Ex Watford Players Now National League Managers

So with David Noble being named Wealdstone Manager he joins 5 other former hornets being in charge of current National League Clubs (not North or south) can anyone name them without cheating?

Eastleigh
Gateshead
Maidenhead
Oxford City
Wealdstone David Noble
York City

 

No

 

As of the other day, Hartlepool are also managed by an ex-Orn!

 

Ok

 

Yep I should have said Hartlepool instead of Gateshead
Only one of the managers had triple figure appearances for us

 

Neal Ardley at York City with Neil Cox as assistant.

 

So we have

Eastleigh Richard Hill
Hartlepool Kevin Phillips
Maidenhead Alan Devonshire
Oxford City Ross Jenkins
Wealdstone David Noble
York City Neal Ardley

 

Richard Hill was an odd one. If memory serves Hill shot the lights out up front for Northampton while Trevor Morley did the same. A deadly double mulleted double tashed strike force.

Man City went for Morley. GT went for Hill tied up mid season. Then Bassett didn’t fancy Hill and he ended up in midfield before doing okay at Oxford for several seasons.

 

Hi Jumb. Hill was GT’s last signing for us during his first spell. If I recall correctly (a rare event these days), Hill was actually a midfielder. The season before we got him, I think he’d scored something like 30 goals. So naturally hopes were high when we got him.

But then Bassett arrived and didn’t fancy him. He was in good company though as of course famously Bassett also didn’t rate Coton, Bardsley, McClelland and others, and decimated the squad.

 

It wasn’t cold that night at Ewood Park and certainly wasn’t packed!! It was during the fuel strike. To this day I’ve no idea why I went to this but glad I did. Not many others made it. 300 maybe

 

How can you not rate McClelland or Coton? Probably the best centre back and keeper we’ve ever had

 

Richard Hill wet down with cramp, midway through the 2nd half of our opening game, I guess Bassett didn't like that, Wilf Rostron was another sent packing by Bassett!

 

We were also 2-0 down inside 10 mins

 

May be wrong but I don’t remember Hill getting a look in during the early games under Bassett. Just kind of disappeared.

 

And Devs men put on a lovely show against Solihull today.

 

You were inadvertently right with Gateshead. Apparently Rob Elliot is the interim manager since Williamson left.

 

News to me mate . Never been north of junction 5

 

Ah but Bassett had the dynamic duo of Mark Morris and Mel Rees eh!

 

According to my old club handbook, he played 4 times. Most likely sub appearances, maybe league cup, but I can’t remember.

 

Hi @Malteser2 2 appearances were as a sub and 2 were starts for which he was subbed, not a very successful signing for what was quite a lot of money at the time!

 

Thanks @Teide1

I remember being very annoyed he didn’t play more.

The Bassett era was a horrific one. It was if he wanted to destroy everything GT had built.

 

No non league general thread, so posting here. Chesham Utd are doing really well and top of the "southern league - premier south". If they win that do they get promoted to the national league south (ie with Hemel & Snorbens) or is there another league between them ? It's not clear from the utterly confusing Wiki (anyone can edit wiki) page table. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_League_System

 

Short answer: yes.

I used to tell my students that just looking at Wikipedia does not constitute research.

Looking at what's available online, a lot of the charts are years out of date, but this site looks correct:
https://myfootygrounds.co.uk/Pyramid.asp

 

Thanks - seems so.
Still, if correct it looks odd that 3 leagues fight it out to send 4 teams up to the national league south (how does that even work?) whereas 4 teams get promoted from just one league in the north to the national league north ?? You'd have thought one of those 3 southern leagues (Isthmian or southern prem league CENTRAL) could have promoted to the national league north ?

 

Richard Hill was one of those sliding doors transfers that could have worked out brilliantly but a series of unfortunate events meant it didn't work out for him.

He'd scored bags of goals for Northampton as they romped to the Div 4 title. They were managed by Graham Carr – father of the comedian Alan. Several clubs were after Hill and Northampton were keen to cash in on him. Graham Carr drove him down to London to meet Chelsea's manager John Hollins. On the way back to Northampton, they also met GT at Watford.

The transfer deal was agreed before the end of the season but was arranged to go through in the summer – a sort of old-fashioned version of loaning him back for the remainder of the season. At the last minute, David Pleat of Tottenham tried to hijack the deal and, technically, Hill could have gone to Spurs because his Watford contract didn't start until July 1, but he'd given his word to GT.

