Ben Garner appointed manager

First, the waiting is over. Three weeks after Johnnie Jackson was told his contract wouldn't be extended, Thomas Sandgaard has appointed Ben Garner (from Swindon Town) in his place. My take is that this appointment wasn't designed to shift season tickets and perhaps we should be concerned if it had been. Whatever, I think this will pass as underwhelming and there will be a lot of added pressure on both Garner and Sandgaard when the season kicks off. Hard to argue, too, that he doesn't appear to be an obvious improvement on Johnnie Jackson.

I knew nothing of Ben Garner until he was mentioned as a possible candidate in the last week. He never played professional football and has limited managerial experience, although he has decent 'coaching' experience as part of Palace's successful set-up between 2005 and 2012, and served under Tony Pulis at West Brom for a couple of years.

His direct experience appears to be an unsuccessful year at Bristol Rovers 2019-20 and a much more successful last season as Swindon manager. Garner steered them to a late place but they lost out in the play-offs. Josh Davison will be pleased following his return from Swindon on loan but if that means we don't strengthen significantly up front, I will be picking and choosing my games once again.

I think you have to give any new manager a chance and I will do that. Perhaps more importantly now, will be the budget that Garner is given and to see what level of player he brings in. The immediate concern, of course, is that it's not got a League 2 focus or that Sandgaard is over-expecting him to get tunes out of too many Academy players. 

As I look for positives, at least it's not Hasselbaink. I also wonder what happened with Matt Taylor and Michael Beale?