I left the UK for a brief holiday a week ago with the team in the relative safety of mid table. I arrived home early this morning with the team in the bottom four. I have only one question. What the hell have you all been doing in my absence? I have spent the last hour reading through the latest threads, and not surprisingly, it all looks like meltdown. The usual crew are even more confident that we will be looking for yet another new manager by Saturday night, but there is also a new factor. It turns out that the club is rotten at its core. It turns out the Patrick Cryne is not the cuddly grandfather figure that we all took him for. It turns out that that club is rewarding its fans by kicking them all in the wedding tackle at regular intervals. Here is some news for everyone. The club is losing football games, and when that happens, everything is rotten, both on and off the field. It is a fact of the game. I cannot tell anyone how to put this sad situation right because, like everyone on here, I am not a club insider. But what I can say is this. Panicking will only make a bad situation even worse. The big problem for us as fans is that we have hopes, and these hopes lead to expectations. The club has to take advantage of those hopes. That is how they sell tickets. If they say, “expect nothing and you will not be disappointed”, then no-one will turn up. Nevertheless, fans need to be realistic, because if you continue to live in hope, if you continue to ignore the evidence of your own eyes, then you are going to end up disillusioned and angry. After the early season games that gave everyone such hope I wrote some very down beat “Minority Reports”. I could see that we were not as good as everyone maintained. I could see that the underlying performances in those games was flattered by the results. Equally, I do not think that we are relegation material. What we are is a team at the very start of the rebuilding process. We have a young manager, who is making mistakes and a young team that is making more. We have a long term rebuilding policy that will not reach fruition until it has run at least three transfer windows. It would be wrong to abandon everything, all the thought, all the internal argument and all the logic at the first sign of problems. I have written about the need for patience since the very start of the new regime. You only need patience when things go wrong. It is ridiculous to talk about patience when the team is winning games. Patience is only tested when the team is put through the mill. This is certainly a time for patience, and I think that our patience will be tested further in the coming months. However, if we are to build, it is necessary to get the foundations right, and that is what is happening this season. We have all been critical of the number of loan players that have passed through the club this season, but if the right players were not available in the last window, has it really been such a disaster in the long term. Would any of those who have been critical of the policy have been happy if the club had signed all those loan players on 3 year deals? Now that would be the very definition of a disaster. Instead, we signed them on a three month trial period. Long term trials during which most of them have not impressed. In the meantime, I sincerely hope that other players have been identified, and that the next transfer window will see some of them join the club, and many of the loanees leave. In my experience, things are never as bad, or as good, as they are perceived on the outside. As a fan of 50 years, I have been kicked in the wedding tackle more than most. The only advice that I can give is to keep hoping, but keep your eyes open and your brain engaged.
Welcome back. Out of interest, will you be giving a new title to future reports given that there has been a major shift in perceptions?
My guess is that they will always be Minority Reports, whatever it is that I feel that I need to write.
No. But I would have been much happier had we kept Bailey, Berry, Lalkovic and Oates, made better use of Bree, Abbott, Digby, Williams and Phenix, and only used the loan system once the season was well under way and we could see in what areas we needed to strengthen. I'm not saying this with the benefit of hindsight, our transfer policy appeared positively lunatic to me before we had even kicked a ball and I said as much on numerous occasions. Of course, we have no idea how we would have faired had we done what I have stated above, but it's difficult to imagine, what with the poor quality of the league this season, that we'd be doing worse than we are now. Lalkovic assisted for the first and scored the second for Walsall btw. Not that I want the manager sacking, nor do I believe the club is rotten to the core, but terrible mistakes appear to be repeated time and time again. I don't wish to question the integrity of anyone involved in running BFC, but I do question their ability to put together a successful football team. I'll be patient, in that I'll keep going to games and I won't be demanding anyone's head, but I'm far from convinced my patience will be rewarded no matter how many arguments I put forward for keeping personnel in place.
I guess that our opinions of individual players is bound to differ and I do not want to take issue about individuals. I think that our only other differences are about perspective and time. I have always seen the rebuilding process as a three season affair, and I was hoping that we would not go up this season because I thought that we were not ready. I do not think that you can build anything that has any permanence to it in one transfer window, and I have always seen the summer transfer window as part of a longer term process. Of course I am disappointed with our current league position, but I am confident that if we do not panic, change the manager, change the player recruitment policy and upset our current owner badly enough that he simply decides to walk away, that we will improve. There is obviously no chance of promotion this season, and quite frankly, I would settle for signs that a footballing spring is on the way. It is all a matter of the time frame that we view these things in. Few of those old enough to remember Jim Iley have a good word for him, but time has given some perspective to his reign. When he left, to many we seemed as though we were at our lowest ebb. But his reign made Alan Clarke's first short reign possible, and the momentum from that took us back to the second tier for the first time in 20 years. I am not saying that I can see a similar situation now, but there is the possibility of the John Stones windfall and the prospect of building, if the foundations are solid, which they were when Mick McCarthy provided the foundation stone back in Iley's time.
I don't want anything different to you. I want us to keep the manager in place, for his three transfer windows plus half a season at the very least, and I want us to commit to the policy we have begun. Where we differ is that, even if we carry the plan through (which is in itself a long shot as itchy trigger fingers tend to squeeze sooner or later), I'm far from convinced it will bring success. Not that there's a fault with the plan, but I don't think we know which players are worth pushing the boat out for and which certainly aren't, or for which players we require adequate recompense should they leave and which we can just let go. And I can't imagine we'll get to Christmas next year without ripping up the plan and starting again anyway. Patience isn't just a virtue required by the fans. And that's just the big stuff without going in to the nitty gritty. The long and short of it is that I have no confidence in the current set-up. However, I have no suggestions for any alternatives. It's not that I think they're incompetent, but you've to be a lot better than merely satisfactory to gain success in football these days, such is the competition. I'll keep buying my season ticket, I'll celebrate the victories, I'll support my club like I always have, but my expectations are rock bottom.
As supporters, it is our role to support. The job title says it all. As you say, if we want to see better times, there is no real alternative to just keep turning up and keep hoping for the best. We are in no position to do anything else.
