“Just a Blip”?
I got a bit of a shock yesterday to be totally honest. I was glancing at the topics on the Morecambe fans’ forum Shrimps Vices and suddenly saw the following:
God is the new Manager – OFFICIAL.
“Blimey!” I thought; “So it is possible to upgrade from Derek Adams!”
But then I realised that I’d misread it. That’s when I got an even greater shock. I had to seek immediate clarification of this astounding news. But it was right: Ged Brannan is officially the new Morecambe Manager on an eighteen-month contract. So all I can say, folks, is this: there’s hope for all of us yet.
I can’t think of any other situation where a man with negligible previous managerial experience and whose audition for the Top Job – a truly feeble display away from home where his team was lucky to lose only six-nil – could still come out top of the pile. I wonder how much this apparently sudden decision had to do with Dave Artell’s appointment as the new Grimsby Manager? We will probably never know. Whatever, the club’s official website has made all the right noises – due diligence; best man for the job; confidence of the players blah blah totally unconvincing blah. But it does make you wonder what is really going on behind the façade that we as fans are presented with by the Executive Class at Morecambe. Derek Adams – to the best of my knowledge – has never spoken publicly about his decision to leave the club last week. But you can’t help feeling that he had seen the Writing on the Wall and decided to cash in his chips because of his view of the ownership issue. This knotty problem has been at the heart of all the club’s problems for years now but Derek told us only a few weeks ago that it would be resolved in the next six months. It makes you wonder if he suddenly learnt that it simply isn’t going to be. So Ged’s appointment has all the hallmarks of kneejerk and – worse still – contingency: the easiest and cheapest option that the club has been able to find. It could, of course, turn out to be an inspired choice: Ged may confound the many critical voices on social media and turn out to be the man to lead the club forward in precisely the way King Derek would have if he had chosen to stay. Let’s hope he does. This time next week, things could look very different. If Morecambe were to win tonight and then progress in the FA Cup next Saturday, we could all have cause to look forwards to a bright new future. But if neither of these things happen, we could all be facing a truly bleak Winter with nothing to play for but a place in the EFL next season with a man in charge who will still have the best part of a year to run on his contract. Time will tell but in the meantime, we must all get behind him; hope for the best -and keep our fingers firmly crossed. The Scouser who was once invited to play international football for the Cayman Islands said the following, having just put pen to paper to accept his new job:
“I’m absolutely delighted to be in charge of a Club like Morecambe. The fans are great. If they are anything like Saturday at Wrexham, that’s all I can ask. Come down on Tuesday, sing your hearts out and get behind the team because you’re an extra player for us. You’ve been brilliant so keep it going. I’ve been here before as a player and I always loved it, I’m absolutely buzzing, I’m just so glad the Board have stuck by me and given me this opportunity.”
Anyway, the Ged Brannan era officially began tonight as Morecambe further indulged their recent Welsh interlude. Newport County arrived in north Lancashire for their first league meeting since Derek Adams’s Shrimps beat Michael Flynn’s Exiles at Wembley two years ago.
Derek has gone and Michael is long-gone from the South Wales’ club, for whom a second Play-Off defeat in three years was the Final Straw for the Executive there. Newport’s current Manager – Graham Coughlan – saw his men beat record-seeking Stockport County at Rodney Parade last Saturday by two goals to one and – in doing so – ruined Stockport’s chances of creating a new unbeaten record for any League Two club. After this famous victory, Mr Coughlan said the following:
“”You can probably see why I get annoyed; why I get angry. Because those lads are capable of that and I know they’re capable of that. It’s just getting that consistency week-in week-out; keeping those standards. It’s a great victory but we want to be a consistent team. We don’t want to be a team that delivers once or twice a month. Let’s string a few together and I might crack a smile.”
