Chairman Charles Grant on the difficult decision to change manager

Chairman Charles Grant says it was a difficult decision to relieve David Artell from his duties as manager, but admits that the tough call had to be made in the best interests of the Football Club.

Artell was dismissed on Monday after a culmination of things led to a run of 15 defeats out of the past 16 matches in League One. Crewe’s relegation to League Two was confirmed with four games to go following a disappointing 2-0 defeat at fellow strugglers Doncaster Rovers.

Grant explained that a decision had to be made to try and end the slide as quickly as possible and inject some positively back into a club that has suffered one of the worst campaigns of the modern era in terms of results.

The chairman told the club’s official website: “It has been a difficult week. We have experienced the disappointment and devastation of relegation and then we had to make the difficult decision with David (Artell).

“I’ve worked with him here for going on ten years and we had an excellent relationship, but as a collective board we had to do what we thought was right for the Football Club.

“David has been a great servant of Crewe Alexandra. He captained and managed us to promotion and not many have achieved that.

“It has been a sad week to come to that decision and to experience relegation. It was very down as you would expect and the decision to part-company with the manager was part of the process for moving forward.

“I can assure the supporters that it was not based solely on relegation being confirmed on Saturday, but what we want to try and achieve next season. We felt a change at this stage was the right thing to do and approach it from a different angle going into these final four games and then into pre-season.

“It was purely a judgement call on what we all felt was in the best interests of the Football Club moving forward.”