Ian Culverhouse to Cambridge United rumours are bad timing for King’s Lynn Town

Ian Culverhouse - is the ball in his court? Picture: Geoff Moore (Image: ©Focus Images Limitedwww.focus-images.co.uk+447814 482222)

It was bound to happen – King's Lynn Town manager Ian Culverhouse is being linked with another job.

These things happen when you take your team into their league's play-offs, having got within a good shout of the league title.

The 'interested party' are Cambridge United, who currently have Joe Dunne (with whom Culverhouse worked at Colchester) in interim charge until the end of the season. For the record, the club are saying nothing - they believe it isn't a story so neither the manager nor the owner, Stephen Cleeve, is commenting. Which doesn't prevent everyone else...

It's perhaps best to make clear that the link between Culverhouse and Cambridge came from a fans' discussion forum and has a lot of 2+2=4 about it.

Why wouldn't a league club want Culverhouse in charge? He has done a magnificent job at The Walks this season and is a coach/manager/assistant manager/whatever you want to call him to be coveted. It's a feather in the cap of the football club that he is being talked about in such terms – it's just the timing that stinks.

The stylish Linnets are trying to finish second in the Southern Premier, which guarantees home advantage in the play-offs. Culverhouse is facing a few untimely injury problems – losing your best players to the aches and strains of a season isn't good, but the squad is thin, the strength in depth doesn't go very far.

Then there is the relationship between manager and owner: the view from the stands is that it is strained. There is no real evidence to suggest that is true – I saw them chatting away amiably recently but, again, that doesn't perhaps reflect anything much either.

But when Culverhouse speaks publicly about the club letting the players down because of the state of the pitch – as Culverhouse did after last Thursday's 2-1 home win over play-off rivals Kettering – then it is clear that something may be amiss. The manager was right: the pitch was awful and for it not to have been worked on in the previous five days was either an alarming oversight or poor management of a major part of what the manager is trying to achieve.

The manager is hugely supportive of his squad, but the last thing they need now is uncertainty in any direction: sadly, it comes with the success Culverhouse has achieved.

If I owned Cambridge United I would be all over Culverhouse like a rash. Ditto if I owned King's Lynn Town.