Post by ronfosker on May 31, 2020 13:53:56 GMT
Unless I get any more inspirations, this is the last of my nostalgia pieces for the Braintree and Witham Times
Ron Fosker looks back at the men in charge of Braintree Town during his time reporting on their matches
With hindsight, it was probably significant that I reported on my first Braintree Town match the week after they had dismissed their manager.
That became a fairly common scenario over the next 18 years during which time only George Borg and Alan Devonshire managed to stay in post for more than a year or so.
In that time I’ve seen 17 managers, not including the four caretakers, and as three of them have done the job twice, that means 20 changes of manager.
Borg and Devonshire between them account for nearly eight years, which adds up to a considerable amount of inflow and outflow in the other ten years.
The departing manager in 2002 was Ben Embery, who had taken Braintree to the previously unscaled heights of fourth place in the Isthmian League Premier Division in May 2002.
The next season started badly and by October, when I started reporting on their matches, it was decided that a new face was needed.
It seemed rather a short time to give him after the previous season’s achievement and Embery was not happy. His comments to the Colchester Evening Gazette at the time have a familiar ring to them: "I'm disappointed because I feel I have done a fantastic job. I was hoping to build on a good side after last season, but the finances meant we lost good players.
"We had wage cuts at the start of the season and this made the job difficult. But the board have to take responsibility for that situation.
"When I started they gave me the tools for the job. But they withdrew the tools and expected the same results."
Chairman George Rosling said: "The decision was made on facts alone. We have played 14 games and only won one."
Embery’s successor Gary Bellamy, a former Chelmsford manager who had just left Dover Athletic, steadied things sufficiently to pull the team clear of relegation but the opening months of the following season were little better and Bellamy barely saw out October.
The board then came up with the novel solution of having not just one player-manager but two as defender Dave Culverhouse and midfield man Dean Parratt were given joint responsibility.
It wasn’t long before Parratt decided the job wasn’t for him and Culverhouse struggled on on his own without being able to pull the team away from the bottom few places.
He decided he had had enough when three players were sent off in one game in late February.
The most significant change that season came not in the managerial seat but in the boardroom where Rosling made way for Lee Harding to take over as chairman.
Harding made his ambitions clear almost immediately when he called in a favour from an old friend, Graham Roberts, an FA Cup winner with Tottenham, who was living in Spain at the time.
It was never likely to be more than a temporary solution and so it proved. Roberts was also unable to shake the team out of its torpor and they finished second from bottom, saved from relegation only by the creation of the Conference North and South, which meant that the teams in the top half of the Ryman (Isthmian) Premier went into the new league while the bottom half combined with the top of division one to form the new premier division.
The team ended the season with Tim Moylette as a caretaker for one game .
It was at this point that the club turned to George Borg, a colourful character much travelled in non-league circles and with no little success to his name.
He brought about a revolution at Cressing Road and changed virtually the whole team, bringing in soon-to-be-favourites such as Billy Burgess, Ollie Adedeji and Alex Revell among others.
It almost had the desired effect immediately as Iron rose to fifth place but missed out in the play-offs.
The Borg gloss continued to shine and he led them to the top the following season, sealing the title with a more than satisfying win at local rivals Chelmsford.
Borg continued to inspire success and led the team to third place in their first season in the Conference South and the play-off final where they lost by a late goal to Salisbury.
But Iron got off to a poor start next season and were languishing near the foot of the table when the directors decided to give Borg five matches to turn things round.
It is unclear what happened behind closed doors but Borg was surprisingly given his marching orders only two games into that spell and ten days after Iron had last been in action.
After a three-match interregnum when club captain Brad Quinton and youth team manager Tom Marshall held the reins, the board turned to Lee Patterson, who had previously gained promotion with Isthmian League East Thurrock and was an almost instant success.
Iron were in 14th place when he took charge of his first game in November 2007 but by the end of the season he had pulled them up to fifth, and a second successive season in the play-offs.
But for some reason, the honeymoon did not last into the following season.
Patterson’s comment that all the players he had signed in the close season were better than the ones they had replaced rebounded on him when the team got off to another sluggish start the following season.
Supporters – and the board – were entitled to ask: ‘If the players are better than last year’s why aren’t we higher in the table? Either his assessment of them was inaccurate, or he is not getting the best out of them.’
