throwback to random players in random formations. Our short term goal is to stay in League Two – a phrase I never thought I would be saying – and then rebuild. But rebuild from a base of what? Average to below average League Two players.

Long term, even if we do stay up, I worry for our future as this rot has been setting in for five years or so, the quality of the team and the club getting worse and worse every year. I honestly don’t have the answer (although I do think that Brian Dutton isn’t part of the answer), but something needs to be done and quickly, otherwise the faithful may turn their backs forever.