My Dad and I went up to the County Ground to watch Northampton play one of their games towards the end of that season and Hill was a sort of David Platt-type player. Not quite a midfielder, not quite a forward, but very good at breaking between the lines and much too good for Div 4. We were confident that day Watford had signed a good one.

Of course, GT left straight after the end of the season. John Barnes was always going to go. Bassett was appointed.

Hill went on Watford's end-of-season trip to China then, if memory serves me right, flew back to London and then flew straight off on a long holiday he'd planned with his wife – three weeks in New Zealand and a week in Hawaii. Anyway, he flew in from China, met his wife at the airport and then flew straight to New Zealand. Anyway, it meant he returned for pre-season training having done next to no fitness work for a month and he was off the pace.

So, he was always playing catch-up, wasn't fit enough for the type of midfield work Bassett wanted him to do, and didn't fit Bassett's style of play at all. He got injured in a game against Spurs early on and tried to play through it. Bassett wanted to move him and a few others on and when the chance came to sell Hill and Bardsley to Oxford, he pretty much forced them to go. He suffered a bad injury at Oxford which eventually ended his career.

In different circumstances it might all have been different but Watford in the summer and autumn of 1987 was turned upside down and was pretty much a complete mess from top to bottom.

 

The clubs that go up and the leagues they go into are absolutely a mess. Bishops Stortford are in the National League North and they're about as far north as Stevenage or Luton for instance!

 

I bump into Morley often, he's a pundit here in Norway. Told me Watford were after him on a few different occasions.

 

I don't know if this is still the case, but in the past there were plenty of examples of clubs who either couldn't be promoted due to the lack of facilities at their grounds or chose not to go up because they didn't want to meet certain requirements or payments that were needed in the the next division up. Some of the shoehorning of teams into leagues might result from this.

 

It's mostly because there's two divisions at Step 2, one north and one south, and three leagues feed into it – Northern Premier (northern clubs, obviously), then the Southern League (southern and some central teams) and Isthmian League (traditionally teams based in London and around the doughnut of the M25).

So there's three divisions feeding into two and two of those divisions are predominantly southern clubs.

The boundary is drawn pretty faithfully on a north-south basis with the 24 most northern teams going in National League North and the 24 most southern teams going into National League South.

Kings Lynn, by no means northern, were promoted to NL North and it was pretty much the thing that led to their demise. Players left because they didn't want to do do the travelling and the club was relegated and played in the Northern Premier League.

Bishops Stortford are having a terrible season for similar reasons – local players don't want to spend the time travelling to South Shields and Warrington and so on.

The wikipedia page has maps with the geographical spread of clubs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023–24_National_League

Unfortunately, things could work out in such a way that Hemel or St Albans might be moved to NL North next season, as barmy as that seems, simply because they are the 24th most northern club at Step 2.

One solution that often gets suggested is creating a National League Central division, which might make a lot of sense, although it would probably mean clubs like Hemel and St Albans would likely be permanent members of the Central division and would have to go to places like Hereford, Alfreton and Tamworth instead of Truro, Dover and Weymouth.

 

As you suggest it would be ridiculous to push someone like Hemel to play in the northern league and would basically kill the club. Could they request relegation instead ?
A central league would make much sense.

 

Yeah, I'm not sure what the solution is. I don't know if a club ever has (or could) refuse promotion or ask to be relegated to avoid being placed in a geographically unsuitable league but neither of those ideas are great either. Slog away all season to earn promotion or retain your status and then drop back a division.

Non-league football is at a crossroads in a lot of ways. A winter of postponements is costing clubs a fortune (not as much of an issue for clubs like Hemel with 3G pitches). There's no doubt a lot of them are overpaying for players, sponsorship and other revenue is getting harder and harder to come by.

The other issue is that the leagues below the National League may object to another 24 clubs being taken in order to form a Central division at step 2. Then there's the issue of promotion/relegation to step 1, four up across three divisions would mean only the three champions plus only one other winning promotion (unless they want to have six going down from the National League, which seems a non-starter). It's an issue that seems simple to solve on the face of it but there are multiple other issues to sort.

In the meantime, there's a handful of clubs who are at the mercy of the annual league reorganisation process.