Friday, 22 February 2008
Sifting through the wreckage
Wherever things go wrong most of the time, people will always try to explain why, in many imaginative ways. Disasters at Blundell Park are variously attributed to the five-man midfield, the twelve-month year, European fishing quotas, decimal coinage, or Danny Boshell, Paul Bolland and Austin Mitchell all being natives of West Yorkshire.
The explanations can be similarly interesting when our industries and public services suffer, as they often do, the equivalent of one of Town's devastating double relegations.
True, explanation sometimes matters less than retaliation, and when I pay £1.70 to ride two and a bit miles on a bus running 15 minutes late on empty roads, I just spend the journey dreaming up innovative tortures for the bus company's chief executive.
But there is a compelling theory that people are 'promoted to their level of incompetence'. This means that if you're good at your job, you're given a more demanding job, and if you're good at that then you get one that's harder still, and so on until you reach a job you're absolutely hopeless at.
Then you don't get promoted any more – you just keep doing the job badly, and eventually the administrators are auctioning your PC from under your nose and the Government is taking you into temporary public ownership to stop the banking system collapsing and taking the whole of Western civilisation with it.
Superficially, football seems immune to this vulnerability. If a player is promoted from the youth team to the reserves and finally the first team, but is then found wanting, the manager can just drop him or sell him on.
Likewise, a coach who rises through the ranks but then doesn't really cut it as the first team manager can easily be sacked by the chairman. If he's lucky, like Graham Rodger, he might get his old job back, lower down the hierarchy. And ideally the chairmen of First and Stagecoach would be redeployed cleaning discarded bubblegum off the seats.
But a player can't be dropped if no replacement is available. Town's opponents tomorrow, Wrexham, recently lost six games on the trot, conceding 14 goals, then put Gavin Ward in goal to replace Anthony Williams. When Williams played for us, our opponents scored more or less every time they shot low to his left, but he kept his place all season because Town's only other goalkeeper was too busy revising for his mock GCSEs.
And ultimate responsibility for the performance of a club over time lies with the chairman and the board. If they have risen to their 'level of incompetence' (not that I'm suggesting this is the case at GTFC!) then there's nothing much you can do. When disgruntled fans sing "sack the board", the obvious question is "how, exactly?"
The explanations can be similarly interesting when our industries and public services suffer, as they often do, the equivalent of one of Town's devastating double relegations.
True, explanation sometimes matters less than retaliation, and when I pay £1.70 to ride two and a bit miles on a bus running 15 minutes late on empty roads, I just spend the journey dreaming up innovative tortures for the bus company's chief executive.
But there is a compelling theory that people are 'promoted to their level of incompetence'. This means that if you're good at your job, you're given a more demanding job, and if you're good at that then you get one that's harder still, and so on until you reach a job you're absolutely hopeless at.
Then you don't get promoted any more – you just keep doing the job badly, and eventually the administrators are auctioning your PC from under your nose and the Government is taking you into temporary public ownership to stop the banking system collapsing and taking the whole of Western civilisation with it.
Superficially, football seems immune to this vulnerability. If a player is promoted from the youth team to the reserves and finally the first team, but is then found wanting, the manager can just drop him or sell him on.
Likewise, a coach who rises through the ranks but then doesn't really cut it as the first team manager can easily be sacked by the chairman. If he's lucky, like Graham Rodger, he might get his old job back, lower down the hierarchy. And ideally the chairmen of First and Stagecoach would be redeployed cleaning discarded bubblegum off the seats.
But a player can't be dropped if no replacement is available. Town's opponents tomorrow, Wrexham, recently lost six games on the trot, conceding 14 goals, then put Gavin Ward in goal to replace Anthony Williams. When Williams played for us, our opponents scored more or less every time they shot low to his left, but he kept his place all season because Town's only other goalkeeper was too busy revising for his mock GCSEs.
And ultimate responsibility for the performance of a club over time lies with the chairman and the board. If they have risen to their 'level of incompetence' (not that I'm suggesting this is the case at GTFC!) then there's nothing much you can do. When disgruntled fans sing "sack the board", the obvious question is "how, exactly?"
