By Clarence Rode
May 15 2009

If Chris Turner has his way, 2009-10 won’t be so much a season for Hartlepool United, more a reunion of former favourites. He’s already signed Adam Boyd to return to his home-town club, he looks almost certain to be named manager of the club for a second time himself, and he now wants to sign TWO more ex-Victoria Park players.

He has already admitted that he wants goalkeeper Dimi Konstantopoulos (right) to return from Coventry, preferably on a season-long loan, and now he’s made an approach to promoted Peterborough for defender Chris Westwood.
In signing a goalscorer and going for a central defender and a keeper, he’s clearly decided to follow football’s golden rule that if you get the spine of your team right, you’re off to a good start.
But we aren’t so sure about this going back to your old club idea.
Messages have been posted on this and other sites expressing concern about players returning to their old club, and there are literally hundreds of examples in football and many other sports of players leaving a club hoping to do well, failing to live up to their expectations, and going back to square one only to find that you just can’t bring the good old days back.
Hopefully that won’t apply to Adam Boyd – he is a class act, of that there is no doubt, and he is coming back to his home town for family as well as professional reasons.
But while both DK and CW did well in their previous spells at the Vic, they are not locals and would be coming to Pools in the hope that they can resurrect their former form.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way.
And that rule applies just as much to managers as it does to players.
Turner began his managerial career at Pools before moving on to Sheffield Wednesday and Stockport, flopping at both clubs.

He had done a good job at Pools, helping new owners IOR to turn the club from a laughing stock into a professional set-up, saving them from relegation to the Conference in his first season and taking them on to the play-offs later.
But it wasn’t all plain sailing and while Turner deserves praise for what he did first time round, he made a few cock-ups as well, and not all his signings were good ones.

If IOR really are thinking of giving him the job on a permanent basis – not that there is anything in football which is permanent, apart from Alex Ferguson – they will hopefully give it some deep thought first.