Outside Perspective

General
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Hi All

I am a Wrexham fan coming in peace. As we’ve competed with each other over the last few months I’ve regularly read this board, listened to the heroes of hp12 and read Twitter comments on your clubs account and have seen a surprising lack of unity.

I get the frustration with Dan Rice and a rookie manager but they both will leave at some point but you’ll still be here.

I’m posting as a rallying cry that your season is far from over. You have a very good squad and a real chance of promotion and if you make it, an owner with deep pockets who can keep you there. In my experience the clubs who make their goals are the ones pulling in the same direction.

Therefore my outside perspective is embrace Doddsball for these last 4 games. Embrace the great defence you have and squeak those games 1-0. Have your post mortem afterwards as to be fair neither you or Wrexham were on anyone’s bingo card to get promoted this season.

Good luck :crossed_fingers:

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Complete agreement here. There’s nothing to gain from slating our management team right now, asides from to dampen any spirit we might be able to muster for the play offs. We’re still in with a chance, albeit an outside chance, but this club has always thrived on being the underdog and the outsider.

The post mortem of this season may be tough, but it should wait another 2-3 weeks in my opinion.

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@CPDWrecsam Congratulations on your promotion and thanks for taking the time to post on here.

Dodds has taken flack after games, but during the games fans have generally been united in getting behind the team. Social media for better or worse allows fans to vent while at their most emotional, which can give a pretty distorted picture of what a particular team’s fans’ opinions are.

Our biggest cause of optimism is that Saturday is pretty much a dead rubber. I hope key players whose fitness Dodds doesn’t appear to have managed well can get a breather while some players who need more minutes under the belt can get a chance to impress. If Kone can regain his sharpness from the first half of the season, “Doddsball” might just work. My biggest criticism of his brand of football has been our floundering in front of goal being very predictable and easy to defend against. Kone at his instinctive and unpredictable best is just what it needs to work, but he’s still a raw talent who needs to be nurtured.

As for owners with more money than god, we’ve shown it counts for nothing if you don’t invest wisely. Our youth development won’t bear fruit for a while yet, though our massive (by our standards) splurge on the unknown Danes and James Berry barely getting a look in has practically nil return for the club on the pitch so far. If that money was spent on a proven class act in Aaron Morley who appeared to be keen to sign for us and another decent striker to share the load with Kone, who knows how things may have turned out.

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Wise words by both of you. We have created chances in recent games, but not taken them. The Shrewsbury game was an extreme example. Players who had earlier scored seemingly with little effort were instead firing high and wide. Dodds can’t be held responsible for poor shooting, unless of course it was brought on by fatique.
We gave away 12 points to the 2 promoted teams, the main cause of our dropping down to the playoffs.

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Sorry, the 3 of you above!

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@CPDWrecsam Thank you for the message and encouragement.

You mention a rich owner being a good thing, and indeed it should help to keep the club in business. There are, however, some key differences between our rich ownership and yours, which go a long way towards explaining why many posters in this forum are pretty p**sed off.

Wrexham’s rich owners have talked up how far the club can go up the leagues - the Premier League dream - and how they, with support from the whole Wrexham family if supporters, could help you get there. They are visible at matches and online when they are unable to attend, they’re encouraging that family, all in it together feeling.

Wycombe’s rich owner is entirely absent. I’m not sure if he’s ever visited Adams Park but, if he has, I’ve never seen him. The staff he has appointed to run the club are very much in the background too, from a public visibility perspective. When they do make public statements about the future of the club, they talk only about how great the academy they are setting up is going to be. Nothing about how successful the actual playing team is going to be. Nothing about how great it would be for the team to get promoted: that’s entirely secondary to the academy project. Zero fan engagement.

Wycombe had, for many years, a feeling of everyone - fans, management, players, owners - all being in it together, for better or worse, which largely continued even after the club ceased to be fan owned. Like him or not, Rob Couhig certainly made a lot of effort to build on the “One Wycombe, all in it together” feeling. We now have an absent owner who appears not to care about the club other than as a peg to hang an academy on.

Couple that with rumours about why a much loved, club legend manager left the club while we were riding high in the league, the appointment of a totally unproven coach as his replacement (whose defensive tactics make for awful entertainment) and, in between those events, the ownership spaffing record sums of cash on players who have played just a few minutes each over the 20 or so games since they were signed, and you start to see why so many are unhappy.

For me, we’ve gained a rich owner and, in the process, lost the club I loved.

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Thank you for posting this Uncle_T, you’ve summed up my sentiments exactly. Somewhere over the past 4 months or so my emotional attachment to WWFC, which I have had for 55 yrs +, seems to have evaporated completely. I suspect this is pretty much for the reasons you describe. Currently I have no plans to attend the play-off games, something that would have been unthinkable before 2025 dawned. Sad times.

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@Uncle_T the perfect summary of the current situation :clap:

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But at some point, unless I’ve imagined it, there were a fair amount of people on Gasroom 2.0 saying that a quieter, low key owner was preferable and that we should just “enjoy the ride”?

And that the presentations given around the academy were impressive and showed the ambition of the owners, etc?

Appreciate that was while Matt Bloomfield was manager, so not denying your other points, but that is fair isn’t it?

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@peterparrotface Fair comment, although the “fair amount of people on Gasroom 2.0” to whom you refer did not, I think, include myself.

Re. the presentations on the academy, they were indeed very impressive and showed great ambition for the academy. I believe those ambitions still exist and I hope that a successful academy will become a reality. At the time those presentations were made, I and others who I know assumed that similarly great ambitions existed for the first team and it’s success. It now seems to me that assumption was incorrect.

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When things are going well, you’re not necessarily looking for the top brass to stick their oar in.
The situation that has been allowed to develop due to strategic and planning failures by the ownership group needs firm and positive leadership from the top. Rob Couhig to his credit generally did that side of being a chairman pretty well.

At moment all we have is a rookie head coach being left in the firing line and AI-generated pap at a critical moment in the club’s history.

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Great summary, @Uncle_T, albeit I’m not completely bereft yet. I was commiserating with a work colleague on Monday. They said right now there’s three groups - the ownership, the fans, and the players, and none are aligned. Maybe a bit OTT but seemed unthinkable only 6 months ago.

@CPDWrecsam thanks for your comments. As mentioned, the difference with us and Wrexham is that your club is completely united in its goals and philosophy. Albeit when things looked murky for you a few weeks ago I was staggered how much abuse Parkinson and the team were getting on forums. Three promotions in a row! I guess we’re all guilty of outbursts in the heat of the moment and promotion races can be just as tense and ugly as relegation battles.

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We can close Gasroom 3.0 now, there will never be a better post than this.

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I’m not sure I understand why you think they haven’t shown ambition for the first team, considering the investment etc?

Not saying the signings have been successful or otherwise, but in terms of showing ambition I felt plenty thought the number of new players showed their intent?

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It might have if we’d bought players good enough for the Championship, or even League 1 for that matter. But we bought players who can’t get into the team, which suggests a different kind of intent.

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I don’t think there’s anything radically wrong with the players signed. The problem is that we haven’t got anyone competent enough to coach them. If Dodds was all we could get if would have been much better sticking with Sam Grace.

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