THE white smoke has risen in to the cool Autumnal Darlington air and a new manager has been coronated. I actually can’t remember a managerial appointment at our club that has been so highly speculated upon or where such appointment has been so crucial to get right. So, with some convenience, it probably helps that the directors have appointed none other than Mr Wright. Surely it’s a sign.

With more plot twists and red herrings than your average Agatha Christie thriller, it seemed that we swung from one candidate to another and then back again. That has led to several chairmen of clubs feeling the need to inflate their hubris by suggesting that their man had turned down the once mighty but now fallen Darlo. I’m sure those words will have played out well among their constituents, but beyond their little worlds it just made them look a bit daft. When you have clubs like Blyth, Nuneaton and Hyde trying to score points at our expense, it ultimately only makes them look like clubs that are exactly where they are in the footballing food chain.

It’s been a fascinating few weeks reading the thoughts of fans on various social media. Suggestions for candidates swung from the wildly nostalgic to the very optimistic. At the end of the day, the board had a difficult choice to make and had to apply a good dose of pragmatism in their process. Could they have done better throughout the process? Possibly yes, although we have to remember this is the first time the directors have appointed a manager. I can imagine it will have been a stressful time for all involved. Any appointment would be a gamble and the financial risk of the new manager failing considering our financial state would be unthinkable. It wouldn’t surprise me if there had been a sleepless night or two over the last week or so.

In Tommy Wright, we have appointed a manager who has had faith and patience with young players turned away from professional academies, something that our previous manager didn’t. Given our need to start consolidating as a football club, this is the sort of approach that we would do well to encourage. While Martin Gray started looking further afield for players having decided that the local talent simply wasn’t there, I suspect Tommy Wright may be more accommodating to players closer to home. You only had to look at the group of players put together by South Shields to see there is still plenty of talent in the North-East that could come in to improve our team. While most of the players fielded by the Mariners were brought in from Northern League clubs, a number of them had spent time in one of the big three clubs' academies. These are the type of players that we need to refocus our attention on and I suspect Wright will do just that.

Alongside Wright, the perfect option as far as the fans are concerned is the appointment of Alan White as his assistant manager. I love Alan White. Yeah, he goes over the top occasionally and may have minor disagreements with officials but his never say die attitude, like that of Wright, appeals to the fans. It’s the sort of attitude that has maybe been lacking in our squad for the most of this season. For as much as Phil Turnbull and Gary Brown have talked up their team-mates during their caretaker reign, something hasn’t been right among a group of players who were good enough to make the play-off places last season but which has struggled against poor opposition this season. Hopefully, the new management team will get the players pumped up and motivated in a way that they themselves displayed when pulling on our black and white shirts.