Neither view was helpful to his case.
A 6-2 FA Trophy defeat at the hands of Southern League Farnborough was the last straw and at roughly the same point in the season as his predecessor, Patterson was looking for a new job.
It was at this point that the board again decided to go down the player-manager route and handed the task over to Quinton.
Iron’s long-serving and much admired midfield general later showed his managerial mettle both at Enfield and then by bringing smiles back to Cressing Road faces in 2017-18 but the 2008 appointment at the age of 30 probably came too soon and he returned to his exclusive playing role the following season under new manager Robbie Garvey.
Unlike Patterson, who moved up a division, and Borg, whose move was more of a sideways one, the choice of Garvey was based on his experience at a higher level, namely as assistant manager at Dagenham and Redbridge, a Football League club for the previous two years.
Garvey made his mark by releasing a large number of players while others followed of their own accord. His approach mirrored that of Borg earlier in putting his trust in his own signings and to a certain extent it worked as he took the team up from 14th the previous season to seventh.
At the beginning of the following season, the club, anxious as ever to operate within its means, cut the amount of cash available to the manager Garvey denounced it as a ‘relegation budget’ and walked out the door.
Rod Stringer stood Garvey’s words on their head and used the relegation budget to gain promotion, seven points clear at the top of the Conference South after leading the table from November.
In many ways, Stringer’s appointment was similar to Patterson’s. He had taken Aveley to third place in the Isthmian Premier League after gaining promotion the previous season.
But at the end of the season Stringer announced his resignation while supporters were still celebrating. Disagreement, ostensibly over the choice of car, led to a falling-out and the Iron board were back in the market again.
This time they went for a different mix, an international as a player but with experience no higher than the Conference South as a manager.
But Alan Devonshire soon proved the absence of the Conference Premier on his CV was no handicap as he guided Iron to 12th, ninth and sixth in their first three seasons, an achievement that was perhaps under-appreciated at the time.
A falling away to 14th in his fourth season led to some disillusion and Devonshire decided the short drive to Maidenhead was preferable to his thrice-weekly slog round the M25 (in the passenger seat as it happens, with normally either his wife or Dean Wells at the wheel).
Devonshire departed with two matches left, which gave academy manager Mark Sansom a chance to step into the hot seat as Iron’s next caretaker.
And then came the Cowleys. Danny and brother Nicky arrived after guiding Concord Rangers to three promotions and quickly made their mark.
Despite losing some important players like Alan Massey, Ryan Peters and James Mulley, who all followed Devonshire to Maidenhead, and Nik Hamann, who went to Woking, Cowley fashioned a strong side with a high work ethic. Of their pre-season training, Matt Paine commented: ‘We’ve never worked this hard before.’
It paid dividends as the new signings settled in quickly, most notably Alex Woodyard, who had made little impression in his first brief spell at Cressing Road three seasons earlier, but began to dominate matches with his wholehearted midfield displays.
Cowley famously led the team to third place and a play-off semi-final with Grimsby, which they were leading on aggregate five-sixths of the way through the 180 minutes but eventually went out to two late goals.
The downside was that Cowley had put himself in the shop window, where Lincoln City, desperate for a return to the Football League after six years, were the first to snap him up.
Not only that, but the players had also been spotted by other clubs and a large chunk of the first team found other places to ply their trade.
It was a sad end to a glorious period in the club’s history and left new appointment Jamie Day with a mountain to climb.
Only Simeon Akinola, Chez Isaac and Michael Cheek remained from the previous season and Akinola departed in December for Barnet, then in the Football League.
Day, who like Cowley was 36 when he took on the job, was less successful in his recruiting and a number of questionable signings caused furrowed brows among supporters, notably his decision to bring in several players from Welling, the team he managed up to the end of 2014, but who had just been relegated.
With only two wins in their first 12 matches and the team second from bottom, Day was on his way before the end of September.
The club moved quickly and two days after Day’s departure, Hakan Hayrettin, first team coach at Luton, was given the job of keeping Braintree in the Conference Premier.
When Braintree beat Southport on March 18 he appeared to have succeeded. Iron were then 17th, seven points clear of the drop zone, but a disastrous run of seven defeats in the last eight matches ended their six-year stay at the top level of non-league football.
Gallingly, champions that year were Lincoln, where Cowley had once again worked his magic, taking them from 13th the previous season.