Saturday’s victory against the league leaders confounded the Exiles’ recent form: just one win in their last five league games and two defeats. Newport are no Wrexham, despite the national tie – and that’s probably just as well as far as the Shrimps are concerned. Last Saturday, the Red Dragons totally humiliated Morecambe in the north of the Principality, winning six-nil with a team that you felt didn’t even have to get out of second gear to achieve this far too easy victory. The Shrimps were pathetic: they played like a non-league team – and a particularly poor one at that.
So Interim Manager Ged Brannan’s first experience of Life in the Fast Lane ended disastrously. I wrote on Sunday as I was preparing this preamble: “If he is to stand even an outside chance of being given the Morecambe job on a permanent basis, he would need a transformational reaction from his players against Newport.“ How wrong can you be? Reading between the lines – possibly incorrectly again – my guess is that preferred candidate Dave Artell turned the job down and Ged was the only other practical choice. So, in a sense, now it wouldn’t matter how well or badly the players perform tonight: the die has already been cast.
Morecambe have now lost three of their last five League Two games on the spin. However, they won all three before that and went into tonight’s game in twelfth place in the division (as opposed to County’s sixteenth); five points ahead of tonight’s opponents and with two fewer games played.
Morecambe’s previous Football League record against the Exiles was once almost Southendian – we won all of our first five games against them, home and away. But the Amber Army’s recent record improved so much that – prior to the Shrimps’ victory at Wembley – Newport had beaten the Shrimps three times in a row. Currently, it is two-nil to the English club: in addition to the Play-Off win, they dumped County out of the FA Cup two years ago. Overall, Morecambe have won half of the eighteen games they have contested in all competitions so far against the Welsh club but have lost five.
Another worry – to add to all our other woes and as is so often the case – is the standard of refereeing we could expect tonight. That concern increased significantly when we learnt that Ross Joyce would be in charge of proceedings this evening. This is the man who single-handedly conspired with the dreadful Ian Evatt to establish Morecambe’s reputation as a racist club when he stopped the game against Bolton Wanderers at the Maz at a point when the Shrimps were about to win. They ended-up drawing. At Harrogate earlier in the season, Mr Joyce helped to hand the game to the hosts with a very harsh red card for Farrend Rawson after he adjudged him to have blocked the ball with his hand in an incident he couldn’t possibly have seen properly because Faz was effectively on the ground in front of him. Subsequent video footage shows this decision to have been comprehensively wrong. On the day, JJ McKiernan had already retired hurt when Farrend was sent off. Normally, I would have little sympathy for JJ, given the amount of cheating he indulges in during most games. But nobody can fake the swelling he had on the side of his head (“The size of an egg” according to boss of the time King Derek) as he was finally helped from the pitch and led back to the Dressing Rooms looking genuinely groggy. A better Referee would have sent the player responsible for this injury off. But Mr Joyce was never likely to – he is yet another EFL official who is not physically fit enough to keep up with play and therefore see what is actually happening around him.
In his first game in official control of the club, Ged shook things up from the disaster in north Wales three days ago. Jordan Slew was dropped to the bench; Yann Songo’o started along with David Tutonda who was not available last Saturday and there was no place for James Connolly in the squad.
He said, the day before the match:
“Hopefully, it’s just a blip on Saturday. We have to play on our front foot. We will tomorrow. We worked on it in training just now. The lads were buzzing. We had a good chat about how we are going to play; the tempo we are going to play at. We will be right on top of them tomorrow. Hopefully. Home games count for a lot. When you are playing at home, you have to be more attacking than defending to be honest. Our best way of winning games with the team we’ve got now is attacking the other team. Getting at them; closing them down; playing at a high tempo. That’s what we worked on this morning. Hopefully we’ll do the same again tomorrow.”
The only thing I would personally criticise about these comments is that the word `hopefully’ appears far too many times. He should be much more positive and assertive. In terms of his own approach to dealing with criticism like this is concerned, Ged explained:
“I’d say if you’re doing interviews and that and you’re on the line, I think people can see right through you. If you’re lying like – making things up – saying things for the sake of it to get people on your side… I’m just going to speak from my heart. (That’s) the way I am. I wear my heart on my sleeve and I’ll always do that. I’m not going to change.”
