Football Season Guide

Only Oldham's current stay in League One is longer than Walsall's, with the Saddlers spending most of their last ten seasons in the third tier hoping for promotion but showing little to suggest that they are actually capable of achieving it. There was more of the usual for the Saddlers in the previous season as they had periods during which they looked promising and spells during which they seemed set to go down, with all of this being enough only for a mid-table finish. They were repeatedly bailed out by their keeper Neil Etheridge but can no longer count on him to atone for their defensive shortcomings as his superb form has earned him a move to Cardiff. The others to leave were mostly back up players, with Andreas Makris's return to Cyprus coming as no surprise. The forward, who became the Saddlers' club-record signing last year, badly struggled to find the back of the net during his time with them. As is usually the case, Walsall have not really had money available to spend, with the consequence of this being that their list of summer signings contains no head-turners. Jon Guthrie, Mark Gillespie and James Wilson are the players they signed that have previous League One experience. Meanwhile, Luke Leahy and Nicky Devlin sign from Scotland but have no previous experience of playing in the Football League. To sum things up, the Saddlers have lost arguably their best player last season in Etheridge while making mostly underwhelming signings. With last season's core still together, their squad would still be good enough to comfortably beat the drop in most cases. However, it is unclear if it will be enough this time around, given that there seem to be no obvious candidates to go down.