Kernow Yellow wrote: ↑Wed Aug 23, 2017 2:52 pm
I'd forgotten that Denis Smith was still in charge at the start of that hideous season. In my mind Kemp was entirely to blame for the era of Jarman, McGuckin, Robertson et al, but Smith must have signed them all! This got me wondering where we were in the table when Kemp took over, and whether it was all his fault after all. But the site I usually use to see historic tables on a given date (statto.com) doesn't seem to be working these days. Anyone know another site which does that job?
According to
this site, you can search and see that on 1st November 2000
when Kemp took over we were bottom of the table with just five points from 16 games (0.31 points per game). You won't need me to tell you that under Kemp's stewardship we finished rock-bottom with just 27pts from 46 games (0.59ppg). As a certain M. Brodetsky
pointed out, Kemp managed us for 31 games and lost 21 of them. If that data is correct - or, just as importantly, if I've generated the right information from the website - there is a case to be made that we improved under Kemp.
But personally, I'm not having it. We started dreadfully under Smith, and IIRC he went to the London Road End after the
home defeat to Brentford to try and explain the restrictions under which he was operating (which, in retrospect, were probably the result of penny-pinching from Firoz Kassam). But I still think that if he'd been given time and the same resources that Kemp was given, he might've turned things around. We'd still have been relegated, but probably not in such embarrassing fashion.
Despite some of Smith's summer signings (McGuckin, Jarman etc) being poor, they were free transfers as there was no money to spend. Yet Kemp was then given £150,000 to buy Andy Scott (and I recall other cash signings too). I maintain that Smith would've spent that money better and wouldn't have been as tactically naive as Kemp.
Ultimately, it was the lack of investment by the chairman at the time that was so crippling. Remember, this was around the time when players were told they'd have to buy their own bottles of squash for the training ground, and when one player signing from a northern club was put up at Heythrop Park whilst he got himself settled in Oxford, only to then be presented with a bill for accommodation by our money-grabbing chairman.