For the visitors, Newport Captain Ryan Delaney made a welcome return to his old club. Alongside him, Shane McLoughlin was another player I was surprised to see the Shrimps let go. But there was no place in the squad for old favourite Aaron Wildig. As was the case before and after Derek Adams managed him at Morecambe – when he played virtually every game – he seems to be virtually permanently injured yet again these days.
It was freezing as the game kicked-off under clear skies and an almost Full Moon. Morecambe looked quite good initially. As their new Manager has insisted they would, they took the game to County and were the better team in the opening period. They crowned this achievement with the opening goal of the night after twelve minutes when leading scorer Michael Mellon bagged another one. Adam Mayor had set up the move with a run down the left; the ball finally made its way to Michael and he found the back of the net. I thought he slightly mis-hit the shot which probably deceived Nick Townsend in the away goal – but they all count. Chances were at a premium after that in a match of few of them. But in the twenty- seventh minute, Morecambe conceded a corner. Shrimps’ Old Boy Shane McLoughlin took it; the men in the red strip panicked and although Adam Smith did brilliantly to block an initial effort by Omar Bogle; Will Evans was quickest to react to the loose ball and fairly hammered it home to put the Welsh club level.
There’s not a lot more to say really. Just before half time, a JJ McKiernan header smashed against the cross bar as Townsend was a bystander as far as the Referee was concerned. I thought he pulled-off a brilliant save to stop it going in but what do I know? – Mr Joyce awarded a goal-kick. After 32 minutes, the same player went down in the away penalty area and the Referee waved play-on. As I’ve already moaned, sometimes JJ is his own worst enemy: if he didn’t look for free-kicks so often and stayed on his feet, maybe referees would be generally more sympathetic towards him. Tonight, though, I thought he really was fouled; he rode the first nibble from a Newport defender who then had a second go from behind and brought him down: you could tell by the way he fell that he wasn’t diving this time. But I say again – what do I know? During the second half; Mayor was felled right in front of us as he was about to escape down the Morecambe left only for the officious gentleman in the smart black strip to award a throw-in to the visitors. Ross Joyce seems to make the rules up as he goes along: I simply don’t understand why he liked to re-start the game at various times with a dropped ball – and the players clearly didn’t either, given both sides’ obvious incredulity about some of the bizarre decisions he made yet again tonight. He indulged shameless play-acting by the visitors once they had gone ahead. Goalkeeper Townsend spent ages on the ground and needed prolonged treatment on a seemingly collapsed leg before using it to boot the ball the length of the pitch once he recovered. I noticed that Will Evans was genuinely hurt at a certain point in the second half. Our under-rated ex-central defender Exiles’ Skipper Ryan Delaney – doing his best Terry Butcher impression with an increasingly bloody head-bandage – clearly kept telling him to go down. To his considerable credit though, Evans didn’t. And he had to go off shortly afterwards. Did Ross Joyce even notice this? Of course he didn’t…
But it would be unfair to blame the man with the whistle and the shaving foam for what happened at the Maz tonight. He’s always a liability. Morecambe were the architects of their own downfall. Once County had got back on level terms, there was only one team going to win this game. The home side suddenly looked as if they had never even met before. Throughout the second half, they were second-best as County played their way through them time and again. The Shrimps kept giving up possession really cheaply as the game was played at a suddenly very comfortable Newport tempo. Having said that, Morecambe could have regained the lead with fifty-four minutes on the clock. Tom Bloxham managed to escape down the Morecambe right and put a deadly cross right across the opposition goal-mouth for a sliding Mayor to only just fail to bundle it home.
