My first Coventry City post, one of many more to come!

So there is currently a clear divide between City fans as to whether Andy Thorn should be replaced as manager.  Without going into the gory back story of how the club arrived at this painful point, it’s fair to say that most clubs that are bottom of the league with such a poor record would have replaced the manager a long time ago with very limited disagreement from the fans.  We are of course a club in crisis and the sheer volume of extenuating factors make this a far from clear-cut subject and represents the key dilemma, why blame a man who has to work in such an awful situation?

Up until Saturday I was broadly in the Thorn should stay category.  He is someone who has had to deal with what can only realistically be described as a ‘shit-storm’ of circumstances which would have tested the patience of any football manager and seen many men walk out in disgust.  Thorn has kept his dignity and also attempted to maintain a relatively (although not as  ‘Brazil-like’ as many would have you believe) entertaining style of football, considering he has had extremely limited funds to work with and seen the infrastructure of the club and it’s hierarchy lurch from crisis he has shown admirable restraint.

But the facts do not lie; our record is atrocious, we have failed to score enough goals and have consistently conceded goals and points in the final third of games.  The defeat against Ipswich in the final minute was the final-straw for me, not because I was particularly angry with Thorn or the players, but because in my view it confirmed us as ‘down’.  The test of a truly effective manager is to be able to push players that little bit further and compensate for a lack of quality with honesty, work-rate and fitness – the last few games have shown that Thorn is incapable of deilvering that.  I do not advocate that for one minute with ANY other manager we would have been able to survive in this division, from day one it was clear that our lack of depth and the impending departure of any effective players would stimie any possible momentum.  However, I do maintain that another manager would have seen us compete more effectively, concede less silly goals and ultimately grind out points where Thorn has failed – we would have still gone down but at least have been within touching distance.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, we cannot change the past, we are where we are.  Therefore by accepting relegation and given the wider situation the club is in I would advocate what some have been calling for in that we replace Thorn with Lee Carsley.  The laughable suggestions by some deluded fans that we should ‘get Warnock’ or ‘Steve Bruce would do a job’ are comical and still surprise me – the concept of us being bankrupt in all but name seems to be too hard to fathom for some!  Carsley seems to have an appetite for the job, an affinity with the club and the area and also a crucial relationship with the youth players which we will need next season.  Needsless to say he would also be a low-cost option with only a modest increase from his current package (I imagine).  If we do follow this course and replace Thorn with Carsley I would still not expect us to do anything other than be relegated, but this is one of my primary points – building for next season to allow us to have a solid League One campaign is vital.  Given how battle-scarred and weary Thorn already appears with the job I don’t think there are many fans who would have the confidence in him being able to deliver a succesful season next year – and I even think Thorn would agree with us.

Make the change now, give Carsley the time and experience ahead of what should be the club’s true focus – aside from the ownership of the club which I have deliberately not brought into this – next season and League One.  I will always be grateful to Thorn for the way he grasped the nettle last season and would like to think he could be offered his previous scouting role in a new management structure, where in the main he seemed to be pretty effective, whether he would accept would be another matter.

Thanks Andy, I’ve never booed you or your players, but circumstances have conspired against us all and the time for us to change is now.

So we all saw the facebook IPO document which outlined the 800+million users now signed up.  I was pulling together my standard stats today and noticed an unbelievable and pretty impressive figure, the potential reach of the 1.2million Aston Martin facebook fans – to the extended network now numbers over 200million!  So that’s a 1/4 of the total facebook population potentially being reached by a shared piece of content or interaction.

That means within one degree of separation we have the potential to reach a quarter of the total userbase of facebook.  I’d love to see the number for brands with much larger fan bases and also more ‘sharable’ and repeatedly consumed content.

Ultimately, as we’re frequently reminded, the numbers don’t really mean much, but with us seemingly having reached a tipping point in terms of the amount of fans we are gaining and also the engagement levels (January was a new record) the question is how via shared content we can reach a higher proportion of that 200million people.

Aston Martin on facebook: www.facebook.com/astonmartin

This week saw us hit a new milestone on the Aston Martin Facebook page, our first single post to reach over 10k likes.  A very simple post which shows it’s not about the structure or the ‘professionalism’ in this case, the subject was the key here – a front three quarter shot of the ultimate Aston Martin, One-77.  View the post.