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, 11 April 2008
It's the economy, stupid
So the credit crunch is starting to bite. We're about to learn the hard way that an economy built on borrowing can't carry on growing indefinitely. All the experts agree that a serious downturn lies ahead. And as if Town's financial situation weren't bad enough, they say the country's probably facing a recession as well.
John Fenty tells us that we must leave Blundell Park or the club will cease to exist. I'm still not sure how this all adds up, because our support is average for a fourth division club. Barnet, Accrington and Dagenham are operating on attendances less than half the size of Town's, but you don't hear them go on about needing to build a new stadium at Pyewipe.
Thanks to the chairman's careful stewardship, however, the finances at GTFC are in much better shape than they were.
In 2002, of course, Town were left reeling when Carlton and Granada decided to get out of paying the £315m of TV money they'd promised Football League clubs by placing ITV Digital in administration. Even if they had stumped up, though, it would still have been scary hearing the rumours that we were paying Zhang Enhua twelve thousand quid a week.
Plenty of football clubs have followed Carlton and Granada's lead. Before it became punishable with a 10-point deduction, administration had become essentially a mechanism for clubs like Bradford and Leicester to sign lots of expensive players who were better than Town's, so they could keep beating us, and then get out of picking up the tab – a sort of football equivalent of legging it out of the curry house at the end of the night while the waiter's gone away to fetch the bill.
These days it is not an option taken quite so lightly. Rotherham, who visit Blundell Park tomorrow, have just called in the administrators for the second time in three years – and the points deduction has shattered their play-off hopes at a stroke.
As ways of having your play-off hopes shattered go, this is slightly less fun than being fatally distracted from a string of decisive league fixtures by a nice day out at Wembley in the final of a no-pressure lower-league cup tournament. Still, as Oscar Wilde put it during a turn as pundit on the popular Victorian highlights show Association Foot-Ball Splendid Sunday, to go into administration once may be regarded as a misfortune; to do so twice looks like carelessness.
So will the need for tighter finances herald a new era of prudence in football's boardrooms, and Rotherham be among the last clubs forced into administration? If I were you I wouldn't bet my mortgage on it. Especially given the way the economy is going.
John Fenty tells us that we must leave Blundell Park or the club will cease to exist. I'm still not sure how this all adds up, because our support is average for a fourth division club. Barnet, Accrington and Dagenham are operating on attendances less than half the size of Town's, but you don't hear them go on about needing to build a new stadium at Pyewipe.
Thanks to the chairman's careful stewardship, however, the finances at GTFC are in much better shape than they were.
In 2002, of course, Town were left reeling when Carlton and Granada decided to get out of paying the £315m of TV money they'd promised Football League clubs by placing ITV Digital in administration. Even if they had stumped up, though, it would still have been scary hearing the rumours that we were paying Zhang Enhua twelve thousand quid a week.
Plenty of football clubs have followed Carlton and Granada's lead. Before it became punishable with a 10-point deduction, administration had become essentially a mechanism for clubs like Bradford and Leicester to sign lots of expensive players who were better than Town's, so they could keep beating us, and then get out of picking up the tab – a sort of football equivalent of legging it out of the curry house at the end of the night while the waiter's gone away to fetch the bill.
These days it is not an option taken quite so lightly. Rotherham, who visit Blundell Park tomorrow, have just called in the administrators for the second time in three years – and the points deduction has shattered their play-off hopes at a stroke.
As ways of having your play-off hopes shattered go, this is slightly less fun than being fatally distracted from a string of decisive league fixtures by a nice day out at Wembley in the final of a no-pressure lower-league cup tournament. Still, as Oscar Wilde put it during a turn as pundit on the popular Victorian highlights show Association Foot-Ball Splendid Sunday, to go into administration once may be regarded as a misfortune; to do so twice looks like carelessness.
So will the need for tighter finances herald a new era of prudence in football's boardrooms, and Rotherham be among the last clubs forced into administration? If I were you I wouldn't bet my mortgage on it. Especially given the way the economy is going.
Labels: debt, economy, fentydome, finances, itv digital, rotherham
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