After this, there was only one occasion on which the home team actually sped up the play and put proper pressure on a retreating defence. Mayor and Mellon combined well only for our Burnley loanee to force a truly phenomenal save from the stocky play-actor in the away goal This was after eighty minutes of the match – too little; far too late. Because the visitors had taken the lead just before the hour. Another set-piece poorly defended before Exiles’ Bristol City loanee Seb Palmer-Holden bundled the ball home. And that was basically that…
I don’t normally quote from opposition managers at the end of games. But I think that what Graham Coughlan said was very instructive and something his Opposite Number could ponder upon as part of the very steep learning curve he is embarking upon:
“That was a hell of a performance. I don’t mean glitz, I don’t mean glamour. I mean we had to dig deep, we had to show resilience and we had to show character on a bitterly cold night. You can see the pitch is freezing over – the conditions were tough. But that was a brilliant performance from our lads. It’s not glitzy, glamour, it’s not tippy-tippy football – that is true grit and determination. That is what you have to do in this division.”
Several hundred miles away to the north, in the clash between Morecambe’s last two Managers, Derek Adams’ Ross County prevailed against Stephen Robinson’s St Mirren by the only goal of this evening’s match. So, in the space of a week, King Derek has taken his new club three places up the Scottish Premiership table into a position of absolute safety. Meanwhile, Morecambe have slipped five positions from the one he left us in: we are still in twelfth position in League Two despite tonight’s loss.
What does this tell us? It tells us that whereas we can all believe in Derek; in Ged, however – we just hope
He has now lost both of his opening games in charge; seen his team ship eight goals and score precisely one. The Fortress Maz which Derek Adams had firmly established crumbled tonight as Morecambe lost for the first time at home this season with a truly anaemic display once the visitors equalised. It’s a comprehensively poor start for the Shrimps’ rookie Manager. But one swallow doesn’t make a summer and there are still plenty of games for Mr Brannan to steady the ship and turn things around. Let’s hope that he can…
This is what he said after the game:
“I thought the first twenty minutes is the best we have played since I’ve been here. We moved the ball really well. We come out second half, we never quite got going. To be fair, they had a game plan. It was spoiling the game; slowing it down; wasting time – the keeper wasting time. The Referee never got to grips with it – it stopped us getting into a rhythm. In the end, when we did get into a rhythm, the keeper goes down injured. Six or seven minutes. It just takes the sting out the game. You know what, I don’t even want to talk about the referee because I would probably get fined or something. The time wasting was just embarrassing, it really was: for them to let that happen… (deep sigh). The performance was really really well. The positives coming out of tonight is outstanding – I’m so happy with it. I’m not happy with the defeat by the way – I’m happy with the way we played. The only thing I’m disappointed about is the way we conceded the goals. If we stop doing that, we’ll be a match for anybody. I hope the (fans) will be patient with us – it’s going to be a long road but we will get there, I promise.”
Morecambe: 21 Adam Smith; 3 David Tutonda (23 Max Melbourne 78’); 4 Jacob Bedeau; 5 Farrend Rawson (C); 6 Yann Songo’o (18 Jake Taylor 78’); 7 Tom Bloxham; 8 Eli King; 9 Michael Mellon; 10 JJ McKiernan; 11 Adam Mayor (Y); 12 Joel Senior (28 Oscar Threlkeld).
Substitutes not used: 26 George Pedley; 14 Jordan Slew; 15 Chris Stokes; 16 Jacob Davenport; 19 Ethan Walker.
Newport County: 1 Nick Townsend; 2 Lewis Payne; 4 Ryan Delaney (C); 5 James Clark; 7 Will Evans (20 Harry Charsley 82’); 8 Bryn Morris; 9 Omar Bogle; 17 Scot Bennett (Y); 19 Shane McLoughlin; 28 Matthew Baker; 30 Seb Palmer-Houlden (18 Kiban Rai 69’).
Substitutes not used: 26 Jon Maxted; 11 James Waite; 22 Nathan Wood; 33 Matthew Bondswell; 41 Nelson Sanca.
Ref: Ross Joyce.
Att: 2,982 (83 from Newport.)
