Down - the Mighty vs Millwall

The evening is beautiful. It's warm. There is anticipation. There is hope. There is a wild, wilful optimism. The odds say 'no' but the heart says 'just...maybe...' My brain says 'If people followed their hearts more instead of worshipping the cold mysterious objectivity of numbers then maybe the world would be a better place. In fact, whole cultures have existed without the same reliance on counting and calculations as the modern world, so there... Fuck you league tables, fuck you betting odds, fuck you permutations, economics, wages bills, CEO salaries and all of that and most of all fuck you the rest of the division. We can do this...'

I'm not really convinced by myself but Dobbie has dialled up 0891 ATTACK again on the team selection hotline. Of course he has. I love him for it. I've met someone who has come all the way from Canada for fucks sake. We'll turn up. You can't not in such circumstances. It would be rude not to go for it. 

--- 

Grimmy's trimmed his beard. Maybe it's deference to the gaffers majestic effort? We're pressing again. Keshi wins it and we're so nearly through, but I've barely processed the opening of the game when they break and score. 'Shall we go?' asks the lad impishly. I give him a hard stare. He doesn't ask again. 

Millwall are horrible to play against. They swarm all over us. They give us no time. The referee and the linesmen in their shitty Sunday cyclist luminescent gear are both shit as fuck. Keshi is wiped out and Millwall break. The linesman just watches like a gormless glow in the dark Easter Island head, staring blankly across the pitch past the prone and furious Anderson. I hate him. 

We make a half chance. Their keeper collects, hoofs it long, Super Jimmy is lost and their lad runs in on goal and belts it wide. Thank fuck. The pattern repeats. We get it, they kick, bite and snarl. We're hurried and uncomfortable. When we finally get a position, we take possibly the worst free kick routine anyone has ever tried, ever, which involves passing it once and then passing it to the other team for no reason. 

Then Morgan Rogers (baby...) flicks one over the head of his man and charges forward. He's flying. He's got his head down, he's in, he shoots.. It's parried wide and the ground erupts. That's the moment it swings our way. 

We've got space suddenly. We've got Keshi swaying his hips and caressing the ball. We've got Jerry dancing in the box, he doesn't lose it, because, he never does. We've got a couple of passes and now we've got CJ on an angle picking up his own rebound and he's sprawling because he's clipped and its........ YES!!! It's given! 

Jerry. I feel sick. Jerry. We wait.... Here we go. He looks to the side. He makes a little jump to start his run and he's like a beautiful oiled mechanism as he draws back the trigger and the hammer ignites the gunpowder and the bullet flies down the barrel and its in the back of the net!!! One more headshot from the sniper. I am in heaven. That was a fucking shotgun blast. Flesh everywhere. 

We're all over them. Corners. Runs. Penning them in. We've got this. We have. 

--- 

My heart is going ten to the dozen. This is us. Where have we been most of the year? Why are we only any good now? Millwall are decent. They're nothing special, but they're well set up and seemed to understand what we'd do and countered it well, but we found a way to get at them and now, we're on top. 

--- 

We come out in the same fashion. We're pressuring. We're trying shots. We're playing. All of a sudden though, something happens. I'm not really concentrating for a moment and they're through with one pass, Grimshaw is trying to narrow the angle, someone is trailing in the wake of their lad but it's in the back of the net before I can even panic. That was lethal and we fell apart like a slab of beef cleaved by a sharp blade. 

It's a hollow feeling. It's like when you're on a boat on a rising swell - riding up the wave is fun, but crashing over the top is a horrible moment. You feel like the sea can carry you forever, but as the boat falls, you remember the depths and the drowning and the fact that a boat is a slender barrier between you and sinking into darkness.  

I love Stephen Dobbie. Other managers would fiddle about with the full backs or swap things like for like. The tired eyed bearded Glasgow maverick is having none of that pointless defeatist deckchair shifting. If this is the titanic, then fuck the furniture and get the band playing. A band needs a soloist and Josh Bowler is that man. Off goes a centre back for the least practical player in the division and suddenly, I believe just a little bit again. This is going to go to pieces or it's going to go brilliantly. 