Hayrettin left at the end of the season and the next appointment, unlike the previous season’s, was greeted with acclaim almost universally. After proving himself with three successful years at Enfield, Brad Quinton was invited to return to the club where he had spent most of his football life.
Like previous managers, he had to start with a clean sheet as, apart from two squad members, the whole of the first team had departed.
In common with his predecessors, Quinton raided his old club, bringing in former Iron favourite Nathan McDonald in goal, together with Jon Muleba, Ricky Gabriel and Billy Crook, all of whom had been with him at Enfield.
Together with the likes of Luke Allen, Ben Wyatt, Marc Okoye and Christian Frimpong, they formed a solid team that surprised most people by finishing in the newly expanded play-off places and then even more people by becoming the first team to finish more than four places off automatic promotion and yet go up – and that was after playing all three play-off matches away from home.
Sadly, the team were unable to keep up the momentum on their return to the top flight and in the first week of October Quinton and the club parted company.
Quinton announced his resignation after a fourth defeat in a row left Braintree at the bottom of the table, saying he didn’t think he had any more to give while the club announced that they felt a change was needed. Thus, for once, a departure ‘by mutual consent’ may well have been an accurate description.
The club turned once again to Hayrettin, initially as a caretaker but reappointed full-time after a run of seven points in four matches.
As so often happens, that initial spurt was not maintained and as soon as Hayrettin signed on the dotted line, his team started losing. His appointment as full-time manager was followed by a run of two points from seven matches and by the end of January he decided his time would be better spent as assistant manager at Maidstone, one of Iron’s relegation rivals.
Assistant manager Danny Searle then stepped up into the hot spot. He saw out the season and impressed many with his approach.
Unfortunately Aldershot Town were also impressed and persuaded him to take on the manager’s role there shortly after the end of the season.
And so to last season, which threw up some familiar tropes: a manager (Glen Driver) chosen because of his success at a lower level; departure of the manager in the autumn, of his own volition this time; a short-term appointment (Jake Hutchings), not strictly a caretaker as he was given the job full-time but only lasted three matches; and the return of a former manager (George Borg).
At the time of writing Borg remains Braintree’s manager though what and when he will be managing remains in the hands of a wider world than football.
Ron Fosker looks back at the men in charge of Braintree Town during his time reporting on their matches
With hindsight, it was probably significant that I reported on my first Braintree Town match the week after they had dismissed their manager.
That became a fairly common scenario over the next 18 years during which time only George Borg and Alan Devonshire managed to stay in post for more than a year or so.
In that time I’ve seen 17 managers, not including the four caretakers, and as three of them have done the job twice, that means 20 changes of manager.
Borg and Devonshire between them account for nearly eight years, which adds up to a considerable amount of inflow and outflow in the other ten years.
The departing manager in 2002 was Ben Embery, who had taken Braintree to the previously unscaled heights of fourth place in the Isthmian League Premier Division in May 2002.
The next season started badly and by October, when I started reporting on their matches, it was decided that a new face was needed.
It seemed rather a short time to give him after the previous season’s achievement and Embery was not happy. His comments to the Colchester Evening Gazette at the time have a familiar ring to them: "I'm disappointed because I feel I have done a fantastic job. I was hoping to build on a good side after last season, but the finances meant we lost good players.
"We had wage cuts at the start of the season and this made the job difficult. But the board have to take responsibility for that situation.
"When I started they gave me the tools for the job. But they withdrew the tools and expected the same results."
Chairman George Rosling said: "The decision was made on facts alone. We have played 14 games and only won one."
Embery’s successor Gary Bellamy, a former Chelmsford manager who had just left Dover Athletic, steadied things sufficiently to pull the team clear of relegation but the opening months of the following season were little better and Bellamy barely saw out October.
The board then came up with the novel solution of having not just one player-manager but two as defender Dave Culverhouse and midfield man Dean Parratt were given joint responsibility.
It wasn’t long before Parratt decided the job wasn’t for him and Culverhouse struggled on on his own without being able to pull the team away from the bottom few places.
He decided he had had enough when three players were sent off in one game in late February.
The most significant change that season came not in the managerial seat but in the boardroom where Rosling made way for Lee Harding to take over as chairman.
