ClaphamFox

Alan Nixon reckons he has another story about us tomorrow. Please God let it be that Martin has told us to do one 🙏 https://x.com/reluctantnicko/status/2060689153864486927?s=46

Going Sheffield Wednesday it seems.

Sure—I wasn’t disagreeing with you. Just pointing out why it’s plausible we might actually go for this clown despite him being an incredibly unpopular choice with the fans.

Martyn Glover worked with Martin at Southampton and is a massive fan of his. He was apparently advocating very strongly for Martin before we appointed Cifuentes, and probably has been doing so again. He’ll be behind this if it’s true.

It’s still only Nixon linking us with Martin—and while it’s only Nixon, there’s hope. In my case I’m ardently hoping that this story has been put out by Martin’s agent in an attempt to get Blackburn (or whoever) to cough up more for his client’s services. We’ve seen it before…

He'll have to deal with that wherever he goes, so it's probably not much of a factor unfortunately.

Nixon reckons we're making a 'last bid' for Martin, which suggests he's been resisting us so far. Hopefully he'll snub our final attempt too. We are in desperate need of somebody who can instill discipline, establish defensive solidity and make us hard to play against again. Martin is a flaky ideologue who prioritizes his cherished principles over pragmatism, even if his teams are getting stuffed every week. It would be more of the same, but worse. An astonishing decision if it's true.

If this happens, any benefit of doubt I've been extending to the club pending McCarron's first managerial appointment will be extinguished in a second. I can barely think of a more stupid appointment than this.

It looks like Skubala is going to Bristol after all... https://x.com/JPercyTelegraph/status/2060314922420953468?s=20

A pauper's Russell Martin

It's like the ending of the Sixth Sense, except instead of realising you've been dead the whole time you realise that despite being convinced you cancelled your season ticket you actually renewed and will be there every game next season.

We recently tried to get Enzo back. We have many problems, but a lack of delusional self-confidence doesn't seem to be among them.

Oh I agree. Our recent track record suggests a very real chance that we take ages and still appoint the wrong bloke. We just have to hope that McCarron's influence prevents this from happening. It's not much, but hope is all we've got.

After the departures of Ayew and Daka, we have a vacancy for our coveted 'striker with the scoring rate of a defensive midfielder' position, so this makes sense.

I think we can all agree that in an ideal world we'd recruit the strongest candidate possible and do it quickly so that he can get cracking. Unfortunately, given that we're now in League One and our reputation has taken a massive battering over the past few years, we're going to have to work very hard to persuade any talented manager with ambition to join our 'project'. This will take time, especially if the names we're targeting are currently in work (which will mean compensation will have to be paid for them) and/or are fielding offers from other clubs. If the choice is between getting in a weak/mediocre manager tomorrow or taking longer to recruit a good one, then we just have to accept it's going to take time. It's not ideal but unfortunately we're not currently attractive enough to have talented young managers beating a path to our door.

I bet James McCarron is pissed off that they’ve told him to forget about finding a manager and pour all of his attention into drafting endless tweets about the anniversary game.

Absolutely. Nixon promotes himself as a professional scoop-getter. He has to publish a large volume of stories every week to maintain that image. It follows that he sets a much lower bar for credibility than others—there’s no way he could uncover a huge amount of genuine exclusives every week, so he has to chuck in a large number that are little more than idle gossip. A small number might turn out to be true. I wouldn’t go as far as to say he just makes stuff up—he probably doesn’t. Somebody probably told him about this proposed investment, just as someone probably told him that we want Russell Martin. But both stories are far more likely to belong in the ‘speculative gossip that turns out to be bullshit’ category than the ‘occasional genuine scoop’ one.

BlueTintedLCFC is not exactly an aggregator account - it’s a fan account that posts original content including podcasts and interviews, etc. But yes, it wasn’t the source for this story—it was Alan Nixon. Nixon posts dozens of ‘exclusives’ every week on his Patreon account. Some occasionally turn out to be true, many do not.

The wife of a mate of mine saw his Nixon subscription and asked him what it was. He told her Patreon was a gay porn site and that Alan Nixon was one of its biggest stars. Dodged a bullet there…

And you know this for certain because?

Reportedly, yes.

I’ve been giving it some thought and I’ve started to wonder whether my scathing dismissal of any story from Alan Nixon over the years has perhaps been a little harsh. Maybe I’ve been unfair. Yes, come to think of it, I’m starting to realise that he’s the most well-connected and reliable football journalist there is…

Well that was worth all the feverish anticipation.

The problem with the last two appointments wasn’t simply that they happened later in the summer—it was that the club made bad choices. Rushing into another appointment now just to prove we’re “doing something” doesn’t suddenly make the decision-making better. We’ve just been relegated to League One, we’ve got financial issues hanging over us, and the football calendar hasn’t even finished yet. A lot of managers and coaches are still working, waiting on play-offs, or assessing their own situations. If we genuinely want the best candidate possible rather than the first available one, that process is likely to to take time. The whole point of recruiting McCarron is presumably to move away from reactive, agent-led recruitment and towards a more data-led, strategic process. It would be bizarre to hire a new Sporting Director and then expect him to rubber-stamp the first name that becomes available in May. Rushing to appoint quickly now might give the impression of doing things differently, but it would significantly raise the odds of us appointing another flop who we have to sack a couple of months into the season. You could be right. It's possible that we'll be here in early July reflecting on a tortuous recruitment process that ended in yet another uninspiring appointment. But we might not be. As McCarron has just started, I'm inclined to wait and see rather than dismiss him as useless simply because we haven't appointed a manager before the end of May.