Right, it's taken me a month what with stuff 'n' all to complete the next season.
Here's my report:
2007/08 Season (Season 4)East Stirling Scot Div 1 Pl 36 W 12 D 14 L10 GF 39 GA 35 GD +4 Pts 50 4th
First day of close season turned down Crewe job and its transfer budget of £4.2 million. I put in bids for players from the two sides relegated from the Scottish First Division having alerted my scouts when their fate was looking certain. However it was at this point when suddenly I was met with a barrage of refusals due to my offering of part-time contracts. As the close season progressed it was coming close to the resumption of training and I hadn't signed a single player due to this insistence. I was forced to compromise and pay a full-time one-year contract to a pair of seasoned journeymen to bring some experience of football at this level to the club. I also gave a full-time contract to our first international, a young Icelandic lad unwanted at Celtic who went on to play half an hour at Wembley in a 0-3 Euro Championship qualifier defeat. Then when my squad's contracts were up for renewal to my shock all the experienced first team squad refused to accept part-time contracts so as the pre-season began I had nine full-time players. As the season progressed it became clear that at this level no one will accept a part-time contract; the prospect of a semi-pro team in the SPL was rapidly receding.
Showing a human touch I acceeded to an offer from Rangers of £100,000 for my only youth product, a promising keeper who appeared at the end of the first season (he made all of three appearances!) and was developing nicely (despite his 'best' attribute being his Eccentricity!); on a salary of £15 a week I didn't have the heart to block his opportunity even though I didn't need the transfer money since no one worth more than a bean will join us - ever.
The bookies offered odds of 1000-1 for us gaining promotion and with the season underway I was under no illusion that the season would be a struggle. To be honest it wasn't much fun. After three years of amateurish antics and a happy bunch of lads it all got very serious. Almost half the first team squad was full time and I'd actually reached my wage budget limit after being on about 50% previously. Now players were moaning about the usual things such as not getting enough first team action whilst most of them clearly didn't have the ability to make that step up to the first division - indeed it was largely the small group of aging warhorses I'd brought in to show the way who kept us in the running.
In the cups we went out in the second round at home to third division Dumbarton and the following week lost a penalty shoot-out at second division Peterhead in which one out of ten penalties was converted. In the Tennants Scottish Cup (i.e. SFA Cup) 3rd round we won a thriller where we came from 0-2 down to clinch the winner with the last kick of the match at home to Ayr, and then made history in the fourth when for the first time ever East Stirling beat SPL opposition. Admittedly it was Livingston who were bottom and destined for the drop but we comprehensively outplayed them as we strolled to a 2-1 victory. Having made the quarters we were very disappointed to go out to Raith Rovers after outplaying them and thus missing out on a semi-final place.
The league basically amounted to Gretna strolling it and the other nine struggling to avoid relegation with me averaging seventh out of ten, simply trying to keep my neck in front of Morton and Hamilton until the last couple of months when our inconsistency was less than most of our rivals and we finished fourth, 22 points short of promotion. Being safely mid-table would have given me the luxury of giving some youngsters experience - except I didn't have any. The spiralling full-time wage bill had forced me to trim my squad and release most of the youngsters who weren't already in the first team squad. By the end of the season my entire squad numbered thirty.
It's getting increasingly difficult to strengthen my squad but at least the quaity of the staff is improving. Three coaches, a scout and my female physio who'd been with us since the first season all demanded substantial increases to renew their contracts so I let them all leave and recruited some very impressive individuals including ex-England 'keeper Nigel Martyn as scout. I persuaded my assistant manager to accept a coaching role to let in a very talented Italian as my number two. He doesn't yet speak English but he came in five months before the start of the next season so hopefully he'll settle in.
I may have a slightly better fifth season but it appears to me that I've hit a glass ceiling. It's not just the failure of the board to expand the stadium leaving us with capacity home gates every match yet last in the average gate statistics for our division by a long way. It's not just the lack of resources in a league where only one team goes up - early in the season the bottom side Airdrie United approached me with an offer which included a wage budget four times greater than mine, a transfer budget 150 times larger, a stadium eight times larger - you get the picture. Then Dundee Utd. waded in with an even more generous offer and in the final month SPL Dunfermline with a transfer budget of £2.6M. No, it's the AI bug that still 'sees' us as East Stirling 2004 which precludes any player worthy of playing in the first division from signing for me. Half my remaining part-time contracts will be due for renewal in the next year and if they all go full-time the board could convert our status and our amateurish days will be a distant memory. Having said that, with Gretna promoted there's no one in our division next season who we should be intimidated by. Inverness Caley did it in 2004, Queen of the South in 2006 and they are both doing okay in the SPL - indeed the Doonhammers are still semi-pro (with one 16 year old part-timer left!). We'll give it our best shot.
:o
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