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BLIND, STUPID AND DESPERATE
 
Editorials:
Pick and choose
By Julie MacTaggart
 
I don't get to as many matches as I used to: financial hardship doesn't just affect football clubs so when every match costs around £100, you have five kids to support and live 130 miles away, you start to have to pick and choose. Do you go to the slightly nearer northerly away matches (save a bit on the petrol) or blow it all on a visit to the Vic? Well, as I say, you have to pick and choose.

As football fans, that's all we get to pick and choose. You go to the match or you don't, you go to every match because you can or because you want to, and similarly you don't go because you can't or you don't want to. But for the rest, we don't get to pick and choose. We don't get to decide who plays for our club and who leaves, we don't get to decide whether we want a manager or we don't. In the case of Lewington, we don't even get to show whether we wanted him to go...well, there was the one guy at the semi final against Liverpool, but I digress. Okay, so four wins in twenty-four league matches wasn't brilliant but notably we hadn't lost all twenty of the previous twenty-four. Take into account the brilliant League Cup run and it wasn't all bad.

Lewington showed himself to be a highly liked and respected manager, a man who might've felt initial reserve at finding himself managing the club after the debacle that was the ill-chosen and forgettable 'Vialli Era', but slowly forged a good relationship with the fans, began to acknowledge the crowd's cheers for him with a wave and a smile and eventually we, as fans, were comfortable with 'Lew...ing...ton'. The vast majority of us accepted that he had been given an almost impossible task, to run the club on a day to day basis on a shoestring. Sometimes having to let players go, notably one Paul Robinson, for the benefit of the club's purse strings rather than progress on the field of play. During his time at our club, he took us to two Semi-Finals, realising finances, without which we would, presumably, have needed even more of a cull. I for one am sad to see him go and, as a fan who can't 'pick and choose', am glad that the responsibility for relieving him of his duties will never be laid at the supporters' door.

Adrian Boothroyd comes in with my blessing albeit because he didn't 'choose' to let Lewington go but was 'picked' by the board as a suitable successor. He speaks well, he obviously feels confident that he can be successful at our club and we, as fans, will give him the chance to prove that. We don't have a choice. We can't pick and choose.

(31/03/05)