I was gutted when Scott Smith’s departure was announced; early in the season, I admit that I thought he looked like a bit of weak link whenever he played, but something seemed to click mid-season, and I thought he improved massively. In his last few games, he was just starting to look like a real player.

 

It seems an odd decision to release Scott, so I was trying to wrap my head around the rationale for that decision.

 

Ryan Lowe, it would seem, didn’t see what I saw, and Ryan’s the manager… I’m just some nobody on a forum, so fair enough, but I’d have given Scott another season to see if he continued to improve. I doubt he was getting paid megabucks, since he came through our own academy, so seems like a bit of a rash move to allow a player who was starting to show some real promise walk out for nothing if the cost to keep him on wasn’t going to be excessive.

 

Another possible explanation is that Scott himself felt that at 24, he’s not a kid anymore and that he’s ready to be playing more regularly, and Lowe couldn’t promise him that so he already had an eye on the door when his contract expired. I’ve got no doubt at all that Scott will find another club, so time will tell how he gets on. Wherever he lands, I wish him all the best (unless he lands at Bolton or Barnsley…).

 

Last possibility in my head is that knowing that he has to be frugal with the pennies, Lowe looked at the players we have in centre midfield and decided that Scott was the least likely to make an impact (especially with Matt Smith hopefully back from injury next season), so letting Scott go frees up a little bit of wage budget to use on either one of the younger academy lads he wants to come into the first team or maybe a new signing to strengthen in a different position without adding to the wage budget; like any new manager, Lowe’s going to want to bring in ‘his’ players, so will have to make some choices when the reality of our limited wage budget is factored in.

 

Baba Adeeko has also grown up massively as a player, going from a bit of a liability early doors to looking like an absolute powerhouse in the middle of the pitch by the end of the season – Baba definitely gets my ‘most improved player’ nod this season. If it was a straight choice to keep one and let one go, then I’d have to agree that Adeeko was the right one to keep.

 

Lastly, style of play no doubt comes into it. I’d criticised Scott a few times for being too negative: he was always looking to pass backwards (in the Martinez / Maloney mould). Adeeko was also guilty of that, but seems to have adapted better and more quickly to Lowe’s more direct style than Scott has.

 

On a side note, about style of play, Lowe’s style is very different from what we’ve seen in recent years, which is no bad thing:  I hate possession based ‘fifty-passes-around-the-centre-circle-then-back-to-the-centre-half’ tactics we’ve seen for years and years and I much prefer Lowe’s more direct game as a spectacle. The games since Lowe arrived have been much more entertaining as a spectator imho. I appreciate that scoring goals is still a problem, but at least we were actually starting to get forward in bigger numbers and put balls into the box… the basic recipe for scoring goals… and with more coaching and a full pre-season in the ‘new’ style, combined with a couple of signings whose natural style of play is more suited to Lowe’s tactics, we will *hopefully* see a dramatic upturn in our ‘goals for’ column – defensively, we’ve pretty much got it nailed, so adding goals into our mix will make us a real threat to the playoff places next year if we can achieve it. With the slow paced tip-tap football we’ve been playing for years, we’d pretty much hit a plateau: playing that way successfully needs very good players (at the level): players that we realistically couldn’t afford.

 

For the first time in a good few years, I’m actually looking forward to next season with genuine hope that we may have something to celebrate at the end of the season; after two years of consolidation (no bad thing after the turmoil we’d been through before that), it’s time to kick on and be more ambitious, at least within the bounds of financial common sense. Appointing a manager who plays a different way was a huge step in doing that, and whilst  Maloney is a legend on the pitch, I think that as a manager, letting him go was the right decision: his style of play wasn’t ever going to make waves with the players Latics can afford, so we’d have just had another season of inconsistency and treading water in mid-table.

 

I’m a bit sad that Scott Smith won’t be a part of that, since he’s ‘one of our own’ and it’s always brilliant to see our academy lads come through and make an impact, but we have to put our trust in Ryan Lowe and his team that it’s the right decision for the club and for Scott himself. Eight games unbeaten to close out the season tells me that there’s good reason to be optimistic about what next season holds for Latics; I hope that wherever Scott lands, he enjoys some success too.