One Game at a Time: Difficult Second Season.
U18’s v The Wurzels (A) November 30th
I think we can safely dispense with the question mark after Difficult Second Season now, don't you?
“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”
So wrote Enoch Powell in his biography of Joseph Chamberlain. Leaving aside a number of Roman Emperors, despots like Peter the Great and two term Presidents like Reagan (who edges it over Obama as effectively Obama was hamstrung by not controlling the Senate), that quote has stood the test of time and not only for politics.
In a week that saw an abject defeat for Argyle at Norwich AND the return to football head coaching of Frankie Lampard at Coventry City, Powell might have been writing about football management as much as politics. All things being equal no prizes for guessing which will be the headline feature for the Boxing Day Sky slate of fixtures. The “Golden Generation ex-Derby derby” beckons.
It is frequently stated that football is part of the entertainment industry. Try saying that to the close to five hundred chilled and frustrated Argyle travelling supporters at ten o’clock last Tuesday. It is to their immense credit that they did not turn on the team.
Perhaps in part this is due to another maxim of the entertainment business. Harrison Ford/Indiana Jones at eighty might be the most recent example but it was Danny Glover as Roger Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon who was known for exclaiming “I am too old for this ……family site friendly excrescence”. There will have been a number of fans there who doubtless were also at Brentford when a former England legend, trying to build his managerial career with the Greens, suffered a catastrophic evening defeat in another seven-goal match, this time all of them ending in the Argyle net, who knows how Glover felt. I did. A (painful) read of that match summary on the estimable Greens on Screen shows that not much seems to have changed thirty years on. Injury ravaged Argyle, a manager with off field issues (although admittedly Shilton’s were of a different order to having your missus feasting on antipodean animals’ nether regions to provide light entertainment for the masses), and a defensive shambles of a performance, which saw the away end celebrate the sixth and seventh goals along with the home fans. The coup de grace for Shilton came two matches later after the January holiday home fixture against Crewe, ironically a win. For those of us at Griffin Park it seemed inevitable, as Shilton had clearly lost the goodwill of the fanbase.
The fan response post Carrow Road has been more measured. A poll which shows no decisive appetite for a change of Head Coach. A lengthy discussion on the merits of an ever more complex set of rules that now appear to require the match officials to be able to glean intent of action in determining offside. Given we have recent experience that determining whether the round white bouncy thing is still inside the bright thick white liney things around the edges that you have to run along to do the job is beyond some of those tasked with that decision, you do have to wonder if we are asking too much of these custodians of the rules.
A subset of that discussion was then whether VAR would have ruled otherwise for the opening goal. This fan’s honest opinion is that if an automated system with a remote extra referee can take upwards of four to five minutes to arrive at a decision, which in itself remains debatable and inconsistent, then I prefer the old system of the bloke/blokess with the pretty coloured flag guessing.
Then we had the age-old discussion of what has always been true. The team that has spent the most money tends to finish higher up the league than the team that hasn’t. Honourable mention to Stoke City here, whose goalless draw against Preston took them down a place to their traditional fourteenth, and out of the nosebleed inducing top half status they have successfully avoided since relegation from the Premier League despite their huge budget. Followed by the inevitable discussion on why we haven’t found someone to shovel endless amounts of non-returnable cash into the club. Because that’s the answer. Ask Birmingham City, or Leeds, Norwich, West Brom, Reading, or maybe Sheffield Wednesday or QPR. Rich owners, preferably foreign….that’s the panacea.
Finally, and perhaps more pertinently, a discussion of whether the coach we appointed is in fact any good. Here the discussions are more nuanced. It is undeniable we have had some appalling away performances, and that these have become more apparent as we have started to struggle with a spate of injuries. On the other hand, we have recorded some excellent home performances and results, as well as a couple of ridiculous recoveries from perilous positions to gain points. And we have always been prone to an away gubbing or three.
Points wise and league table wise we are more or less the same as last season, and this was around the time Schumacher took the Pottery pound. The outcome of that change was the appointment of a Head Coach who, on the one hand won our first away games of the season, but on the other hand was in change as our previous imperious home form fell off a cliff. Performance levels are a real concern though.
