The buck stops here

10:29am Thursday 16th October 2008

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STEVE Holland insists he is the man to turn around Crewe’s fortunes.

With little sign of the Alex decline halting, some serious questions are be asked of the current regime.

“I’m determined to make a success of it."

Steve Holland

While Dario Gradi’s legacy quelled much of the discontent over their Championship fall out, Holland may have to brace himself for tougher times unless results change quickly.

Ten games in and Crewe have lost seven of them.

The most in League One that leaves them second-bottom to Hereford - 2-0 victors back in August.

Having had near 18 months now in the hot seat, Holland is heading for crunch time with the silent majority.

Facing a key three games in six days, the first-team coach was pretty bullish about the situation.

“It’s my responsibility,” explained Holland.

“I don’t want my team at the bottom of the league.

“We’re ten games in and the fact that results are not good enough lies with me.

“I’m determined to make a success of it.

“What we had last year wasn’t good enough to keep us in the league.

“We couldn’t do any business in January so we did all our transfer activity during the summer.

“Five or six games in and I thought there were signs of everything starting to fall into place but we haven’t gone on from there.

“I do think we should have more points than we have, Southend was a prime example of throwing points away and we’ve done that a few times.”

While their defensive troubles are well documented, Holland feels it’s a lack of goals at the root of the problem.

So he could turn to Clayton Donaldson to fire them out of trouble.

Although a regular off the bench, the 24-year-old is yet to start since his summer move from Hibernian.

“It’s taken him a bit of time to get going with his injury set-back,” said Holland.

“But I think we’ve got a problem scoring goals, the facts state that.

“That’s why we brought him in, to run in behind and score some goals.

“That matchwinner can make a big difference.

“We’ve always had that threat and we could do with someone emerging.

“In Dario’s last season we were bottom of the league with Higdon and Rodgers playing.

“He threw in Varney and Maynard and we finished higher up the league while last season it was Maynard who rescued us.

“We’ve got £5m for those two and spent a fraction of that, you don’t get like for like straight away.”

Holland admits it’s an important few days as they entertain high-flying MK Dons this Saturday before trips to struggling Yeovil (Tues) and Tranmere (Fri).

“We’ve got a big week coming up,” he added.

“MK Dons won 3-1 against Carlisle but there wasn’t much in that game for an hour.

“Yeovil haven’t been doing so well either and then we’ve got Tranmere where we played well last week.

“We’ve got to focus on the immediate future and the opportunity of picking up nine points.

“It could quickly look a lot better than it does at the moment.”

Julien Baudet should come back into the side while Holland will hope both Dennis Lawrence and Michael O’Connor return from international duty unscathed.