Day 286

I’ve made a few decisions following yesterday’s defeat. Sam Smith, Alan Power, Peter Bore, Francis Laurent, Simon Russell, Jean-François Christophe, Paul Robson, and Nialle Rodney will all be released at the end of their contracts this summer. Next season I’ll rebuild around the core of my current first team—Marques, Olembé, Birchall, Woods, Shuker, Barnes-Homer, and Koroma.

I will try to add left back Alex Billington on a permanent contract, too. Diagouraga and Atkinson haven’t done enough to convince me they’re worth the trouble. It’s my understanding that attacking midfielder Robert Taylor is on a two-year loan deal, so I’ll still have him around next campaign.

It’s a very different squad today to when I started. I’ve offloaded nine players and brought around 20 on board—although several of those were short-term loans. It was always a matter of me racing against this idea that the team just wasn’t good enough—that our early wins were lucky (they were, but because we had weak opposition rather than because we punched above our weight), that at some point we’d collapse and sink down to the lower reaches of the league table.

I thought our first defeat—0-2 at home against Gateshead—would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. A woeful performance all over the park seemed to reinforce my preconception that I was on borrowed time hovering around the play-off zone. It was actually the next day that I arranged the Ben May transfer, which didn’t go through until four months later. I had no faith in my attack.

I thought Koroma was still a year away from being ready for regular first-team football, and I expected Barnes-Homer to struggle with consistency. I was wrong on both counts, which is why May struggled to break into the team when he did finally arrive in January. Oh, how wrong we can be.