Start of a new era, tomorrow. Well, we bloody well hope so! After a traumatic week for everyone at the club, following the shambolic performance at Brentford last week and the eventual and inevitable departure of Paul Merson, it’s back to the real business of picking up some desperately needed League points at home, (if we can remember where that is, of course, as it seems so long since we played at Bescot in the League). Mick Halsall has a chance to pick a formation with players in the right positions and using tactics they can understand, so let’s hope he takes advantage!

The club have announced that Andy Oakes will now be fit for the clash with Scunthorpe, as the injury he picked up against Brentford was not as bad as first feared. Gerrard is suspended in defence, however, and there are doubts over the fitness of both Chris Westwood and Ian Roper, so new loan signing from Derby, Pablo Mills, will come straight in.

In the middle, Paul Devlin should be fit again, but we will be missing long term injury victim Darren Wrack, of course, and the suspended Leary, as he picked up (incredibly) his 10th yellow in only 21 starts this season last week.

Up front, as far as we know, everyone is fit.

If we don’t play a 4 4 2, I’ll be extremely surprised, and would expect us to line up something like:

Oakes, Pead, Roper or Dann, Mills, Fox, James or Devlin, Osborn or Keates, Smith or Keates, Demontagnac, Timm or Devlin, Barrowman or Constable or James.

Others in contention include Wright, of course, Gilmartin, Kinsella and Bradley, who is likely to be the central defensive cover, should Roper not be fit.

With this being a “must win” home game, I think the temptation will be to go with the extra creativity of Timm and Osborn in the centre of the park, but, with Halsall at the helm, we don’t have much to go on, in terms of his preferences of style. Whatever he wants, however, the imbalance in the squad has left him with innumerable choices in the centre of midfield and virtually none at the back or in left midfield!

Scunthorpe seem to have few selection worries, with club skipper Andy Crosby now back from suspension, although he may only make the bench, as, ominously, the Iron have been doing quite well without him.

Danger man for Scunthorpe is Billy Sharp, the League’s leading goal scorer (career record 27 league goals in just 43 starts for Rushden and Scunthorpe), which is a worry, considering our centre back partnership will be new to each other and could also be very inexperienced.

Predictions? Oh for something as simple as “new manager syndrome” taking over! Scunthorpe have played once already this week and lost, which ought to bode well, except that it was at leaders Colchester and it was 1 – 0, after they dominated the game and lost only because of missing all of the numerous chances they created. They are just one point ahead of us in the League, with a poorish away record (in that it’s marginally better than ours!), so they are one of the teams we must be trying to pull clear of, especially in view of the news of Rotherham’s possible liquidation, which, if it happened and their record expunged, would leave us second from bottom.
Oh, sod it, home win, even if it’s difficult to see where the goals will come from.

Rotherham United may only have a matter of weeks to find a way around a £1m funding gap or the club is likely to cease trading and drop out of the Football League.

Employees have been told of the seriousness of the situation at a series of meetings overnight and today at Millmoor.

The Football League has been officially informed and the club, which is currently losing £140,000 a month, is being advised by experts in insolvency, to try to save the situation.

They need to find £1m to keep going until the end of the season and up to a further £1m, based on current estimates, to get to to next season and beyond.

Chairman Peter Ruchniewicz said: “We are sorry to have to tell you that the club’s financial position has entered a critical phase and there is the very real prospect that the club will be advised to cease trading within the next few weeks unless within that time we can find credible individuals with sufficient savings additional funding to take it forward.

Heaven forbid, but if the club does cease trading it is likely to go straight into liquidation - it seems unlikely it could go into a formal administration given its limited resources and the level of funds and assets required. This would mean that the club would go out of existence, a thought too dreadful for any of us to contemplate but nevertheless a very real possibility.”

How does that effect Walsall?

Well, if they go into administration, they get deducted 10 points and we aren’t really effected, with them being below us anyway. If they go into liquidation, however, their results from this season will be expunged from the record and guess which team lose out the most? Yes, you guessed it! The League table would then look like this:-

Yeovil 36pts
Port Vale 35pts
Scunthorpe 35 pts
Doncaster 34 pts
Bristol City 32pts
Hartlepool 32pts
——————-
Swindon 31 pts
Walsall 29 pts
MK Dons 26pts
Rotherham RIP

Come on, you Millers!

Perhaps, in the end, it was all proving too much. In his post sacking interviews on Sky and Talk Sport, Paul Merson was already looking more relaxed and better than he had for weeks, if not months.

His attitude had changed too, in that he admitted that he may have lost the dressing room, but refused to blame the players, saying that he had brought every one of them in and, therefore, it was his responsibility.

Contrast that with what he had said before, as he went through the highs and the lows of the job:

26 March 2005 - The Express

That’s why it hurts. If I didn’t take it seriously then I wouldn’t give two tosses. If I lose the manager’s job here, I won’t take another. I want to get to next season, when I’ve got my own team. If it isn’t going well then and I’m getting booed off, at least I can think maybe it’s me, maybe I haven’t got a clue. The players at Walsall will be the ones I rate, the ones I’ve watched on video, the ones I’ve travelled up the motorway all nights to see in the reserves. Then I’ll be judged.

21 May 2005 - The Birmingham Post

The job is only as easy as the players you have. If you have 11 good players in this division you can sit back. I have said all season that Arsène Wenger could not have come here and done any better

25 September 2005 - The Birmingham Post

When this team clicks, you’ll know it. I know we’re not a million miles off and I believe we’ll still be in the top six.

17 Nov 2005 - The Sun

I am just putting in the groundwork, gaining the experience and becoming a better manager every day. It’s impossible to get worse! The difference for those at the top, your Mourinhos and Arsene Wengers, is that they don’t have to teach the players to play properly

5 Jan 2006 - Walsall Advertiser

At the end of the day you have to look at the players on the pitch. They should have done better and if they are not prepared to do better then they have to go.

