This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Sunday 2nd October 2011 at 4.00pm
Mister Doubty and McClanger
Nigel Doughty has resigned as chairman of Nottingham Forest, the football club I support, after many years. He has received a lot of criticism from fans in the last couple of years and I would just like to put my views across.
There is little argument that Mr Doughty has overseen one of the worst periods in the club's history, and he cannot avoid taking some of the blame for that. Poor decisions have been made at key times, either by him or by people working for him. The relegation to the third tier of English football was an embarassment to everyone involved: Forest were the only club ever to have won the European Cup and then fallen so low in their domestic league.
But Mr Doughty did not shirk that embarassment; he carried on at the club, bankrolling the return to the Championship and appointing Billy Davies, who revitalised the team and so nearly secured promotion to the Premiership. He has often taken flak from fans with good humour. More importantly he wanted the best for the club, and gave a huge amount of his own money and time to try to make good things happen.
Those good things never quite materialised. The club in general, and Mr Doughty in particular, were stung by the reign of David Platt as manager. Appointed largely on the basis of his reputation as a player, he spent large amounts of money on three Italians from the backwaters of Serie A who all failed miserably in England; and his lack of tactical nous was obvious even to me, a somewhat casual observer (I did have a season ticket at the time).
This experience led the club to introduce the much-maligned "Transfers and Aquisitions Panel", under which signings were made by a committee. In theory this lessened the chances of such obviously bad purchases as Petrachi, Matrecano and Mannini. The TAP was actually not a bad idea in principle, and worked well for a time, but became unwieldy. And relying on David Pleat as your football consultant is beyond a joke - any sensible fan listening to the man commentating on ITV can tell you he's lost any expertees that he did have (and I would argue that his record as a manager even in his younger days was mediocre at best).
To a large extent the success or failure of clubs at Championship level comes down to a large dose of luck in having the right people at your club at the right time. Managers and players stay for such short periods , and coaches feted as the next big thing are often out of the door a year later. Even the very few bosses with well-established good records at a number of clubs sometimes fail horribly when put in the wrong situation - see Woy Hodgson's appointment at Liverpool, for example.
(Alex Ferguson is widely acknowledged as the best manager in English game, but has never been tested in charge of a smaller side. I would be very interested to see him take charge at a club like, say, Ipswich (or Forest!) and see what he makes of it.)
So I would like to say thanks to Mr Doughty. He may not always have made the right decisions, but I have no doubt that he always made what he though were the best decisions for the club. Clearly the fans want more than that; I hope, of course, that they get what they wish for, but more importantly than that I hope the club continues to receive such generous care and support from whoever replaces Mr Doughty as chairman.
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