OPINION

Having been absent for a couple of weeks holiday, during which Town continued their erratic trend, I was greeted back with the news of Phil Brown and Neil McDonalds’ departures from the County Ground writes Peter Mitchell.

Their winning ratio at Swindon was 31%, not even matching Brown’s previous record of 35% – so it seems that chairman Lee Power’s patience finally ran out after just eight months. He certainly doesn’t hold back on making managerial changes, and paying for them, as his next appointment will be his sixth in the five years since he took charge.

The managerial merry-go-round has cranked into action once again and a relative unknown has stepped off to join the fray.

Richie Wellens has been appointed on an 18 month contract taking him through to the end of next season. He is 38 years old and his only previous experience has been as manager of Oldham Athletic for a year, when they were relegated to League 2. Apparently they played attractive football but Wellens says the awful state of the Boundary Park pitch in the winter caused him to change his playing style, and this led directly to their undoing.

We can only wait and judge for ourselves as we enter yet another new era at the County Ground.

Right until the end Brown seemed to spend his time trying out more combinations of his squad and formations than a consortium picking lottery numbers.

He made seven changes for his final game against York City and it appeared he was no further forward fathoming his best eleven than he was back in August. I think his other failing was to not place enough priority on resolving his goalscoring predicament.

He continued to rely on veteran Marc Richards and young inexperienced loanee Elijah Adebayo, when it was obvious to all that this pairing just wasn’t working out. His hands were probably somewhat tied due to him blowing his budget on a plethora of midfield players.

Nevertheless, I feel sure that Wellens will now be given an extra “emergency” budget to spend in the January Transfer Window.

We are only 17 league games into the season and Town lie in 17th place.

There is still plenty of time for a resurgence of form to take place and for Swindon to surge up the table. What will need to happen is for Wellens to hit the ground running and galvanise the existing squad into better, more consistent, performances immediately.

Power obviously hasn’t written off this season yet, hence this significant change coming relatively early in the campaign.

The squad has bags of talent, so we need to hope that this time the choice of leader will be the right one.

Town face Carlisle United on Saturday in a match that has a draw written all over it and it will be interesting to see the reaction of the players to these latest developments.