Well it wasn’t good, but it was light years better than now! He did have weird ideas onformationsthough,he’d do thing like play defenders at the back, midfielder in midfield and unbelievably strikers in the middle upfront ,we even had multiple forwards!
The 1974/75 & 1975/76 seasons in particular were extremely poor. However, we had the enjoyment of watching players like Doyle, Butler, Pickering, Millar, Otulakowski develop. The other aspect was that although we were poor, we weren't as far behind the rest of the teams in our division as we are this season.
The Iley out thing was about us not quite achieving promotion on two occasions. Chance would be a fine thing now.
I was very young, so can't remember a lot and therefore not the best person to answer, but we weren't forever being beaten, we were failing to make that step up to being a promotion side. It was the 4th division so quality wasn't great at times, but it was a lack of success that was the problem not abject failure.
Correct, we were all thinking we should be doing better than we were under Jim Iley even though we were almost pushing for promotion
Iley gets a bit of bad press. He took over a side in real danger of going out of the league and turned us into a side that was at least top 10 in the 4th division. It wasn’t brilliant but we did score some goals and win some games. McSeveney and Bodges were worse
We were definitely pushing for promotion in the 1976/77 & 1977/78 seasons, but not in any of the others.
No it wasn’t . The Illey out days were more frustration with keep falling at the last hurdles for promotion .
The 76/77 season if we hadn't thrown away that 3-0 half time lead at home to Exeter to lose we'd almost certainly have gone up.
Joicey never seems to get a mention these days when anyone mentions best strikers we have had. Yet at the time and in Division 4 he turned out to be brilliant signing and we got him from the Owls who we never really played against back in them days.....30 goals one season I seem to remember....good going that!
I don’t think we would have ever got Allan Clarke to be player/manager tbh if it wasn’t for Ileys previous spadework
Yup. The season I enjoyed most was the 1973/74 season. We had an extremely young, skilful team playing all out attack home and away. Sadly, in those days, Fourth Division defenders used to kick our players from pillar to post and face no retribution from the referees whatsoever.
Anyone showing any talent was sold straight away as the club were really in the doo dar. Gorry, Otulokowski, Butler etc . I can remember an interview with Rimmo which he reminisced about the local shop refusing soap for the baths because the tab was too big .