Hopefully Hughton can sort out some staff this week!
Posted on November 15th, 2010 | 17 Comments |
Fair play, wish him all the best and all that malarkey, but his departure has left a rather sizeable hole in what was already a limited backroom staff setup.
As it stands we have only Chris Hughton and Paul Barron who are dedicated to working with the first-team, and the latter one of those is actually supposed to be a goalkeeping coach. Then we have Steve Stone and Peter Beardsley in the background floating around with the reserves and youth setup, which is all very good, but even if they pitched in and helped with the first-team it would still leave us stretched.
What Chris Hughton is missing, more than anything at the moment, is an assistant that he can rely on, and that man has to be someone of his choosing as he needs to be able to trust him and work with him. Perhaps something can be sorted in that department this week?
Probably not, this is Newcastle after all, and recruitment doesn’t seem to happen too quickly round these parts, but at least there is some spare time to be pressing on with things this week. By ‘spare time’ I mean the fact that we don’t have a game in midweek, and with a fair amount of players away on their respective international duties it will give the backroom staff a smaller squad of players to work with, which in turn will hopefully free Hughton up a bit so he can press on with the recruitment drive.
Hughton, who is widely acknowledged as a work-a-holic, admitted to The Guardian that he is starting to find things tough now that he has had to shoulder the extra burden for a number of weeks now.
“There’s a lot of work,” Hughton told The Guardian “I do take the occasional day off but you can’t switch off, you don’t have a day off where you do nothing. My chin is very firmly up but a day doing nothing would be nice. We do need to bring in another member of staff.”
“I have a very good staff but it’s small,” said Hughton. “Sam Allardyce had a very big staff with him here and Fulham also have a very big staff. This, though, is what we have. We just hope it’s addressed soon. We need to replace Colin.”
The problem I see, will be money. With Hughton on a low wage (in Premier League managers terms), I think he could struggle to find a replacement of any note that will be willing to accept less than what he is on. Maybe I’m just being cynical, but I certainly wouldn’t like it if one of my staff was on a higher salary than I was.
Who knows though eh? But at least Hughton should, hopefully, have a bit of time this week to be able to go some way to addressing the situation.
The sooner it’s solved, the better!
NUFCBlog Author: toonsy
toonsy has written 643 articles on this blog.
I’ll do it and I’m cheap as chips :-)