Little respite for Wingate as club moves onto fourth manager this season
Wingate & Finchley manager Glen Little (pic: Martin Addison). - Credit: Archant
The Blues are still pointless this year after a run of defeats since December
Wingate & Finchley will hope to win their first point of 2019 when Brightlingsea Regent pay them a visit this weekend in the Bostik Premier.
The Blues have had a torrid term to date and remain in the bottom three, and now they are onto their fourth manager of the season.
Long-serving Keith Rowland left at the start of October and his successor Nicky Shorey failed to stay longer than a month, so his assistant Glen Little stepped in.
However, Little’s tenure ended last Friday and Dave Norman, Wingate’s ex-director of football, has taken over for now.
Chairman Aron Sharpe told the official club website: “Glen helped us hugely in our hour of need and I cannot talk highly enough about him, so I can only thank him.
“However a different approach was now needed to try and maintain our place in the division and so a difficult decision had to be made.”
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Sharpe added: “We are thankful to Dave’s current club Rhyl in the Welsh Premier for allowing us to work with Dave.”
Norman remains as director of football at Rhyl, but is helping out at Wingate on a short-term basis and will oversee all of the football operations at the Blues.
He took charge of his first game on Saturday and immediately had an impact, although it still wasn’t enough to inspire a victory.
Blues made the trip to Sussex to take on high-flying Lewes and the visitors found themselves two goals up within an hour.
Ahmet Rifat opened the scoring in the 11th minute and Frankie Chappell’s own-goal made it 2-0 with 58 minutes on the clock.
Unfortunately this only seemed to wake Lewes up and they scored four times in the final half an hour to claim a 4-2 win.
Wingate would have hoped to bounce back on Tuesday with Tonbridge Angels set to visit, but the weather intervened.
Snow started to fall in N12 two hours before kick-off and shortly after the Maurice Rebak Stadium surface was completely white.
The referee had little choice but to call the fixture off at 6.30pm even though Angels had already arrived at the ground.
It frustrated all parties involved and extended Blues’ wait for a first point of 2019 with their last positive result on December 22.
Since then, Wingate have lost six games in a row in all competitions, but they will look to halt the side on Saturday.
Regent are 11th in the table, but lost 1-0 to the Blues on home turf on November 13 after a Charlie Cole goal and the Summers Lane club will aim to complete a double over the Essex outfit this weekend.
