We’ve got ourselves into an extraordinary pickle, haven’t we? Again.

Just when Vale appear to have taken us to the very depths of despair, they reveal another level beneath it and invite us down.

Second from bottom of League Two. One win from seven games. Just one goal scored from open play. Whichever way you dress it up, whichever mitigating circumstances you reach for, those numbers are dreadful. Absolutely fucking dreadful. Numbers that, ordinarily, leave a club with little choice other than to relieve a Manager of their duties. And yet, here we are again.

Fiddling while Rome burns is the default position of the Shanahan’s and whoever else they have sitting on the Board. We saw it with Andy Crosby and we saw it again with Darren Moore. On both occasions, the inevitable was postponed until it could be postponed no longer. Surely we cannot allow the same paralysis to take hold with Jon Brady? Surely they have learnt something from those experiences? I cannot get my head around the fact that yesterday came and went without an announcement.

And that is what makes all of this so infuriating: I’ve always wanted them to succeed. I genuinely believe Carol is a force for good and there are plenty of things happening around Port Vale that we should be proud of. But the repeated failure to act decisively when it comes to the footballing side of the club is impossible to ignore. Maybe there is plenty happening behind the scenes. Maybe a Director of Football and a new manager are already being lined up. I sincerely hope so. But I can only judge what i can see, and right now all I can see is silence.

Brady got the summer recruitment desperately wrong, particularly when it came to the most important commodity in football: goals. The decision to push Jayden Stockley out of the door looks more bewildering with every passing week. If you are going to dispense with a proven focal point, you have to do so with a degree of certainly about what comes next. You either replace like-for-like what you have thrown away or, ideally, improve upon it. Brady has done neither.

Instead, Brady has pinned everything on Mo Faal (we already knew how this would end), Max Watters (barren since 2021), Tyreece Simpson (not in condition, and precious little to show for the past three seasons), Ben Waine (a player Brady knows to be next to useless), Oli Lynch (he was the one for me, but that’s all over now; I won’t get fooled again. Not until next July) and Keyrol Figueroa (nowhere near ready).

Individually, you could make an argument for some of them. I really don’t know whereabouts in the football pyramid Faal and Waine would be scoring consistently, but for the others you might be able to point to a project here, a gamble there, a player who might just rediscover himself, a youngster who might develop into something special. But collectively? That’s not a strike force. It’s a handful of lottery tickets, each one purchased in the hope that this might be the one that somehow comes good. That’s not squad building, that’s wishful thinking. You cannot build a promotion challenge, or even a functioning League Two attack for that matter, on wishful thinking. There has to be someone in the squad who you can pretty much guarantee is going to give you double figures over a season. There has to be a bare minimum.

That is the part I cannot forgive.

Brady had the summer. He had the opportunity to assess what was already here, decide what needed replacing and put together a squad capable of competing. The forward line we are watching now is not something that has happened to him. It is the consequence of decisions made by him and those around him.

And the evidence is there on the pitch: one goal from open play in seven league games. And what’s the crack with our second half performances? What the fuck are they doing? At some point, the conversation has to move beyond patience, beyond giving it another game, beyond waiting for something – anything – to click. There comes a point when patience stops being a virtue and becomes negligence. For me, we have reached it.

I don’t particularly enjoy saying that. There is something depressingly familiar about Vale arriving at this crossroads yet again, another manager failing, another season threatening to disappear before autumn has properly arrived. Nobody should take pleasure in calling for somebody to lose their job. I certainly don’t. But sentiment cannot obscure what is happening in front of us.

This summer’s recruitment, most glaringly the construction of that forward line, has left us hopelessly ill-equipped in the one area of the pitch where excuses eventually run out.

Goals aren’t some optional extra. They’re not a luxury. And they are certainly not a problem you knowingly carry into a season and then hope to patch up in January after four months of watching one gamble after another fail to pay off.

Worse still, what exactly are we expecting to find come the new year? The January transfer window is football’s equivalent of rifling through the bin bags left outside a charity shop overnight, convincing yourself there might be a Rolex underneath that broken toaster. This was not bad luck, it was not some unforeseeable misfortune that befell us once the season began. The weakness was obvious, and it was allowed to remain obvious.

To all intents and purposes, it was a dereliction of duty.

Brady has to go. But Carol and Matt and whoever have to understand something too: doing nothing is still a decision. We waited with Crosby and we waited with Moore. They cannot keep repeating the same mistake and expecting a different outcome. Football does not reward good intentions, and sometimes leadership requires ruthlessness. Right now, this club needs somebody at the top to recognise the danger and fucking act.