Here’s my column from yesterday’s Leader. It formed part of the paper’s comprehensive coverage of Andy Morrell’s departure. All content in the column (c) www.leaderlive.co.uk.

As a confirmed Andy Morrell loyalist, my first reaction to the news he has gone is massive disappointment. My second is curiosity as to what actually happened this morning.

If this really was a mutual decision then there can be no complaint. I’ve never seen Morrell cut as morose a figure as he did after the Barnet match, and with hindsight perhaps he’d decided he could see the end of the road.

I must admit that at the time I wondered if his negative tone and talk of ripping up the squad and starting again was a tactic to motivate the players, putting pressure on them to play for their contracts, as Morrell’s public pronouncements tend to be measured and it was extremely out of character to see him as low as that. With hindsight perhaps it really was a man at the end of his tether.

This might sound odd, but I genuinely hope that was the case. I’d hate to think that the board had caved in to the pressure applied by loud voices amongst the crowd. Morrell is a genuinely decent bloke who would put the club’s future first and not kick up a fuss if he was told to go. I hope that hasn’t happened here, as his success over the last two years meant he’d earned the chance to turn things round.

So why has there been a downturn this season? The question of exactly how competitive our budget has been this season is a contentious one, and I accept that we might have had more success with a different transfer strategy last Summer. Yet there is no doubt that year on year, Morrell’s capacity to spend has been dramatically reduced.

That’s no criticism of the running of the club, in fact quite the opposite: Brian Little and Dean Saunders were bankrolled to a ludicrous degree and reality simply had to kick in to safeguard the club’s future. Morrell has handled the diminution of his room for manoeuvre in the transfer market with dignity when others would have kicked off, demanded more and used it as an excuse for failure.

Irrespective of the reasons for his departure, he leaves the club as a legend, and not only for what he did on the pitch. He is the only Wrexham manager with a win percentage over fifty per cent in our history, and the only one to have lost less than a quarter of his matches. I hope respect for such success was borne in mind when his future was discussed this morning.