Official Statement

Quoted from cjbill

Thank you Paul for bringing stability to our club and bringing us promotion.

Now let's get someone in who can continue to "keep us shape" . UTM!

Edited 😉

I guess in my heart I'm glad - I feel like there's always been some underlying problem that has meant the team has never quite gelled 100%, what with some mysterious departures last season and the sheer number of players dumped after we won promotion, not to mention the horrendous inconsistency.

But that's not to say we don't owe a debt of thanks to PH for getting us back into the league, and for making some excellent signings.

Good look at Shrewsbury, Paul. Thanks for making fans proud of the club again.

At least we're getting some money back. RH didn't cost anything to dismiss either. The days of spending thousands paying people off are behind us.

I feel that we've always been one or two players away from being a really good team under Hurst. I think, perhaps, a lot of this was that we didn't have the budget to compete with the biggest spenders and so tended to have too many players signed as permanent stop-gaps, so to speak!

On the other hand, you rarely felt that the team was ever greater than the sum of its parts. We've never been particularly fluent going forward except in fits and starts, we've tended to lack pace in midfield and (until this season) in attack. The lack of real quality or variety in our set piece delivery continues to absolutely do my head in.

Hurst is a decent, if conservative, manager and will probably have a solid career in the lower divisions, but he's certainly lacking that something extra that the best managers are able to bring to a team.

Only problem is that it seems to be difficult to find these very good managers these days. I think most of the names mentioned already (Madkins et al) wouldn't contemplate dropping down to a League Two club. So, where do we go from here? Haven't the faintest clue.

Good luck to him, he definitely steadied the ship and has a great eye for a player but I think he owes a lot of last seasons success to operation promotion and us finally getting a rub of the green at the right time. We stumbled over the line into the playoffs, a Braintree player handed us one hell of a lifeline and then the player whose purchase was enabled by OP then pops up with 3 very important goals to secure promotion.

He has been a steady manager and I have supported him fully for the last 5+ years but I can't really say I am too disappointed by this as his clear lack of a tactical brain has been the reason I have seen so many poor performances over that time.

I just hope we get an attack minded manager who can bring some exciting times back to BP. Over to you now Mr Fenty & co, you have a big task on your hands......don't f**k this opportunity up!!

Quoted from chicaneuk

I guess in my heart I'm glad - I feel like there's always been some underlying problem that has meant the team has never quite gelled 100%, what with some mysterious departures last season and the sheer number of players dumped after we won promotion, not to mention the horrendous inconsistency.

But that's not to say we don't owe a debt of thanks to PH for getting us back into the league, and for making some excellent signings.

Good look at Shrewsbury, Paul. Thanks for making fans proud of the club again.

Exactly my thoughts too.

All the best to him. We were a mid-table Conference team when we came in and we're not a competitive League Two side again so he's done the job and managed to bounce back from several agonising defeats to do.

Didn't expect him to leave quite so soon and expected him to go to a club in a better position than Shrewsbury but at the end of the day, it is a step up (for the time being at least) and maybe he just wanted a fresh challenge after six years.

I'm quite excited now actually. Love a good managerial merry-go-round. Just hope we can get the right man in.

In his time at town he brought a culture of professionalism on the playing side that we hadn't really seen in the recent years before. His teams could never be accused of lacking in effort and he never blamed his players when things went wrong. He's a bit tactically naive on occasion but is a real winner and Shrewsbury is likely to be a stepping stone.

Now though questions need to be asked of the club as to why we lost our manager to flipping Shrewsbury?

Sometimes a change is good for all concerned. People get stale and PH hinted at that at the end of the season. He freshened up the playing squad and now we have the opportunity to freshen up the management. The football had become rather stale over the last few weeks, after a promising start. I see it as an opportunity rather than a set back but then i've never been the biggest PH fan. He deserved this season to settle into league management but has decided he wants to do that somewhere else. He is clearly ambitious and sees this as an opportunity to better himself, even if we don't. He clearly wants to work his way to a top job and sometimes that can be achieved by what others see as a sideways move. If nothing else, he was always honest and hard working and so were his teams, which is what we needed at the time and what the Shrews need now.

The next step is to get in the right fit for this club; something which is easier said than done but we recruit from a good position and that will be attractive to management candidates. Not many managers come into a club that isn't in a relegation battle at this level of football.

Agree with Ginny above,

Hurst did not like high scoring games,

Always happy with a 1-0 win,

At the start of this season we scored goals for fun but let a few in at the other end too,

So he stopped the other side scoring so many but in doing so he stopped us scoring as well,

I think most fans do not mind seeing the other side score,

As long as we win the game,

So I hope we get the right man in who will bring a bit of excitement back into our game.