We probe, we push it about. There's give and goes. There's a slide rule pass that nearly has us in. There's moments when we might shoot and we don't but then, just as it feels like the little flurry of energy that Bowler gave us is ebbing away, then, almost out of nowhere, Fiorini skims one that arrows into the bottom corner and I'm first shocked and then elated. YES! We don't score goals like that, except it seems that now, we do. That was miles out. I'm almost too stunned to go mental. 

Patino has a go. Keshi has a go. Can we do this? 

They're running at us. Gabriel stumbles and bounces back up in a tumbling feat of gymnastic desperation, like an acrobat who is frantically trying to mask a fluffed landing, but try as he might, he can't make his ground, Fiorini is lunging to cover and I know, before contact is made, that this is a penalty and so it is. 

Grimmy does everything he can, clowning, waving and chucking himself in the right direction but the ball is just a fraction too well hit and his hand a fraction too late and in that that few cm's of distance, between his glove and the leather of the ball, is the death of our survival hopes. 

Dobbie doesn't do giving in and he shuffles what he can out of a thin pack of cards. Holmes and then Marvin, with Nelson going up front but we can't get the pressure on and when Jordan Gabriel goes down in a heap after lunging to try and keep our hopes alive and the stretcher is summoned, it seems symbolic of a season where so often we've played with 10 men that we go down chasing shadows and scrapping in vain with a man short and an injury to a key player. 

Full time. Jerry. Oh Jerry. He takes forever. We know what this means. He's drinking it in one more time. His home. He's Blackpool's no 9. For one more game. I will miss him painfully. 

--- 

What is there to say? It's likely the last time we'll see many of these players at Bloomfield. Some we'll miss and some we probably won't. 

Like all of the Dobbie games, there was a lot to like in what we did. Like the season as a whole at times, we did some very daft things but we played with pace and we didn't give up. 

There's been some frankly fucking horrendous decision making this season. We've seen in the last few games what a team playing with belief and focus can look like and it looked like one that could have got plenty more points than it did playing the majority of the season looking confused and lost. The fact we've only got to the point of looking like we're understanding a plan on a regular basis after hiring and firing two managers and turning in desperation to the youth coach says an awful lot about where things need to be better next season and it's not just on the pitch. 

That's then though. Tonight was everything I love about football aside from the result. It was intense, loud and hard fought. We lost and it hurt, but that's not what sent us down. We weren't good enough over the course of the season. It happens. Every day of joy has a dark twin. Every team that wins beats someone. Every promotion is balanced by a relegation and now, it's our turn.  

My lad says 'Dad, Wembley was for nothing' and I say 'Mate, football is for nothing. None of it actually means anything' but despite my words of reason, I feel a sadness that reaches my bones. 

No one likes Millwall, but I like the idea of them going kicking lumps out of the Premier League. They're like a horrible Cockney Rotherham. It's just funny to think of them knocking seven shades of shit out of Man City. They were more than the sum of their parts. Fair enough. They do what they do well. 

We've got a long road back. We shouldn't even be taking it. We had a platform and we threw ourselves off it. This relegation was aided by shit refs and players made of bone china and horrible tactics at times but it was forged by ourselves as much as anything. You end up wondering how the fuck people in football earn so much to make such gash decisions and how we've had such obvious holes in the squad for so long. There's all of that... but despite it all and despite the temptation to retreat into rage, ultimately, the journey is the point. We keep going. We keep moving, we keep believing. There'll be a pitch and a team in tangerine and we'll be there. What the fuck else are we going to do? Football is an absurdity in a life of absurdity but it's stupid fucking game that I love as much as anything else I can think of and if it didn't hurt sometimes, it would be a hundred times a poorer game for it. 

We go again.

We go again better.

Stephen Dobbie's Tangerine Army. 

Onward.  

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