Interestingly this element of the discussion is the one that echoes on the message boards of opponents, to the extent that we even have visiting fans arriving to give lengthy analysis of why we are doomed under Wayne. Birmingham City fans seem especially determined we fail. I call it the Stansfield effect.
This narrative is the one that is impossible to control. Wayne is a part of our so-called “Golden Generation”, although in truth this epithet, bestowed by Adam Crozier (he of Post Office omnishambles fame) after the five-one win in Germany in 2001 has been applied to a number of squads and players ever since. If there is one thing that is consistent in the fortunes of the various GG’s it is that barring Gareth Southgate and possibly Michael Carrick, they are not very successful coaches by and large.
Tony Adams, John Terry, Steven Gerrard, all the Neville’s except Tracey, Sol Campbell, Cashley Cole, Paul Scholes, Robbie Fowler, Big Fat Frankie and Wayne….show us your medals. Now show us the ones you won as coaches/managers. Hmm, where did everybody go?
The thing is, we have seen this movie before….Shilton went and McCall, a popular player stepped up….and we went down. Schuey left, Foster arrived, and we survived by the skin of our teeth. Waiters is sacked after a home defeat to a Hull City team that played four teenagers….and his replacement, Mike Kelly, takes a solitary point in the final four games as Argyle fall into the relegation positions. David Kemp, sent off in his final game in charge, against Cambridge, and fired after that rarest of things, a Jon Sheffield clean sheet. Sadly, for Cambridge. Which ultimately ended with Shilton as player/manager and Speedie’s final day hattrick sending us down and helping Jack Walkers cash buy Blackburn the League title the following season.
The aftermath of the Norwich fiasco, and a near perfect reversal of the home fixture of last season we all remember so fondly, was a furious head coach promising dire consequences for the players. In truth his hands are tied, with an injury ravaged squad and a low confidence level, not helped when you gift your opponents multiple chances and have a tendency to ship early goals, in this case in both halves.
The remarkable thing was at half time Argyle were still in it courtesy of a Bundu goal from the one piece of aggressive front foot football we played in the entire match. the second half? the best you can say is at least Ashley Barnes didn't t score.
So, we head into the weekend with a sense of dread, as past performances this season, against avian nicknamed clubs, have so far been traumatic at best.
Words have been spoken. Harsh ones possibly. Changes? Probably. Injuries to players such as Hardie and Whittaker may have cleared up. Or not. Such things happen in a season. To all clubs.
At least the travelling won’t be too traumatic, well there at least. And out of a hundred and five League opponents our ranking is in the top hundred….at ninety-eighth. So, the only way is up.
What can we expect from a trip to Bristol, other than a drubbing?
There is a traffic junction in Bristol, Turbo Island, which is famed for having a makeshift hammock set up there, but potentially if some are to be believed, it may be borrowed by City keeper Max O ‘Leary for Saturdays match. Not strictly Bristol City related but it may be worth noting the name of local non league side Bradley Stokes FC young goalkeeper for future reference. He is called….Bradley Stokes. Just in case Burnley don’t want to sell us Etienne Green.
Bristol also have a number of busses powered by, shall we say, human waste. In our quest for a sustainable club there’s a team coach idea we could all get behind.
On the footballing side, City are one of the clubs rivalling Stoke and Preston for the most boringly predictable Championship teams, invariably finishing between eleventh and sixteenth. If only.
What we won’t get is the riveting half time entertainment of local rivals Bristol Rovers, who managed to “accidentally” play “Babestation” over their stadium screens at a recent match. Whatever that is.
Despite our poor form, injury crisis, and historic ineptitude at this particular club and ground it is remarkable that we have sold some 320 away tickets for the fixture. That is some show of loyalty.
Sorry? What? Three thousand two hundred? Fellow greens, I salute you all. Including the ones sitting on your hands in the City seats.
I hope that unprecedented loyalty and support is suitably rewarded and we can finally make use of the oft misquoted Churchill joke, made in the Commons in 1948.
“For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”
Time to write some history of our own.
