Opinion: Flitcroft exit may be too late to save relegation but it’s surely good for the long-term

Rob Fielding says that the departure of David Flitcroft as director of football bodes well for the future but it has potentially come too late to save the team’s season.

Rob Fielding writes…

Regardless of what division the club lands in, it faces a crucial summer of rebuilding including the thorny issue of the majority of the squad being under contract. The fact that it won’t be Flitcroft in charge of that process will give many fans cause for optimism…

The departure of David Flitcroft from the Director of Football role has been warmly received by the vast majority of Port Vale fans. Flitcroft had come under sustained criticism for some awful business in the transfer windows – although that wasn’t the sole criticism of what felt like many to be a rushed and flawed appointment.

Unfortunately for the Valiants – with the transfer window shut – Darren Moore has been left with an unbalanced and underperforming side and it could already be too late for the Vale to escape relegation. I do hope I’m wrong on that by the way!

However, regardless of what division the club lands in, it faces a crucial summer of rebuilding including the thorny issue of the majority of the squad being under contract. The fact that it won’t be Flitcroft in charge of that process will give many fans cause for optimism. It’s also worth noting that there are other factors other than the Director of Football which will make the next window a success or failure. Those include – the people scouting and recommending possible signings and the playing budget that has been set.

However, I hope the club move from Flitcroft’s approach of waiting till late in the window for deals to become available. This is far too risky an approach and has left the club with no strikers for three windows now. It is surely a much better approach to move earlier. That allows players more time to settle and also means less chance of exiting the window without your key targets.

If you take the January window, Flitcroft said he waited till the final days because higher-placed clubs needed to sign their targets allowing Vale’s targets to move down the pecking order and become available on loan. This was simply the wrong idea as there was always the risk of there not being enough time to complete such moves before the window shut. And the club was short of strikers at the start of the year anyhow. If they had signed someone in the first week of the window it would have meant the Vale had a new forward to play for three weeks in January and should there have been any last-minute hiccup the club would have had time to look elsewhere. The Valiants lost all of their January fixtures but who knows what the results may have been had firepower been available at the start of the month?

I also felt it was a dereliction of duty for Flitcroft – with over three hundred games as a manager behind him – to not step into the breach and be in the dugout when Andy Crosby and his coaching team left. To hand control to complete novice Will Ryder (highly promising academy coach he may be but he had no League experience) was just inexcusable in my eyes. Flitcroft himself had said he was in charge of all “football matters” but at a crucial time, he failed to step up and take charge.

It isn’t clear if Vale will look for a replacement for Flitcroft as director of football – the statement said “a further update will be made in due course” – but if they do, supporters would hope that there is sufficient due diligence with several candidates interviewed and not (as appeared to be the case with both Flitcroft and manager Darren Moore) the first candidate to be spoken to appointed. It may actually be better to dispose of the role altogether and hand the manager sole transfer responsibility.

Flitcroft’s time at the club was, by and large, a failure but there were some successes along the way and out of fairness,  it’s worth noting them. It was Flitcroft who appointed Darrell Clarke, who built the squad that achieved promotion from League Two and that brought in Ollie Arblaster and Alfie Devine on loan this season. However, those highlights have been completely overshadowed by repeated failures in the transfer markets (despite rival clubs on similar budgets succeeding), two managerial sackings, a failure to step up and take charge of the team at a crucial time and a potential relegation on the cards. It was clearly the right choice for him to go.

It good that the club owners have acted, but who knows where the club may be right now if they’d have made this move ahead of the January transfer window?