Friday, 2 May 2008
The wait of expectation
Lots of people can't stand waiting for a bus because there's nothing you can do to make it arrive more quickly. Waiting for something good to happen to your football team is much the same. You can shout encouragement or abuse at the players or sound off on a messageboard until you're blue in the fingers. But you won't make any more difference to what actually happens than if you were to stand at the bus stop yelling: "Booooo, this is rubbish! Sort it, Stagecoach!"
The bus eventually turns up, though, and sooner or later something good happens to your football team. Although, granted, nobody publishes a timetable for winning promotion.
Town fans are getting twitchy because next season will be our fifth in a row as a fourth division team. This represents our worst spell, in terms of league status, since we joined the Football League as founder members of the second division in 1892. True, we spent the 1910–11 season as a non-League club. But the league still only had two divisions at that time, so that wasn't so bad. And in those days you didn't have TV companies promising the league 300 million quid and then welching on the deal when they didn't sell enough advertising.
But five seasons in the basement is nothing really. Rochdale have got themselves into the play-offs this year. If they win they'll be promoted for the first time in 40 years. And from 1970 to 1989 they failed to finish higher than 15th. At least we had a day out in Cardiff the other year and the fun of knocking Lincoln out of the play-off semi-finals.
And three or four decades of fourth division football were the stuff of dreams for Accrington Stanley, of course – liquidated in 1962 with debts of less than £50,000. A reformed Aldershot will return to the league next season after suffering a similar fate in 1992. But Stanley fans had to wait 44 years for their big comeback. If you're stuck for what to do over the close season, nip out and buy a Travel Scrabble.
When Town were relegated to the third division in 1997, our opponents this weekend, Hereford, went down to the Conference. It took them nine years to return, and tomorrow they'll be celebrating another promotion – on an average attendance nearly 1,000 less than ours this season.
And the greatest consolation for Town fans is that when our club eventually gets itself together and achieves promotion, the momentum tends to carry through to the following season and we often go up again. For the Mariners, promotion really is like waiting for a bus: you're stuck there for ages and then two come along at once.
The bus eventually turns up, though, and sooner or later something good happens to your football team. Although, granted, nobody publishes a timetable for winning promotion.
Town fans are getting twitchy because next season will be our fifth in a row as a fourth division team. This represents our worst spell, in terms of league status, since we joined the Football League as founder members of the second division in 1892. True, we spent the 1910–11 season as a non-League club. But the league still only had two divisions at that time, so that wasn't so bad. And in those days you didn't have TV companies promising the league 300 million quid and then welching on the deal when they didn't sell enough advertising.
But five seasons in the basement is nothing really. Rochdale have got themselves into the play-offs this year. If they win they'll be promoted for the first time in 40 years. And from 1970 to 1989 they failed to finish higher than 15th. At least we had a day out in Cardiff the other year and the fun of knocking Lincoln out of the play-off semi-finals.
And three or four decades of fourth division football were the stuff of dreams for Accrington Stanley, of course – liquidated in 1962 with debts of less than £50,000. A reformed Aldershot will return to the league next season after suffering a similar fate in 1992. But Stanley fans had to wait 44 years for their big comeback. If you're stuck for what to do over the close season, nip out and buy a Travel Scrabble.
When Town were relegated to the third division in 1997, our opponents this weekend, Hereford, went down to the Conference. It took them nine years to return, and tomorrow they'll be celebrating another promotion – on an average attendance nearly 1,000 less than ours this season.
And the greatest consolation for Town fans is that when our club eventually gets itself together and achieves promotion, the momentum tends to carry through to the following season and we often go up again. For the Mariners, promotion really is like waiting for a bus: you're stuck there for ages and then two come along at once.
Labels: accrington, buses, conference, hereford, itv digital, play-offs, promotion, relegation, rochdale
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, 19 October 2007
The man on the Cleethorpes omnibus
Signing players is like catching a bus – you have to wait ages, and then two come at once. And then the privately owned, deregulated bus operator claims some of its routes are making a loss and threatens to close them down unless the council hands over thousands of pounds of public money in 'subsidies'.