COYG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
U18’s v The Wurzels (A) November 30th
I think we can safely dispense with the question mark after Difficult Second Season now, don't you?
“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”
So wrote Enoch Powell in his biography of Joseph Chamberlain. Leaving aside a number of Roman Emperors, despots like Peter the Great and two term Presidents like Reagan (who edges it over Obama as effectively Obama was hamstrung by not controlling the Senate), that quote has stood the test of time and not only for politics.
In a week that saw an abject defeat for Argyle at Norwich AND the return to football head coaching of Frankie Lampard at Coventry City, Powell might have been writing about football management as much as politics. All things being equal no prizes for guessing which will be the headline feature for the Boxing Day Sky slate of fixtures. The “Golden Generation ex-Derby derby” beckons.
It is frequently stated that football is part of the entertainment industry. Try saying that to the close to five hundred chilled and frustrated Argyle travelling supporters at ten o’clock last Tuesday. It is to their immense credit that they did not turn on the team.
Perhaps in part this is due to another maxim of the entertainment business. Harrison Ford/Indiana Jones at eighty might be the most recent example but it was Danny Glover as Roger Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon who was known for exclaiming “I am too old for this ……family site friendly excrescence”. There will have been a number of fans there who doubtless were also at Brentford when a former England legend, trying to build his managerial career with the Greens, suffered a catastrophic evening defeat in another seven-goal match, this time all of them ending in the Argyle net, who knows how Glover felt. I did. A (painful) read of that match summary on the estimable Greens on Screen shows that not much seems to have changed thirty years on. Injury ravaged Argyle, a manager with off field issues (although admittedly Shilton’s were of a different order to having your missus feasting on antipodean animals’ nether regions to provide light entertainment for the masses), and a defensive shambles of a performance, which saw the away end celebrate the sixth and seventh goals along with the home fans. The coup de grace for Shilton came two matches later after the January holiday home fixture against Crewe, ironically a win. For those of us at Griffin Park it seemed inevitable, as Shilton had clearly lost the goodwill of the fanbase.
The fan response post Carrow Road has been more measured. A poll which shows no decisive appetite for a change of Head Coach. A lengthy discussion on the merits of an ever more complex set of rules that now appear to require the match officials to be able to glean intent of action in determining offside. Given we have recent experience that determining whether the round white bouncy thing is still inside the bright thick white liney things around the edges that you have to run along to do the job is beyond some of those tasked with that decision, you do have to wonder if we are asking too much of these custodians of the rules.
A subset of that discussion was then whether VAR would have ruled otherwise for the opening goal. This fan’s honest opinion is that if an automated system with a remote extra referee can take upwards of four to five minutes to arrive at a decision, which in itself remains debatable and inconsistent, then I prefer the old system of the bloke/blokess with the pretty coloured flag guessing.
Then we had the age-old discussion of what has always been true. The team that has spent the most money tends to finish higher up the league than the team that hasn’t. Honourable mention to Stoke City here, whose goalless draw against Preston took them down a place to their traditional fourteenth, and out of the nosebleed inducing top half status they have successfully avoided since relegation from the Premier League despite their huge budget. Followed by the inevitable discussion on why we haven’t found someone to shovel endless amounts of non-returnable cash into the club. Because that’s the answer. Ask Birmingham City, or Leeds, Norwich, West Brom, Reading, or maybe Sheffield Wednesday or QPR. Rich owners, preferably foreign….that’s the panacea.
Finally, and perhaps more pertinently, a discussion of whether the coach we appointed is in fact any good. Here the discussions are more nuanced. It is undeniable we have had some appalling away performances, and that these have become more apparent as we have started to struggle with a spate of injuries. On the other hand, we have recorded some excellent home performances and results, as well as a couple of ridiculous recoveries from perilous positions to gain points. And we have always been prone to an away gubbing or three.
Points wise and league table wise we are more or less the same as last season, and this was around the time Schumacher took the Pottery pound. The outcome of that change was the appointment of a Head Coach who, on the one hand won our first away games of the season, but on the other hand was in change as our previous imperious home form fell off a cliff. Performance levels are a real concern though.
