League 2 General Chat Thread

[Si Robin]

I think the most important thing was that we were a team from the ground up and not a collection of individuals only interested in self gain.

The fans bought into Gary Johnson and the board trusted that he knew what it took to get up. His man-management that season was phenomenal. He brought in experienced National League players who deserved a chance in the Football League and promised them at least a season if we did go up - the likes of Kyle Storer and Danny Wright - good players who'd played in decent teams but hadn't quite made that step up. He then supplemented it with some of the best loans I've ever seen at Cheltenham - Dillon Phillips, Rob Dickie and Cameron Burgess who have all played Championship football at least since then - and young players who were hungry like Jack Barthram, Billy Waters and Jack Munns.

Finally, when we needed that extra bit of fire-power up front, he brought in Dan Holman in January who was the best forward in the league that year. His signing basically confirmed promotion for us and it's criminal that he was unable to make the step up to League Two having broken his foot in pre-season and never really recovering.

The problem was, we were too loyal to those players and Gary Johnson started thinking he was bigger than the club. This meant a couple of years of struggle on promotion rather than pushing on and it all had to be completely refreshed again with Michael Duff coming in.

 

[Luke Imp]

Dan Holman, there's a blast from the past!

 

[Si Robin]

He picked up an injury in the last pre-season game but was allowed to play the first few games of the season anyway. He looked really lethargic in those games and it turned out he'd fractured a bone in his foot.

He simply never recovered from that - scored a couple of goals over the next 18 months then was loaned out to Boreham Wood. He struggled there and was let go and ended up retiring at something like 28, before playing for Gary again at Torquay a couple of seasons back, but as a shadow of the player he was.