EDITOR’S VIEW

All Change!

It's October and we're publishing The Wider View again. This issue has been delayed due to the various changes at Railway.

Since our last monthly magazine, we've seen the departure of our manager, Lee Ashforth and Martin Powell, as well as a number of players from the team.

Simon Parkes, George Mason, Harry Brown, Alex Low and Danny Stimpson have all left, to name just a few.

Everyone can agree that the club was not getting the results that we need in the NCEL Premier League and we had found ourselves in the relegation zone.

Performances hadn't actually been that bad, but the team seemed to have forgotten how to win.

With Paul Beesley coming in as player/ manager and now Liam Ormsby joining as assistant manager, there is a new impetus at the club. Two wins and two draws have seen Railway climb the table a little and the manner that the results have been ground out shows that the team is learning how to earn points. It has to be realised that we haven't brought in a completely new team of highly paid players to turn things around. In fact, for certain games, Railway have struggled to put more than one player on the bench as a substitute.

It's this aspect of the game that surprises me.

I know that the financial rewards for playing for Harrogate Railway are not anything more than basic, certainly when compared to other teams in the league who seemingly pay relatively large amounts of money per week to their key players.

Then there is the issue of contracts. Some teams seemingly have the financial ability to contract players and provide a level of stability to their squad.

When you don't have players contracted, there is always the prospect of your in-form players being picked off throughout the season or at least the destabilising attention of seven days being put in to allow other teams to talk

to players. This constant movement between teams replicates the old league transfer system and something that I believe was a bad thing for clubs, supporters and most importantly players.

Maybe it is time to introduce transfer windows to non-league football.

With set windows of opportunity to get players, it would help settle teams down

and stop the bigger teams spotting a star player in one of the less financially capable teams and taking them.

The other option maybe to allow transfers to happen outside of set transfer windows, but then make a team taking a player pay a small fee to do so.

I believe that there is simply too much movement of players during the season from team to team and I do think that there needs to be some sort of control put in place to discourage this.

I believe many teams would welcome this. Let me know what you think, tweet us as @therailfc_media.

TheRailFC.com Sept/Oct 2016 GREG KIDD 7