Ninety percent luck.

Can Salop’s Gavin Cowan gamble pay off?

Picture Shrewsbury Town.

“Captaincy is 90 percent luck and 10 percent skill, but don’t try it without that 10 percent”. (Richie Benaud).

At least it was quick! Gavin Cowan – last seen praising God on national television for his Brackley team’s victory over Notts County in the first round of the FA Cup – was installed as Salop head coach (AKA manager) less than twenty-four hours after Michael Appleton’s departure was made public. Cowan now has a job where he will need to seek more divine guidance or, if the good Lord is more of a cricket chap, take the counsel of his assistant Dave Edwards and senior coach Jamie Haynes.

Salop’s on field leadership is now the responsibility of a group with Blue and Amber in their veins. All three have spells at the Meadow (both old and new) on their football CVs, Cowan and Edwards as first team players and Haynes as a graduate of the Salop Academy. On their latest emergency pod Salopcast]sought the opinion of non-league guru (their words) Ryan Deeney. Deeney framed this managerial head-hunting as ‘an affiliation appointment’. Cowan had done a good job at Brackley, getting them promoted to the National League and masterminding a giant-killing cup run, but he was not necessarily an obvious candidate to make the big step into EFL management. The fact that he has been given this change to take his career forward at this time is down an affinity with a club he played for and supports which has boosted his credentials.

So, a club legend making an emotional return to his roots and reconnecting to an enthusiastic fanbase. Well not exactly. Cowan returns to a club where morale is on the floor after three years of serial defeat. It is fair to say his appointment has been received with a level of scepticism that no amount of Blue and Amber heritage could mitigate. The recruitment of a manager whose experience is wholly of part-time non-league football to rescue Salop’s EFL status has in many quarters been dismissed as sheer madness of the craziest variety.

Such a reaction is not unexpected or lacking in reason. It is the product of a crisis of confidence in the club’s leadership and direction. Cowan’s appointment is being interpreted as the latest symptom of a club structure that is decaying and no longer fit for purpose.

To adapt the quote from the legendary Australian cricket captain and commentator Richie Benaud, appointing a successful football manager is 90 percent luck and 10 percent skill. There is a tendency to view recruiting a manager as a technocratic process of identifying the right candidate with the skills and knowledge to win football matched by analysing dossiers of statistics and testimonials. That is frankly a fantasy based on the assumption that once appointed a manager has complete agency over all the variables they might encounter: winning football matches is merely a process of pressing the right button or pulling the right lever at the appropriate time. Football is a sport where it is impossible to be master of your own destiny because so many of the variables which influence outcomes are under the control of opponents or are decided by chance.

Under these conditions appointing a good manager is more a matter of time and chance than technocratic judgment: a combination of Benaud’s luck and skill. Understanding this is to rationalise why the person that made the decision to recruit managers with respectable Salop records like Gary Peters, Graham Turner, Micky Mellon, Paul Hurst and Steve Cotterill is the same person that appointed Paul Simpson, John Askey, Sam Ricketts and, ahem, Steve Cotterill and Paul Hurst for a second time.

On the surface the appointment of Gavin Cowan is a massive gamble for the Chairman to take. The new head coach arrives at the club with no experience of league management to call on, with a brief to take over Appleton’s unfinished January revolution but without having the time and resources to put his own stamp on things. The outgoing manager was reshaping the squad to accommodate 4-4-2, yet his replacement has apparently always favoured formations with three central defenders. With EFL survival at stake, is another sudden change of direction what the club really needs.

Yet is it really that big a gamble? While being at the foot of the league is not – to put it mildly – a desirable position to be in, Salop is not currently a hopeless cause. Town are not six points adrift at the bottom of the table but sitting narrowly above the relegation places. Cowan’s task is to keep out of the bottom two. I did not share the fatalism of some Salop fans and thought Appleton would just about do enough to stay in the league – although largely on the basis that, unbelievably, there were two worse teams in the division. The risk is that Cowan will be so out of his managerial depth that Salop get sucked through the trap door. An assessment of just how big a risk that is will determine the degree of comfort a fan has with the appointment.

The case for making Cowan head coach is largely based on ‘affiliation’. While it is arguable whether Appleton would have taken Salop down, it was clear that fans were losing patience with his imperturbable technocratic style and matter of fact post-match interviews. Cowan is going to offer us something completely different, a blast of passionate energy that will hopefully lift the team and lighten the funerial atmosphere around the Meadow. This managerial change may be based on a hunch, but it is not a hunch lacking in logic.

The last time I bumped into the Chairman (yes it was in Sainsburys, actually), he expressed to me his frustrations that so many fans thought that under his leadership Salop was ‘sleepwalking’ towards disaster. Whatever supporters might feel about the chairman’s recruitment of Gavin Cowan as head coach I feel we would all agree on one thing: this was not the decision of a sleepwalker.