The inevitable denouement

Kevin Dillon still has time to reflect on his approach to the first few months at the Recreation Ground…..and the ’restoration of factory settings’ could be a good first move.

A Shot from Wales – Friday 12th February 2010

I guess the inevitable is never a surprise…..so when news of Dean Holdsworth’s appointment to the position of Aldershot Town manager was announced shortly after the pathetically shambolic defeat by Oxford United, my face was no more than a picture of epiphany.

Saturday 8th January 2011

The final whistle…..a 2v1 defeat by the resurgent U’s and I said my goodbyes to friends and family, quickly making my way out of the North Stand to join a despondent crowd of Shots fans trudging helplessly out of the Recreation Ground.

An embarrassed row of policemen and stewards stood silently, offering protection to the changing rooms and Directors Lounge….. a sad and somewhat apologetic response to the growing calls for change……

I stopped briefly underneath the Directors Lounge and was quickly engulfed by perhaps a hundred ‘protestors’. The resigned and timid mutterings increasingly drew on an inner corporate strength and then with an explosion of Recreation Ground emotion…..

’Dillon Out’….’we want our football back’….the call from the fans desperate but somehow assertive. The police linked arms and gently reprised their Millbank student riot manoeuvres, moving the crowd down towards the High Street and out of our Directors’ sight.





I made my way back up Redan Road, threading a way through the joyous hordes of Oxford supporters and strutting policemen. I sat motionless in my car for perhaps a few seconds, just a moment of depressed contemplation……’I can’t keep doing this……our Club is being dismantled in front of my eyes’.

I fired up the engine and hit the CD button….I couldn’t risk hearing manager Kevin Dillon on BBC Radio Surrey and Robbie Savage on ‘606’ would inevitably add 3 points to my driving licence.

Just sometimes my wife can be predictable with her sagacity.

“You would be so useless as a castaway on Desert Island Discs’, she exclaimed as Gyles Brandreth exposed his favourite tunes to the Radio 4 listening audience.

Yes, you would be the first guest to choose all eight tracks from the same album.”

Ok, so I’m not big on music. And my record collection is just that. A few records……

When I hit the ‘Dillon and Savage avoidance button’ I probably knew that ‘Elephants Memory’ was not going to be lurking in the CD changer.


Completed in 1919, the Cello Concerto was Edward Elgar's last major work for orchestra, and his most confessional.

In spite of fleeting moments of idyllic release, it's dominated by disillusionment and a sense of suffering that at times cries out against life, yet more often speaks in quiet anguish. Elgar had been ill, and he was deeply depressed by the Great War's destruction of the world he had known.

All of this he poured into a concerto for the cello — apparently this is not such an unlikely instrument, considering its rich-toned yet brooding personality and its searing, dark timbre.

Four movements unfold from one to another as if forming a single, rhapsodic thought. The almost funereal beginning of the first movement a portent for the events unfolding at the Recreation Ground……..

And as I joined the M4 at Reading, the concerto's rondo finale delivered just a bit of the pre-Great War Elgarian swagger, if only fleetingly.

Fragments of melody from the concerto's earlier movements touchingly hinted at, before the climax of anguish and resignation.

Dillon was gone…….and ‘factory settings’ were about to be restored.

Dean Holdsworth, manager and Matthew ‘Bish’ Bishop, assistant manager were introduced to the Aldershot supporters for the first time on Wednesday January 12th…..