Stick With Newell

By: Rob Sedgwick
Date: 10/09/2009

INSANITY,as Einstein once said, is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Those suggesting that Town manager Mike Newell should be sacked, ought to consider what has happened to his predecessors when they were first appointed.

Since the sacking of Alan Buckley in 2000 every manager except Russell Slade and Newell himself have been deemed failures by the various GTFC boards. Replacing managers is a very expensive operation and the past decade has shown that changing the man at the helm has had very little immediate effect. Even Russell Slade had a comparatively poor start before turning things around, but everyone else in truth has been little better than their predecessors.

The lessons of those managerial changes is that we'd have been far better investing the money which was spent sacking Town bosses on strengthening the side. I wonder where we would be now if Paul Groves had stayed at Blundell Park? Or Lennie Lawrence? Or even Alan Buckley? Could we in truth say that we'd be in a better position than where we are now.

So give Newell at least the whole of this season to turn things around. He hasn't even had a chance to play the side that he built up during the summer. It would be insanity indeed to contemplate getting yet another manager. All Grimsby's successful periods in the recent past have been built around a stable management team and playing side. The corollary to Einstein's statement is that it is perfectly sane to do a similar thing and have a reasonable expectation of getting the same result.