'The guy needs to go!' But Argyle give their full backing to under-fire Cleverley

CHAIRMAN Simon Hallett and director of football Derek Adams came out in firm support of under-pressure Plymouth Argyle head coach Tom Cleverley during a fans' forum at Home Park last night.

- By CHRIS ERRINGTON

There was fierce criticism of Cleverley from some of the supporters who attended the event in Club Argyle at Home Park and one of them said bluntly: "The guy needs to go."

However, while acknowledging Argyle's current very concerning 23rd place in League One, Hallett made it clear that Cleverley, who was appointed in June, still had the board of directors' backing.

Hallett admitted that Argyle had got themselves into difficulties as 'a result of some bad decisions we have made, some processes that I think eroded.'

"Much more important though I think is rather than allocating individual blame that we take collective responsibility here. We were successful for several years as a club and we have been unsuccessful as a club.

"So I don't want to spend this evening pointing fingers, allocating blame. We have all made these mistakes, whether it be the board, whether it be executives, whatever

"We are much more focused on what we are going to do to fix it. We have made some changes. We have got Paul (Berne) come in as chief executive, we have got Derek come in recently as director of football.

"We will be reexamining our processes overall. We are obviously very focused at the moment on recruitment processes and we will be looking to strengthen all of those in the coming weeks."

Specifically about Cleverley, Hallett said: "People will disagree but clearly we think he's still the right choice, he's still here. When we hired him we hired a young, ambitious, highly-qualified manager who was prepared to make a commitment in the long-term to Plymouth Argyle.

"The results have been poor, we recognise that he's young, he's inexperienced and he's surrounded by relatively young and inexperienced coaches so we have decided to support him through building up a more experienced infrastructure around him.