Alan Buckley's record in the transfer market is mostly admirable, and sometimes astounding. Buckley is aware of this, and has shrewdly reminded us of it by suggesting that Martin Butler could be the new Garry Birtles. Not all of the manager's acquisitions down the years were quite that successful, however, and it is telling that he refrained last season from comparing Martin Paterson with, say, Murray Jones.
While Town were negotiating his transfer, Butler was described by the club as "an unnamed striker". GTFC then had to confirm his identity, as the media reported it before the deal was finalised – but the commercial department was already complaining to the PR office that if this new striker didn't have a name then they'd have a nightmare getting a certificate of authenticity for his shirt when they flogged it on eBay.
There are times when we need to put aside our reservations and just place a little faith in a manager with a record unrivalled in the Mariners' 129-year history. When Town and Southend were scrapping for top spot in the old third division in 1990, Southend signed a young centre-half from Arsenal, who were top of the league, and the very same day Buckley signed an old centre-half from the club at the very bottom, and we all sighed and lamented Town's characteristic lack of ambition.
That club was Halifax; the player was Paul Futcher; and the rest is history. Nearly 15 years of giddy overachievement, to be precise.
So what of Town's other new player, Shaleum Logan? Other than scoring on his debut against Rochdale last week, the Manchester City loanee showed good pace, agility and tackling – pretty much justifying the description of him by City manager Sven-Goran Eriksson, who said he seemed reminiscent of a younger Ashley Cole.
The defining passage of Cole's recent autobiography is that in which his agent phones up while Cole is driving, with the details of Arsenal's new contract offer, and the player swears bitterly and almost crashes in disgust at the prospect of having to live on £55,000 a week.
It is to be hoped, then, that Sven was referring solely to Logan's playing style, as Cole would clearly be better off travelling by bus, and we can't have important first-team players relying on the 9X to get to Blundell Park. You have to wait ages for it, and then two come at once.
Alan Buckley's record in the transfer market is mostly admirable, and sometimes astounding. Buckley is aware of this, and has shrewdly reminded us of it by suggesting that Martin Butler could be the new Garry Birtles. Not all of the manager's acquisitions down the years were quite that successful, however, and it is telling that he refrained last season from comparing Martin Paterson with, say, Murray Jones.
While Town were negotiating his transfer, Butler was described by the club as "an unnamed striker". GTFC then had to confirm his identity, as the media reported it before the deal was finalised – but the commercial department was already complaining to the PR office that if this new striker didn't have a name then they'd have a nightmare getting a certificate of authenticity for his shirt when they flogged it on eBay.
There are times when we need to put aside our reservations and just place a little faith in a manager with a record unrivalled in the Mariners' 129-year history. When Town and Southend were scrapping for top spot in the old third division in 1990, Southend signed a young centre-half from Arsenal, who were top of the league, and the very same day Buckley signed an old centre-half from the club at the very bottom, and we all sighed and lamented Town's characteristic lack of ambition.
That club was Halifax; the player was Paul Futcher; and the rest is history. Nearly 15 years of giddy overachievement, to be precise.
So what of Town's other new player, Shaleum Logan? Other than scoring on his debut against Rochdale last week, the Manchester City loanee showed good pace, agility and tackling – pretty much justifying the description of him by City manager Sven-Goran Eriksson, who said he seemed reminiscent of a younger Ashley Cole.
The defining passage of Cole's recent autobiography is that in which his agent phones up while Cole is driving, with the details of Arsenal's new contract offer, and the player swears bitterly and almost crashes in disgust at the prospect of having to live on £55,000 a week.
It is to be hoped, then, that Sven was referring solely to Logan's playing style, as Cole would clearly be better off travelling by bus, and we can't have important first-team players relying on the 9X to get to Blundell Park. You have to wait ages for it, and then two come at once.
Labels: birtles, buckley, buses, butler, cole, futcher, logan, rochdale, transfers, travel
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