A radical overhaul and turnover of players during the summer by Graham Westley failed to produce the desired results. Soon after he was appointed in the second half of the 2011/12 season he slammed his squad for a lack of commitment and mental strength. The amount of players who remained could be counted on one hand. Goalkeeper Thorsten Stuckmann was one of them, and Blackburn's Andreas Arestidou was brought in to provide competition. Most of the players Westley brought to Deepdale were lacking in experience at League One level, and from the outside looking in seemed not good enough to challenge at the higher end of the division. Some of the summer additions were familiar to Westley from his time at Stevenage, Chris Beardsley, Joel Byrom, Scott Laird and John Mousinho making the move. Two players arrived from Shrewsbury, Shane Cansdell-Sherriff and Nicky Wroe. Chris Robertson made the step up from Torquay and prolific scorer Stuart Beavon arrived from recently relegated Wycombe Wanderers. Exciting but raw winger Jeffrey Monakana was also signed. It obviously took a while for the team to gel, but it really was apparent that this team was not very competitive, spending most of the season in the bottom half and finding goals hard to come by with several home blanks and some disappointing defeats, being comprehensively outplayed by the likes of Crewe and Walsall and not being that hard to play against. There was no time throughout the campaign where Preston hit a run of form; it was consistently inconsistent. They even managed to throw away the chance of lifting the JPT, with two goals conceded to Coventry in stoppage time to blow a 2-1 lead at the Ricoh Arena. It seemed as if Graham Westley was working on borrowed time and I for one was wondering how long the club would persevere with him, especially in today's managerial environment, as things showed no signs of improving. Westley came across as slightly arrogant and while he did superbly with Stevenage, Preston are a much bigger club with higher expectations and some may say that the pressure got to him and the players. Simon Grayson was appointed not long after his somewhat harsh sacking by Huddersfield and also struggled to win on a consistent basis, although matches mainly ended in draws. Expect changes over the summer as the players brought in by Westley in the summer of 2012 were just nowhere near good enough to mount a sustained promotion challenge. The former Blackpool and Leeds manager's task is to halt Preston's downward slide.
Downward slide my a**e, Westley was arrogant and also out of his depth, apparently he had them role playing, his reign is summed up by a tweet from one of the players, it goes as follows "We used something today in training that we never used under Westley" "What was it?" "The ball" Disagree slight with the consistency aspect, the last 7 homes games only conceeded once, a solid base for next season. Arestidou was not there last season, he was at Morecambe
While admitting that GW eventually lost the team, the team did play well early in the season: Swindon, Donny, Stevenage are games I can recall when they outplayed the opposition. Aso SG has bloodied some useful young players like Hyahurst with regular games.