Now? He seems far more retrospective and prepared to admit that he failed and that he has to carry the can for those failures. The cockiness and confidence of the 26th March quote from The Express has disappeared. We know that he has said that he exists for football, but it seems to me that the pressures of management are too much for him. If he wants to stay in the game, perhaps he should be looking at punditry, or coaching at a higher level. Managing in the lower reaches of the footballing pyramid needs a strength of character that maybe is not there.

Whatever else, it’s time for everyone to move on.

The Express and Star is reporting that Paul Merson’s final fling was to bring in a defender on loan.

They say that Pablo Mills, a central defender recently on loan at Franchise FC, will be joining the Saddlers until the end of the season, to help cover our current injury and suspension crisis. The fact that Anthony Gerrard is only suspended for one game, Roper is due back from injury and yet we are taking Mills until the end of the season, just seems yet another strange decision.

Mills is a six footer, born in Birmingham, is 21 and Derby is his only club.

There is no confirmation as yet on either official website of the newspaper story.

The club have announced that star man Anthony Gerrard has been given a one year contract extension, which he has signed. This will keep him at the club until the Summer of 2008.

This can only be seen as good news in what has been a traumatic week for the club, and also gives an indication that some of the playing staff, at least, are not letting the departure of the manager effect their desire to play for the club.

The club have now officially announced the termination of Paul Merson’s contract as Manager. Jeff Bonser has made a full statement, as reproduced below, and the club have announced that Mick Halsall will take over while a permanent successor is found. Halsall, however, has restated that he has no desire to take on the job full time and wants to go back to working with the Youths as soon as possible.

Jeff Bonser emphasised the personal sadness he had felt in having to make the decision. “I felt that we had reached a point where it was in the best interests of both the club and Paul that this decision should be made,” he said. “I hope that our supporters will never forget the euphoria created when he joined the club. He must have been the most high-profile signing ever made by us.

Nor should we forget the extraordinary skills he displayed while playing for the club. He must surely have been the most gifted player to represent Walsall FC.

He accepted the position of Team Manager at a most difficult time, following relegation from what is now The Championship and the draconian financial fall-out that followed the demise of ITV Digital.

Inevitably, relegation led to a number of key players leaving the club, and a very limited availability of funds to rebuild the team.

Nor has Paul enjoyed much luck during this period. In all my 18 years involvement in football, I have never known a time when we have been so hard hit by injuries. So far this season, as well as Paul himself having a long-term injury, Darren Wrack is out of the season with a broken leg. Players such as Steve Staunton, Andy Oakes, Chris Westwood and Ian Roper have all had lengthy absences. Our most experienced striker, Jorge Leitao became homesick and returned to Portugal.

If all of these players had been available to Paul throughout the season, I have no doubt that our results and position in the League table would have been very different.

I have always admired the way that he has been prepared to give young players their chance, and hopefully some of them who have been groomed by Paul will go on to have bright futures in the game, and will have much to be grateful to him for giving them their first chance.

All of us at Walsall FC have enjoyed working with Paul and wish him every success in the future.”

While a certain amount of speculation about Paul Merson’s reign as Walsall manager is bound to continue, let us all not forget his main legacy. We are in a relegation scrap.

No manager, in my experience, has ever divided the fans into such extremes as Paul Merson has during his time at Walsall. His departure, however, sees us hovering just one point above the trapdoor to the fourth division and Saturday’s game is important, no matter who is in charge (and let’s hope Jeff Bonser has followed his usual pattern and got a replacement already lined up).

We are also in disarray on the pitch for the game, with Gerrard and Leary suspended, Roper and Westwood struggling to be fit, and an unbalanced squad with no obvious replacements.

Saturday is a day we should all pull together, no matter what.

Upthesaddlers.com has received a phone call from Radio WM, asking for a comment on tomorrow’s breakfast programme.

They say that the club has said that they will be making a full press statement in the morning, but are NOT denying the truth of the reports.

Dramatic developments at Bescot this evening with the news Paul Merson has been sacked by Jeff Bonser - news that first emerged on this site’s message board before being confirmed by Sky Sports within the last hour.

Correspondent Magic Man Fan posted the news at 7.13 that Merson was in the Swan in Stonnall - and that Merson had told drinkers he had been sacked by the chairman at 5.30pm, and that Bonser was in the process of getting a new man in.

The information was then confirmed to other UptheSaddlers regulars via contacts.

At 8.10 Sky Sports News reported the departure as a news flash.

As of 9.05, the time of writing, the official site is still reporting on the main events at Bescot - the virtual trial available at the soccer academy, the man of the match text vote, and the Bank’s goal of the month…

Note to all UTS visitors: we are experiencing exceptional traffic levels so you may find the site slower than usual.

The Evening Mail is reporting that Walsall Chairman Jeff Bonser is backing under fire manager Paul Merson and refusing to bow to pressure from the fans to sack him.

Bonser is quoted as saying to the supporters who spent much of the 5-0 mauling at Brentford on Saturday chanting for Merson to go. “Please just get behind the team and help salvage this season”

“We’ve got a lot of genuine supporters who have like me supported the club for a long time, I would ask them to really pull together now”

“We all need to get behind Paul and the team, if you want to shout names, shout at me. Don’t get at Paul and the players, they are doing there best”

“I’m still immensely supportive of Paul. I know how hard he works and we need to pull together at the moment so that we can go forward again next year”

However, Merson has already said himself that he will resign if Walsall lose their next home game against Scunthorpe.

The anger of the fans is now likely to be turned on the Chairman as well as the Manager.