What are these other issues exactly?
Don't really know what to make of it. Sacked by Braintree, Welling, and Hemel. Bit underwhelmed.
It would be interesting to have a more specific description of these issues. This is the key sentence for me:
"The board therefore took the decision to prioritise the appointment of someone who will assume responsibility for managing the team for the remainder of the season with a focus solely on improving results in the short term and getting the best out of a talented squad."
Each of the three clubs who've sacked him has been something of a manager's graveyard in recent seasons, with a ridiculous turnover of managers and often pulling the trigger in mid-season, so I reckon he may well be rather better than that list of sackings looks.
First of all we need to make sure our club doesn't become like those clubs after 3 mid-season sackings during the last 3 seasons, so he's really an interim manager in all but name. Right now we need a "safe pair of hands", and hopefully our directors have done enough due diligence to be confident that's what he is. The first priority has to be simply to get the additional 17 or so points from the remaining 17 games that will ensure we're still in this division, and to get them as swiftly as possible. After taking just 6 points from the last 11 games, that can't be taken for granted, but nevertheless it should be well within the capability of the current squad. Get those points within the first 10 games or so, then we can think about pushing for the top half of the table in the remaining weeks of the season. Best scenario is we pick up another 30+ points, in which case our new man will have made a strong case to be given the chance to reshape the squad in the summer and take us forward.
Bradley spent most of his lengthy playing career with Braintree, through three promotions from Isthmian Division 1 to National Division, then joined Enfield Town. After a couple of seasons there, he succeeded the manager's job for the 2016-17 season and built a decent footballing side with plenty of good young players. He got them into the Isthmian Premier play-offs in his first season, when they succumbed to Ibra Sekajja's hat-trick in a 4-2 semi-final defeat at Champion Hill.
That summer he returned to Braintree (newly relegated from the National Division) as manager, taking several of his Enfield players with him including Billy Crook, and got then promoted from National South at the first attempt via the play-offs. He must have been something of a club legend at Braintree, but perhaps not surprisingly they found it tough at the higher level as one of the minnows in that division, and he was sacked after just a few weeks. (Bear in mind their chairman is the bloke who ordered our media team to stop filming a match at their ground halfway through the game when they were losing. He also sacked another manager last month only a few months after getting them promoted, so he sounds somewhat unreasonable and prone to kneejerk reactions.)
Next stop was Welling, when they were struggling in mid-season, but he turned that around and kept them up only to get the push midway through the following season. That's not a big club in that league and it's surely only a matter of time before they slip through the trapdoor. I'm amazed they've survived this long when they always seem to be in a state of flux with ownership and ground redevelopments, never mind the continual changes of manager.
Hemel's manager was on borrowed time when they beat us immediately after Gavin Rose's sacking, but when he eventually got the push it was Quinton who replaced him. Again, he turned that season around and secured safety, but then got sacked around a year ago after a brief run of poor results while still in a comfortble mid-table position. They brought in Alan Dowson as interim and finished lower than when he'd arrived, before giving the job to Bobby Williamson in the summer, but he's already been sacked with Lee Allinson from Hendon replacing him!
You never really know how any new manager is going to work out, but he does have experience of taking over clubs in a similar position to ourselves at a similar point in the season (Welling and Hemel) within the last 5 years and delivering exactly what was needed over the rest of that season. Given the bewildering range of options and alternatives, I see no reason to be overly sceptical about this appointment.