Labels: blame, buses, business, failure, incompetence, relegation, rodger, williams, wrexham, yorkshire
Friday, 23 November 2007
How I learned to stop worrying and love the Town
Town haven't always been rubbish, and at Barnet tomorrow they may suddenly be good again. But just now, it has to be said, they are a bit rubbish. So how do we bear this maddening state of affairs without going crazy? A range of strategies is available, each with a distinct set of advantages and disadvantages.
The most straightforward of these is not to support them any more. In its favour, this is an elegantly decisive solution, with no messy loose ends, and could save thousands of pounds over the years. Its one minor drawback is that it clearly marks you out as the sort of childishly petulant, weak-minded, thin-blooded, traitorous coward who is often found sharing the best lifeboat with the rats as the ship plunges fatally beneath the slurping waves.
A second approach is to keep supporting the club, but to call for the manager to be sacked. This is great, because it allows you to blame someone for the team being rubbish, and nowadays we need to blame someone for everything that's wrong, even if it's not really anyone's fault (or our own fault). On the down side, calling for the manager to be sacked can leave you looking silly if, as is very often the case, the manager is sacked but the team is still rubbish afterwards.
And if the manager isn't sacked but the team then does really well and nearly gets promoted, you can end up looking even sillier. Just ask the people who unfurled the 'Slade out' banner at Blundell Park two years ago.
To avoid these risks I have tried out a third kind of coping strategy. This is to keep supporting the club, without calling for the manager to be sacked, but to try and forget that you support the club when you get home from the match, until you have to go to the next one.
This is fine so long as there are loads of things to take your mind off the football, but it's that much harder to block out the rubbish match you just watched when you get home and remember that the new series of Doctor Who doesn't start until the spring.
It's also much easier if you can get home on a Saturday night and then not spend the next five days worrying about what to write in your next column for the Telegraph, or not have to write, edit or upload copy for Cod Almighty five days a week. Although actually that might be just me.
So it'll have to be the same old approach as always. Keep supporting, keep a sense of perspective – and win, lose or draw, there's always a pint at the end of it. Or does that just sound crazy?
The most straightforward of these is not to support them any more. In its favour, this is an elegantly decisive solution, with no messy loose ends, and could save thousands of pounds over the years. Its one minor drawback is that it clearly marks you out as the sort of childishly petulant, weak-minded, thin-blooded, traitorous coward who is often found sharing the best lifeboat with the rats as the ship plunges fatally beneath the slurping waves.
A second approach is to keep supporting the club, but to call for the manager to be sacked. This is great, because it allows you to blame someone for the team being rubbish, and nowadays we need to blame someone for everything that's wrong, even if it's not really anyone's fault (or our own fault). On the down side, calling for the manager to be sacked can leave you looking silly if, as is very often the case, the manager is sacked but the team is still rubbish afterwards.
And if the manager isn't sacked but the team then does really well and nearly gets promoted, you can end up looking even sillier. Just ask the people who unfurled the 'Slade out' banner at Blundell Park two years ago.
To avoid these risks I have tried out a third kind of coping strategy. This is to keep supporting the club, without calling for the manager to be sacked, but to try and forget that you support the club when you get home from the match, until you have to go to the next one.
This is fine so long as there are loads of things to take your mind off the football, but it's that much harder to block out the rubbish match you just watched when you get home and remember that the new series of Doctor Who doesn't start until the spring.
It's also much easier if you can get home on a Saturday night and then not spend the next five days worrying about what to write in your next column for the Telegraph, or not have to write, edit or upload copy for Cod Almighty five days a week. Although actually that might be just me.
So it'll have to be the same old approach as always. Keep supporting, keep a sense of perspective – and win, lose or draw, there's always a pint at the end of it. Or does that just sound crazy?
Labels: barnet, blame, cod almighty, coping strategies, denial, doctor who, managers, slade, support
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