Harding made his ambitions clear almost immediately when he called in a favour from an old friend, Graham Roberts, an FA Cup winner with Tottenham, who was living in Spain at the time.
It was never likely to be more than a temporary solution and so it proved. Roberts was also unable to shake the team out of its torpor and they finished second from bottom, saved from relegation only by the creation of the Conference North and South, which meant that the teams in the top half of the Ryman (Isthmian) Premier went into the new league while the bottom half combined with the top of division one to form the new premier division.
The team ended the season with Tim Moylette as a caretaker for one game .
It was at this point that the club turned to George Borg, a colourful character much travelled in non-league circles and with no little success to his name.
He brought about a revolution at Cressing Road and changed virtually the whole team, bringing in soon-to-be-favourites such as Billy Burgess, Ollie Adedeji and Alex Revell among others.
It almost had the desired effect immediately as Iron rose to fifth place but missed out in the play-offs.
The Borg gloss continued to shine and he led them to the top the following season, sealing the title with a more than satisfying win at local rivals Chelmsford.
Borg continued to inspire success and led the team to third place in their first season in the Conference South and the play-off final where they lost by a late goal to Salisbury.
But Iron got off to a poor start next season and were languishing near the foot of the table when the directors decided to give Borg five matches to turn things round.
It is unclear what happened behind closed doors but Borg was surprisingly given his marching orders only two games into that spell and ten days after Iron had last been in action.
After a three-match interregnum when club captain Brad Quinton and youth team manager Tom Marshall held the reins, the board turned to Lee Patterson, who had previously gained promotion with Isthmian League East Thurrock and was an almost instant success.
Iron were in 14th place when he took charge of his first game in November 2007 but by the end of the season he had pulled them up to fifth, and a second successive season in the play-offs.
But for some reason, the honeymoon did not last into the following season.
Patterson’s comment that all the players he had signed in the close season were better than the ones they had replaced rebounded on him when the team got off to another sluggish start the following season.
Supporters – and the board – were entitled to ask: ‘If the players are better than last year’s why aren’t we higher in the table? Either his assessment of them was inaccurate, or he is not getting the best out of them.’
Neither view was helpful to his case.
A 6-2 FA Trophy defeat at the hands of Southern League Farnborough was the last straw and at roughly the same point in the season as his predecessor, Patterson was looking for a new job.
It was at this point that the board again decided to go down the player-manager route and handed the task over to Quinton.
Iron’s long-serving and much admired midfield general later showed his managerial mettle both at Enfield and then by bringing smiles back to Cressing Road faces in 2017-18 but the 2008 appointment at the age of 30 probably came too soon and he returned to his exclusive playing role the following season under new manager Robbie Garvey.
Unlike Patterson, who moved up a division, and Borg, whose move was more of a sideways one, the choice of Garvey was based on his experience at a higher level, namely as assistant manager at Dagenham and Redbridge, a Football League club for the previous two years.
Garvey made his mark by releasing a large number of players while others followed of their own accord. His approach mirrored that of Borg earlier in putting his trust in his own signings and to a certain extent it worked as he took the team up from 14th the previous season to seventh.
At the beginning of the following season, the club, anxious as ever to operate within its means, cut the amount of cash available to the manager Garvey denounced it as a ‘relegation budget’ and walked out the door.
Rod Stringer stood Garvey’s words on their head and used the relegation budget to gain promotion, seven points clear at the top of the Conference South after leading the table from November.
In many ways, Stringer’s appointment was similar to Patterson’s. He had taken Aveley to third place in the Isthmian Premier League after gaining promotion the previous season.
But at the end of the season Stringer announced his resignation while supporters were still celebrating. Disagreement, ostensibly over the choice of car, led to a falling-out and the Iron board were back in the market again.
This time they went for a different mix, an international as a player but with experience no higher than the Conference South as a manager.
But Alan Devonshire soon proved the absence of the Conference Premier on his CV was no handicap as he guided Iron to 12th, ninth and sixth in their first three seasons, an achievement that was perhaps under-appreciated at the time.
A falling away to 14th in his fourth season led to some disillusion and Devonshire decided the short drive to Maidenhead was preferable to his thrice-weekly slog round the M25 (in the passenger seat as it happens, with normally either his wife or Dean Wells at the wheel).
Devonshire departed with two matches left, which gave academy manager Mark Sansom a chance to step into the hot seat as Iron’s next caretaker.