Interestingly this element of the discussion is the one that echoes on the message boards of opponents, to the extent that we even have visiting fans arriving to give lengthy analysis of why we are doomed under Wayne. Birmingham City fans seem especially determined we fail. I call it the Stansfield effect.
This narrative is the one that is impossible to control. Wayne is a part of our so-called “Golden Generation”, although in truth this epithet, bestowed by Adam Crozier (he of Post Office omnishambles fame) after the five-one win in Germany in 2001 has been applied to a number of squads and players ever since. If there is one thing that is consistent in the fortunes of the various GG’s it is that barring Gareth Southgate and possibly Michael Carrick, they are not very successful coaches by and large.
Tony Adams, John Terry, Steven Gerrard, all the Neville’s except Tracey, Sol Campbell, Cashley Cole, Paul Scholes, Robbie Fowler, Big Fat Frankie and Wayne….show us your medals. Now show us the ones you won as coaches/managers. Hmm, where did everybody go?
The thing is, we have seen this movie before….Shilton went and McCall, a popular player stepped up….and we went down. Schuey left, Foster arrived, and we survived by the skin of our teeth. Waiters is sacked after a home defeat to a Hull City team that played four teenagers….and his replacement, Mike Kelly, takes a solitary point in the final four games as Argyle fall into the relegation positions. David Kemp, sent off in his final game in charge, against Cambridge, and fired after that rarest of things, a Jon Sheffield clean sheet. Sadly, for Cambridge. Which ultimately ended with Shilton as player/manager and Speedie’s final day hattrick sending us down and helping Jack Walkers cash buy Blackburn the League title the following season.
The aftermath of the Norwich fiasco, and a near perfect reversal of the home fixture of last season we all remember so fondly, was a furious head coach promising dire consequences for the players. In truth his hands are tied, with an injury ravaged squad and a low confidence level, not helped when you gift your opponents multiple chances and have a tendency to ship early goals, in this case in both halves.
The remarkable thing was at half time Argyle were still in it courtesy of a Bundu goal from the one piece of aggressive front foot football we played in the entire match. the second half? the best you can say is at least Ashley Barnes didn't t score.
So, we head into the weekend with a sense of dread, as past performances this season, against avian nicknamed clubs, have so far been traumatic at best.
Words have been spoken. Harsh ones possibly. Changes? Probably. Injuries to players such as Hardie and Whittaker may have cleared up. Or not. Such things happen in a season. To all clubs.
At least the travelling won’t be too traumatic, well there at least. And out of a hundred and five League opponents our ranking is in the top hundred….at ninety-eighth. So, the only way is up.
What can we expect from a trip to Bristol, other than a drubbing?
There is a traffic junction in Bristol, Turbo Island, which is famed for having a makeshift hammock set up there, but potentially if some are to be believed, it may be borrowed by City keeper Max O ‘Leary for Saturdays match. Not strictly Bristol City related but it may be worth noting the name of local non league side Bradley Stokes FC young goalkeeper for future reference. He is called….Bradley Stokes. Just in case Burnley don’t want to sell us Etienne Green.
Bristol also have a number of busses powered by, shall we say, human waste. In our quest for a sustainable club there’s a team coach idea we could all get behind.
On the footballing side, City are one of the clubs rivalling Stoke and Preston for the most boringly predictable Championship teams, invariably finishing between eleventh and sixteenth. If only.
What we won’t get is the riveting half time entertainment of local rivals Bristol Rovers, who managed to “accidentally” play “Babestation” over their stadium screens at a recent match. Whatever that is.
Despite our poor form, injury crisis, and historic ineptitude at this particular club and ground it is remarkable that we have sold some 320 away tickets for the fixture. That is some show of loyalty.
Sorry? What? Three thousand two hundred? Fellow greens, I salute you all. Including the ones sitting on your hands in the City seats.
I hope that unprecedented loyalty and support is suitably rewarded and we can finally make use of the oft misquoted Churchill joke, made in the Commons in 1948.
“For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”
Time to write some history of our own.
COYG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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