‘I WANT SOME CONSISTENCY’ SAYS ASPIN
MANAGERS rarely have a sunny outlook when their team has played badly, so as Neil Aspin glowered from under his hood pulled up as flimsy protection against an Atlantic storm, faint-hearted reporters may have decided to skip the question about being criticised by the crowd.
Aspin was clearly in no mood to take prisoners having already described 80 minutes of his team’s performance at Morecambe as ‘terrible’.
But he addressed head on the subject of being booed by a section of the travelling supporters when he decided to substitute Manny Oyeleke for Scott Quigley. Not only that, chants of ‘you don’t what you’re doing’ had drifted over from the rainlashed away terrace at the Globe Arena.
Answering a question about his players’ consistency - or more to the point, lack of it - Aspin said:
“The players are what they are, until they have played regularly and played well regularly. But we have a situation where supporters build players up and then unfortunately sometimes, until they have played more games, they don’t deserve to
PORT VALE
get that praise. You have to earn praise over time. And for those people who were saying I don’t know what I’m doing, my substitution shows that I do know what I am doing.”
So, was he surprised by the reaction to taking Oyeleke off?
He said: “I expect to get stick because Manny is probably more popular than I am as manager, but that won’t stop me from doing what I think is right. If a player is not playing well, even if he is their favourite player, he still has to come off.”
He certainly did, and Aspin’s 64th-minute change was vindicated as Vale, who were going nowhere at 2-0 down, mounted an unlikely late rally to snatch a 2-2 draw. First Antony Kay beat the offside trap to score from
Tom Conlon’s free-kick, on 83 minutes, and then Tom Pope headed home the leveller on 87 from substitute Quigley’s excellent cross.
That last goal must have felt particularly sweet for Aspin. It can’t be much fun for any manager to basically be told he’s an idiot while trying to do his job. Fans who were within a mile radius of Brian Horton may remember him turning the air blue, and faces red, when he told some of his detractors in the Lorne Street where to get off after Vale scored a late goal at home to Northampton around 15 years ago.
More recently, Micky Adams stomped down the touchline and looked as though he might invade the crowd in an FA Cup tie away to Plymouth when his substitution was booed, but turned out to be a masterstroke.
It’s a passionate, boisterous game, on the touchline and the terraces, and just because a manager and fans might disagree at certain points doesn’t mean they’re not friends again by full time.
As Aspin pointed out, most of this game wasn’t a whole lot of fun for the 410 travelling supporters who spent about 80 minutes squinting through the storm to try to verify that this was indeed the same Vale side that had thumped Yeovil 3-0 and Stoke under-21s 4-0 in their last two matches.
To his great credit, Aspin always calls a game exactly as he sees it, never insulting our intelligence by putting a spin on a performance.
He was typically blunt about this one, describing the first half as ‘abysmal’, and the second as not a great deal better until those two late goals.
Morecambe were full value for their 2-0 lead at the break, having gone in front on 27 minutes when they broke from a Vale corner with a sweeping move which ended in former Valiants striker Ajay Leitch-smith firing low past Scott Brown.
When striker Jason Oswell buried a back post header for the second, five minutes before the break, even those fans who prefer their glass half-full, were considering whether their Bovril had been topped up by rainwater.
The second half was marginally better, albeit Vale didn’t look like scoring and Scott Brown had to make an excellent save to deny Liam Mandeville to match one he pulled off from Jordan Cranston before the break.
But when Kay got the benefit of the doubt from the assistant referee, and cashed in with an excellent finish, Morecambe began to wobble. Pope’s trademark header - for his 98th goal in a Vale shirt - seemed to have secured a draw for all of a minute before Morecambe were awarded a penalty when Brown brought down Vadaine Oliver in the area.
But Brown saved Leitchsmith’s spot-kick to leave Shrimps boss Jim Bentley in some disbelief that his side hadn’t won, and with steam coming out of his ears because Kay’s goal hadn’t been flagged for offside.
Who would be a manager? Well Bentley and Aspin have more than 1,000 games between them and, for all the aggravation, they must love it really.
This just wasn’t the day to ask.