And then came the Cowleys. Danny and brother Nicky arrived after guiding Concord Rangers to three promotions and quickly made their mark.
Despite losing some important players like Alan Massey, Ryan Peters and James Mulley, who all followed Devonshire to Maidenhead, and Nik Hamann, who went to Woking, Cowley fashioned a strong side with a high work ethic. Of their pre-season training, Matt Paine commented: ‘We’ve never worked this hard before.’
It paid dividends as the new signings settled in quickly, most notably Alex Woodyard, who had made little impression in his first brief spell at Cressing Road three seasons earlier, but began to dominate matches with his wholehearted midfield displays.
Cowley famously led the team to third place and a play-off semi-final with Grimsby, which they were leading on aggregate five-sixths of the way through the 180 minutes but eventually went out to two late goals.
The downside was that Cowley had put himself in the shop window, where Lincoln City, desperate for a return to the Football League after six years, were the first to snap him up.
Not only that, but the players had also been spotted by other clubs and a large chunk of the first team found other places to ply their trade.
It was a sad end to a glorious period in the club’s history and left new appointment Jamie Day with a mountain to climb.
Only Simeon Akinola, Chez Isaac and Michael Cheek remained from the previous season and Akinola departed in December for Barnet, then in the Football League.
Day, who like Cowley was 36 when he took on the job, was less successful in his recruiting and a number of questionable signings caused furrowed brows among supporters, notably his decision to bring in several players from Welling, the team he managed up to the end of 2014, but who had just been relegated.
With only two wins in their first 12 matches and the team second from bottom, Day was on his way before the end of September.
The club moved quickly and two days after Day’s departure, Hakan Hayrettin, first team coach at Luton, was given the job of keeping Braintree in the Conference Premier.
When Braintree beat Southport on March 18 he appeared to have succeeded. Iron were then 17th, seven points clear of the drop zone, but a disastrous run of seven defeats in the last eight matches ended their six-year stay at the top level of non-league football.
Gallingly, champions that year were Lincoln, where Cowley had once again worked his magic, taking them from 13th the previous season.
Hayrettin left at the end of the season and the next appointment, unlike the previous season’s, was greeted with acclaim almost universally. After proving himself with three successful years at Enfield, Brad Quinton was invited to return to the club where he had spent most of his football life.
Like previous managers, he had to start with a clean sheet as, apart from two squad members, the whole of the first team had departed.
In common with his predecessors, Quinton raided his old club, bringing in former Iron favourite Nathan McDonald in goal, together with Jon Muleba, Ricky Gabriel and Billy Crook, all of whom had been with him at Enfield.
Together with the likes of Luke Allen, Ben Wyatt, Marc Okoye and Christian Frimpong, they formed a solid team that surprised most people by finishing in the newly expanded play-off places and then even more people by becoming the first team to finish more than four places off automatic promotion and yet go up – and that was after playing all three play-off matches away from home.
Sadly, the team were unable to keep up the momentum on their return to the top flight and in the first week of October Quinton and the club parted company.
Quinton announced his resignation after a fourth defeat in a row left Braintree at the bottom of the table, saying he didn’t think he had any more to give while the club announced that they felt a change was needed. Thus, for once, a departure ‘by mutual consent’ may well have been an accurate description.
The club turned once again to Hayrettin, initially as a caretaker but reappointed full-time after a run of seven points in four matches.
As so often happens, that initial spurt was not maintained and as soon as Hayrettin signed on the dotted line, his team started losing. His appointment as full-time manager was followed by a run of two points from seven matches and by the end of January he decided his time would be better spent as assistant manager at Maidstone, one of Iron’s relegation rivals.
Assistant manager Danny Searle then stepped up into the hot spot. He saw out the season and impressed many with his approach.
Unfortunately Aldershot Town were also impressed and persuaded him to take on the manager’s role there shortly after the end of the season.
And so to last season, which threw up some familiar tropes: a manager (Glen Driver) chosen because of his success at a lower level; departure of the manager in the autumn, of his own volition this time; a short-term appointment (Jake Hutchings), not strictly a caretaker as he was given the job full-time but only lasted three matches; and the return of a former manager (George Borg).
At the time of writing Borg remains Braintree’s manager though what and when he will be managing remains in the hands of a wider world than football.