Players keen to ensure their Vale futures
With manager Micky Adams’ future still in doubt, some of the players set to be out of contract in the summer are starting to express concern about their futures.
The OVF website urged a resolution to the Adams contract sage back in 2013 but instead the situation has been allowed to drag on. The knock-on effect of the impasse is that the club’s coaching staff and 14 out-of-contract players must wait for Adams to make a decision before any decision is made about their contracts.
Until the gaffer has decided what he wants to do then our will be on the back-burner…
Assistant manager Mark Grew commented: “Until the gaffer has decided what he wants to do then our will be on the back-burner.”
Meanwhile defender Richard Duffy has expressed a desire to stay but admitted his future at the club is still in doubt. Duffy commented: “It is up to the club what happens with me and about 15 other people. We have some good characters here and it is important we keep the core of the team.”
Duffy is also keen for Adams to stay adding: “He was the pull why I came here in the first place. Nothing has changed there and I would like to see him stay.”
Even one of the club’s few in-contract players has had his say with Chris Robertson saying: “There are a lot of players who are out of contract and obviously the manager is out of contract. Those things need to be sorted before we can move on and start talking about next year – we need a squad before we can talk about that.”
OVF Comment
We hope that this situation is part of the “learning process” at Vale Park and that the club will learn from this. We have been urging the club to resolve the manager’s contract for over six months now as we understood that it would also effect the players’ futures.
Even the much derided Valiant 2001 board recognised that key players’ contracts cannot wait to the end of the season (and indeed they agreed long-term deals with (then) key players Gareth Owen and Doug Loft in early April 2011).
The club may be lucky in that many of the player appear to be very loyal to Micky Adams and would prefer to stay at the club but all this uncertainty doesn’t help especially during the key season ticket sales period.
We would hope that if Micky Adams does agree a further one-year “rolling” contract that there is a clause ensuring he agrees to extend or end it well before the end of next season.
After all, we really don’t want to go through all this every summer!