Free-scoring Green signed for Ammies’ promotion bid
SALFORD City have signed striker Matt Green from League Two Lincoln City.
The 31-year-old has signed a two-and-a-half year deal at The Peninsula Stadium and joins ahead of a busy winter schedule after 18 months with The Imps.
Prior to that he has played at Mansfield Town, where he won the then-named Conference in 2012-13 and finished as the league’s top scorer with 25 goals, as well as spells with Birmingham City and Oxford United where he also won promotion from the Conference, via the play-offs in 2009-10.
With playing time limited at League Two leaders Lincoln this season, the forward feels the time is right for a new challenge.
“It’s a refreshing challenge for me and I’m really looking forward to getting started, meeting my new team mates, and hopefully being part of a promotion winning team.
“It would have been quite easy for me to stay at Lincoln and not get the game time that I would have liked to, so that would have been the easy thing to do but I’m a very ambitious lad and I saw a great opportunity at Salford City and I’m really looking forward to getting started.
“There’s a very good squad here already so I’d just like to add to that, the lads have been doing brilliantly this season, I know it’s been very tight at the top with points and I’m just hoping I can add to what the lads have done so far and get behind them.
“The gaffer’s told me how good the lads are and how tight the team is, so I’m hoping to adapt to that pretty quickly and help us get those points on the table that we need, especially over the next coming weeks because we’ve got some really tough fixtures coming up.
“Ambition is totally, 100% promotion, that’s what I’ve come here for this season.” THE Beijing branch of the Manchester United supporters club might call it karma.
But the fact is that the current woes of the Reds - and the serene brilliance of old rivals City - are rooted deep in their respective club psyches.
And those attitudes are products of the two clubs’ contrasting fortunes over the last 25 years.
United’s success has bred a degree of arrogance and complacency within the fabric of the club, as well as attracting owners who had dollar signs, rather than the mist of football glory, in their eyes.
Reds fans mocked City as ‘smalltime’ and a joke club as the Blues stumbled from indignity to insecurity and back again, their only constant being the fealty of their support.
By the time Manchester football history was irrevocably changed, by Sheikh Mansour’s City takeover in 2008, United were a bloated organisation, held together by the iron will and managerial genius of Sir Alex Ferguson.
Like the Roman Empire, their glory had gone on for so long that it felt like a permanence. The sun would never set on United, it seemed. That created a sense that there was no need to worry, as something would always show up. After all, this was Manchester United, the greatest football club in the world.
Older, wiser Reds who remembered the way the edifice crumbled after Sir Matt Busby’s retirement in 1969 were not so certain.
The contrast a few miles down the road at the Etihad Stadium could not have been greater. City had no grand, silver-laden recent history on which to draw - or indeed any laurels on which to rest.
Their successes had all been hard won and easily lost. From the depths of 1999 they had re-surfaced in the Premier League, and then gone under again, just as United were winning a Treble and three successive league titles.
As a result, complacency has become a bitter enemy at City. It does not exist because they have rarely had anything to be complacent about.
And as a club that did its fair sharing of lurching about in the dark they had EIGHTEEN different managers during Fergie’s 27-year Old Trafford reign - it was clear from the start that a plan was needed.
The popular perception is that City simply threw money at the problem until it went away.
And, while their ownership model made investment in the club much easier than United’s leveraged 2005 takeover, the clear-eyed planning was their greatest asset.
From day one, they knew what they wanted and they worked out a plan to get it.
Brian Marwood was appointed to oversee player recruitment and Roberto Mancini - a fiery and volatile individual - was brought in to shake up the club.
He did that perfectly, taking on Fergie head on - quite literally in one feisty derby encounter - and declaring that they would tear down the hated “34 years” banner at the Stretford End.
That banner itself was a symbol, firstly of United’s arrogant certainty in their enduring dominance, and latterly - once Mancini had made good his vow - as testimony to City’s rebirth. Mancini was a shooting star who burned out when his job, of upsetting the power balance in Manchester football, and thereby in English football. But the signings in his era, overseen by Marwood, endured beyond his tenure and made the nucleus of Manuel Pellegrini’s squad.
City were already thinking of the future at that point. They wanted Pep Guardiola, and to that end they brought in his old friends and Barcelona club colleagues Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain. Pellegrini was told, from day one, that he would be moved on if and when Guardiola became available. The planning for that day began apace, with Begiristain overseeing an academy blueprint that placed the emphasis on passing football, playing out from the back, and a basic 4-3-3.
Players who came into Pellegrini’s squad were bought with Guardiola in mind - Kevin De Bruyne, Fernandinho and Raheem Sterling were all admired by the former Barcelona coach, and he had told Soriano and Begiristain so. When Guardiola was appointed, there were still players to be bought, and a football philosophy to instil, but he found a ready framework, and today’s excellent squad is a confluence of all three managers. The manager has also harnessed that hangdog pessimism which has become a Blue trademark, constantly reminding his players and the fans that nothing should be taken for granted, and that every day is a new fight to be won. City’s history tells you that. By contrast, Ferguson’s enduring excellence meant he was trusted to oversee everything.
Since he went, United have lurched from manager to manager, from style to style, from transfer to transfer with little or no strategic planning, always with the feeling that it will come good, with a sprinkle of that magic United dust.
Jose Mourinho did not want a football director, which seems to have been a large part of his conflict with the United board.
The Reds are sure to appoint one now he is gone, and - if they get the right man - will eventually start to claw back lost ground. But for now City fans are loving the moment when their club’s natural pessimism has spawned something beautiful, and United’s arrogance has bounced them into turmoil. Stuart Brennan