Danny Cowley: working tirelessly but still finding time for the Stacey West

Danny said something in the conversation which I had to ask him if I could quote. He said; “2016/17 was a great season, a special time for Lincoln City fans. I don’t want to look back in ten years and think what a great season it was or how it stood out above everything else. I want that season to be more than just a special season, I want it to be the start of a journey where everything changed for this football club, the point where we went from being one level to another for good. I won’t make silly decisions that might jeopardise that, I will spend Lincoln City’s money like it is my money but, where I need to, I will spend the money.”

Essentially, the board have backed him and he will spend on the right players, but he will not settle for second best. He will not throw thousands at a player who could bankrupt the club, nor will he throw loads of money at the one season, et promoted and for want of a better word, fuck off to Ipswich and better himself. He’s here for the long haul but he’s building a legacy, not a one hit wonder. If Mansfield don’t go up, they’ve spent around £275k on wages and fees for Tyler Walker and have nothing to show for it. Danny won’t do that, not with the club’s money.

He wants to bring a player to the club with the right attitude as well as ability, but I see a problem he faces. Take Tom Hopper. If he wanted to sign Hopper, he would have met the boy and sold the club. He will have wanted to see ambition in his eyes and hear it in his voice. However, what message would it send if the same player then turned down a League One offer in favour of League Two? A player hungry to play at a higher level choosing not to? It would render his words pretty hollow, would it not? The same goes for a League Two player choosing moves up over a move sideways. Does Tyler Walker want to play for Mansfield for the betterment of his career? Last season he turned out for Forest and Bolton, do you truly believe he thought the next career move was a season playing for a team with three sides to their ground?

The point I’m trying to make here is the way many view the transfer market, me included at times if I’m entirely honest. everything seems so very cut and dried doesn’t it? I know in January we didn’t get a target because of location, purely that. He would have been perfect for the club, linked up with Matt Green and provided the big man support. He would have been able to add perhaps six or seven goals after Christmas and maybe, just maybe push us a place or two higher. We didn’t miss out because we were cheap, because we didn’t work hard enough or because Danny and Nicky are naïve in the transfer market, all that sort of talk is utter rubbish. We missed out because of where he was based. He lived in a town where his wife had a great job in a hospital and he needed to do the school run every day. Simple. We weren’t offering life changing money, he wasn’t young, free and easy and he had to go elsewhere.

Danny and Nicky are not suffering from a lack of transfer window experience, they just put the long-term future of the club before an immediate hit. It baffles me how anyone questions their methods when we’ve had two seasons of previously unparalleled success. That isn’t to say they’re infallible, I’m sure in a darkened room with a nice single malt, Danny would open up and confess JMD didn’t work out, but there’s been very few permanent deals that haven’t either impacted the club or brought a fee at the end of the deal. We’ve not been lumbered with a wage we don’t want. Okay, we missed out on a striker in successive windows, but we still won at Wembley and made the play offs.

Similarly, do you believe Danny waits until the end of the summer to do his deals on purpose? Don’t you think maybe, just maybe he’d like to smash them all out in early June and bugger off to the Cape Verde Island with the family for a week? Of course he would. This summer things are even tougher because of the World Cup. The Premier League moves aren’t happening because all eyes are on Russia, meaning that all the subsequent links in the chain are experienced stagnation. We might well be looking at a couple of young players on loan, but until stuff dies down in Russia, much of the market is going to remain calm and flat.

Please, trust me when I say Danny is working tirelessly, endlessly and incessantly to better this club. The ‘failure’ t land a striker isn’t entirely true anyway, a year ago we beat five or six clubs to 17-goal Matt Green who had a good season for us and will again. Landing Green, Bostwick and even Frecklington and now Andrade tells me they’re far from naïve and inexperienced in their dealings. Hopefully, things will pan out this summer and hopefully, we land the targets we need. If we do, the squad will be immense come the big kick off, maybe we’ll be at 21 or 22, but it will be 22 players who would grace any other squad in this division without doubt. How many other sides will be able to say that? How many of Forest Green’s squad would grace ours? Ten? Fifteen?

If we get everyone we want, I wager every single one of our players would walk into their match day squad, or indeed every match day squad in League Two. If we don’t get everyone in we need, rest assured we’ll still be every bit as competitive as last season.

Danny reads Twitter, Facebook and all that. He sees some of the utter drivel written about his policy, the club’s reticence to sign strikers and how we’re apparently changing for the worst. Before you type just think for a second’ would I really want Danny to read this? If the answer is no, put the phone down and go sit in the sun with a good book. I can thoroughly recommend Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne series.

Let Danny do what he’s good at, yeah?