PNE Fans’ Panel view from John Smith: Decision to part ways was right one
When I saw Paul Heckingbottom shaking hands with all his team before disappearing down the tunnel on Saturday, I had a feeling that this could be his last appearance at Deepdale as North End’s manager.
Over the past few weeks his position in the club had looked less secure with each defeat. When you have a team with a defence who leaks goals, a midfield who rarely scores goals and an impotent attack who do not score that often, you have a team that will be in trouble towards the bottom end of the table whatever level you play at.
It is hard to pinpoint what went wrong since January when we were riding high. Things would possibly have been better had there been a cash injection at that point instead of in the summer. Probably financial circumstances at the time dictated otherwise but that is the problem when you are a small fish operating in a big pond.
However to give the manager the millions he was given in summer after a disappointing five months seems to have become a massive own goal for the club, and our position in the table could hardly havef been much worse had we gone down the usual route of free transfers and loans.
I personally think the root of our problems are much wider than just having a poor management team.
However football and coaching systems are moving on at a faster pace than ever these days and, although not that old, the duo of Heckingbottom and McCall seem to have become dinosaurs virtually overnight. Their rigid tactics and predictable formations and style had made us easy to beat once opposition coaches had studied our style.
Heckingbottom fell into the same trap as his predecessor Ryan Lowe by trying to play with wing-backs when we had not got the quality of players to do so.
Interim boss Jason Euell has played mainly Premier League football in his career and has previous experience in the dug-out, which will probably be enough to guide us through the choppy waters ofSaturday’s game at QPR until the three-week extended international break.
QPR have been in a similar position to us for years but have gone down the route of employing a foreign coach who has brought his own flair and style to Loftus Road and spent money on players he knew from his managerial career abroad, as opposed to ones signed on the basis of stats on a computer.
Maybe this is a road we could explore one day. PNE have never employed a foreign manager and huge changes are needed here on the coaching side if we are ever to be a not just making up the numbers at this level.
If not a foreign coach, maybe a forward-thinking coach like former Ipswich manager Kieran Mckenna might be the answer.
To campaign for the sacking of a manager is never a nice thing to do. Football managers do not go out on the pitch to try and lose games but on this occasion I would imagine it will be seen by the majority of the Deepdale faithful to be the right decision taken.
A famous TV interviewer once asked a manager if this sequence of losses could surely not go on forever, to which he grimaced, replying: “It can.”
Well, let’s hope that for our sanity “it can't” and the results start improving from next Saturday when we take to the road to Loftus Road for what will be a stern test for Jason Euell’s ‘Super White Army’.