Keith Curle on important meetings to be had
Manager Keith Curle will begin the process of restructuring his squad with the 2017/18 season in mind this week and he spoke this weekend about the need to show a ruthless streak as he finalises his decisions on the out-of-contract players under his charge.“I’ve got a meeting with the stakeholders on Monday morning prior to me addressing the players,” he said. “That is my opportunity to outline my decisions to the stakeholders of the football club and give them a detailed plan of the foundation and structure I want and need in place to make sure we maintain the future of the football club and make sure it’s going in an upward spiral.
“Part of my job now is to make sure I’m ruthless and single minded. Every decision I make is for the betterment of this football club. I need to maintain that level of improvement which means next season we need to finish above sixth in the division.
“I won’t change my philosophy on what I need to take this club forward and I know that means we’ll be starting next season with a slightly reduced squad. With that I’m hoping to bring in quality players who will bolster the performance levels.
“Ideally I’ll have a bit of money in reserve in January to make sure we can go again. Hopefully, if we manage to unearth another gem, we won’t sell him, and I’ll be making sure every single contract which has a buy-out clause will have that clause removed – even if I’ve got to forge it myself!
“Seriously, though, these situations do happen and that’s why we want to be in a better position to react by doing the best business we can through May, June, July and August. We’re all aware that every extra supporter who comes to our games is extra revenue which comes to me to give the team a better chance to compete. Hopefully the fans have now bought into what we’re trying to do and they’ll be there in even better numbers next season.
“I’d have to say that we’ve over-achieved as a club this season and that’s been done with a lot of hard work by everyone involved. Everyone has got on board with what we’re trying to do and I really appreciate that.”
“We’re already looking to the players we need to help us to improve and we’ve missed out on a couple of targets – one due to location and the other because he wants to be able to maintain League One status,” he revealed. “We’re trying to attract players of the right calibre but that means that some of our targets were only going to be interested if we’d won the promotion.
“It’s an ongoing process now but we have a recruitment strategy in place and to do what we want to do we’re going to possibly have to move things round. That means if we have players who haven’t been featuring enough they might need to go out and gain first team football elsewhere.”
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