Defiant Taylor insists City will not give up on promotion fight
TUESDAY’S defeat at Oldham Athletic certainly hurt, but there did seem to be something of an overreaction to the loss amongst the Exeter City fanbase, certainly in the evil world of social media.
The loss was City’s third in succession and led to some calling for manager Matt Taylor to be sacked. It is often a platform of opinions where balance goes out of the window and that certainly seemed to be the case in midweek.
At the beginning of this season, Taylor told fans this was a transitional period as he straight-batted expectations of a club that had reached three of the last four League Two play-off finals. Experienced players left, only three were signed and the club made redundancies as it adapted to the financial realities of a world coming to terms with the crippling effects of a Covid pandemic.
City have perhaps been victims of their own success, to a certain extent, as their excellent start saw them among the frontrunners in a season where no one in League Two seems any better or much worse than anyone else.
Taylor’s men are far from out of the promotion picture, although you’d think otherwise if you read the musings of some over-reactive fans.
“I think we have to be honest as to where we are as a club,” Taylor said when asked if early season optimism brought about by such a good start had raised expectation. “If your budget gets cut, you lose staff members, you have to release eight senior players and can basically only sign two and a half players, as we did in pre-season - when there is no investment, there is no expectation.
“You can use other teams as comparisons to ourselves – look at Colchester, for example – and you will see how difficult it is to keep producing a level of performance where there is no investment.
“If we had tried to improve on what we had at the end of last season, then I guarantee we would have been in a different position this season, but then, there is a huge amount of expectation that goes alongside that.”
Colchester are a club battling to avoid relegation having lost to the Grecians in last season’s play-offs. They too made significant cuts in the summer, against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, while some clubs, like Mansfield Town, Salford (who Exeter play tomorrow,) Bolton Wanderers and Forest Green Rovers appeared to take advantage of the financial climate with owners using personal wealth to invest in their playing squads.
“Our port of call is to make the club financially stable during the pandemic and at the time, I was part of those decision meetings and it was the right thing to do for this football club,” Taylor added.
“The fans have to be careful in terms of what they want and what they expect from this group of players. Even more so because we are holding these young boys accountable.
“When you hold young players accountable, you increase the pressure on them and these are the ones that are the future of this football club. They will keep us going because we will sell three or four of this young group in the coming years and that will enable us to remain a stable football club at this level.
“There is no other form of income. There are no fans coming in through the turnstiles at the moment, so we have to be mindful of what this group of players is and, as manager, I have to really protect them.
“There is a reason why I said that at the start of the season – because I know exactly where this group of players are. Some will move on at the end of the season, some will move on next season, but it will be my job to keep adding the senior ones to a good group of young players.”
The progress of those young players this season really has been a joy to watch, even if results have not always gone Exeter’s way. It was to be expected that their individual performances would be up and down as that is only natural in the early years of a professional footballer.
“Despite what’s happened in the last three games, I’m immensely proud of how far this group have come,” Taylor added. “No one would tell me at the start of the season how Alex Hartridge is performing right now. No one would tell me how Josh Key is performing, or about Matt Jay’s goals record, or what Archie Collins has produced this season, or a 19-year-old goalkeeper (Jokull Andresson), or about Joel Randall, who has been our stand out player. To lose him for the rest of the season is so disappointing.
“Add to that Randell Williams, who has been out for three months, and then losing Nicky Law in January, who has been the best player the fans have seen at this football club for a long time.
“I try to keep the expectations of the fans realistic but, when you have relative success – and relative success is play-off finals in three of the last four years – then sometimes that expectation exceeds what is really possible.
“But we are still fighting. We are not out of it by any means and I am sure we can give ourselves something to be proud of come the end of the season.”