I was quite sad to hear than Ian ‘Charlie’ McParland, half of the ‘Charlie and Frank’ duo who have perhaps provided our most consistent spell of decent football in years, has departed the City Ground having shared the assistant manager role with David Kerslake this season. It’s unclear whether he’s been fired or whether he resigned and as yet Forest don’t seem to have offered any confirmation or explanation at all.
There are all manner of rumours doing the rounds, indeed, the news that Charlie (and also yet more unconfirmed news about Gary Fleming) had been sacked has been on the forums for a couple of days now, but the Nottingham Evening Post has now started to pick up on it too. Whether Charlie, who wanted to continue as a manager after the taste he had with Frank Barlow, has decided to seek his break elsewhere, or whether Smoulds has decided he no longer needs two assistants, who knows.
My favourite rumour is that in the immediate aftermath of the Yeovil home game he said to Smoulds that “you don’t know what you’re doing” - to be fair, I could have found several thousand people in the immediate vicinity who would have backed up that statement, and indeed, if you count the people watching the game on Sky then a murmer of similar words was probably passing the lips of upwards of a million people around about the same time. I must stress it’s a rumour, mind - if it’s true, then that seems a harsh reason to be sacked.
Good luck Charlie in whatever you do next.
