Kaddy takes the ball in. He does that little tease that you've come to expect, showing the ball then whipping it away from the now committed defender. He spins in an instant, making teammates and opposition alike look heavy and leaden footed to a man, the defender is groping at air, Kaddy has spirited himself away with the ball, advancing on his next victim, one part assassin, one part street magician and one part contortionist.
I've seen few players as adept at controlling the ball. I've seen no one as brilliant at seeming not to control the ball - but come away with it so many times that the initial touch can't be accidental. He plays with the mind of the defender and he almost always comes out on top. He sprawls on the pitch, the play hesitates around him and he rolls and bounces back up, like a cat falling from a wall, the descent, the landing, the ascent and the sprint away from the incident all one move. Other footballers are mere clumsy oafs lumbering gracelessly. They're big dogs barking hopelessly at a cat in a tree.
We're losing. It's the last day of the season. Losing is not an option. Kaddy takes it. 'Go on Kaddy' is the one thought of 1700 tangerine souls. Read the above description but append one final crucial detail - this time, he doesn't come away with the ball. This time he lies on the turf looking hard done by (and he
is hard done by) because the referee sees the ankle tap he's drawn as legitimate and the other team race away like grand national horses leaving behind an equine fall and score a third goal on the break.
That's the season right there. Kaddy wasn't quite enough. That's not a criticism of him. I don't think I could muster one if I tried. It's a criticism of the overall picture and how dominated it is by one diminutive boy wonder and how, as wonderful as it was, that was never going to be quite enough.
It's hard to sum this season up. The season before was easy enough. It was shit. Next.
This season has had just enough highlights to keep the fire of belief burning - but too little fuel for that flame to really get dancing. We've played at a level above this division a few times. It's hard to look beyond the dismantling of Pompey and Bolton as examples of why we should have done much better. We gave a decent strength Forest side two games where we looked anything but mid table third tier.
When it worked, it worked. On good days, you could see all the things that Critchley wants us to be - working as a unit, moving the ball quickly, soaking up pressure and springing decisively on the opposition, pressing in groups with a shape to the side. If you could take a small subsection of our games then you'd genuinely believe we were heading for another spell in the Premier League.
The problem is, those few exceptional games are, well... exceptions. Of course, you can't play well every single week - it's ridiculous to read too much into a few poor performances - but equally, it's ridiculous to put too much faith in a few good ones. Mick McCarthy managed us to one of the most convincing wins we've had since Holloway - should we have kept faith with Mick on the basis of that result? Of course not.
Burton Albion away. It's cold. We've travelled fucking miles to get here on Boxing Day abandoning family and friends, eschewing the opportunity to rest and feed up in the bleak midwinter. Why have we done this? Because we're going to see a display of committed and passionate football from a team of quality players. We're going to enjoy ourselves as we watch them swarm all over a dogged but limited side and ultimately dismantle them. C'mon Pool!!!
The final whistle goes. I never boo - but I feel like telling the whole lot of them to fuck off and give their wages to charity because they don't deserve them. I'll forgive Dale and Sonny because they came on with about 3 minutes to go and ran in a forward direction but the game was one long sideways pass followed by an aimless punt from a centre back to no one in particular and repeat. Nothing changed. We just did THE SAME THING ALL FUCKING GAME. I'm still seething 6 months later.
At times we've looked as threatening as a primary school pet. We've been docile, we've been accommodating. We've been timid and frankly, at times, frightened by the opposition. Burton mugged us. Cheltenham mugged us and laughed in our faces. Lincoln mugged us, laughed in our faces and then pissed on us. Leyton Orient mugged us, laughed in our faces, pissed on us and then daubed rude words on our property. Wigan didn't so much mug us as make us give them our dinner money and then spent it on fags which they smoked whilst flicking their ash on our pitifully sad little faces.
I could probably go on. Sometimes we've been really *not very good* and usually it's been against a side who have negated our press by not playing from the back and hit a strong forward quite quickly. Richie Wellens basically spelled it out in his post match press conference. He more or less said 'Blackpool are more than fine against other teams like themselves - but if you get it up them, they fall apart' and you can't really argue with his Mancunian drawl.
The mystery of the season has been the tactical rigidity. The only real change has been accommodating Dembele and moving from a flatter more solid three to a more fluid triangle with Kaddy as the tip. Outside of that, the times when we've shifted shape I could likely count on one hand. We went to a four at the back once or twice (the dreadful tinpot cup semi being an example) in the dying minutes but on the rare occasion we did anything other than swap one player for another, it was usually when we were making one last doomed roll of the dice.
Stylistically though, we
have changed things. A formation and the way you play aren't the same things. We've played possession football and tried to slip the ball through. We've eschewed possession football and tried to hit the big man. We've found a balance at times and done a bit of both. As we've already said - when it's worked - it's worked - but when it hasn't, it's looked aimless. It's never really coalesced into the final product. Good teams have the manner of a machine. They play with a routine certainty and mechanical precision - we've often looked like a blueprint or prototype as opposed to real deal. An idea that not all the parts have been ordered for perhaps.
When we've gone all in on possession football we often haven't looked good enough. We have players like Marvin, Callum Connolly and CJ who just aren't touch and go Cruyff's Ajax players. When we've gone direct, we've often looked like a tragicomic pastiche of a football team who've run out of ideas. Kaddy, Sonny and plenty more aren't exactly classic Crazy Gang era Wimbledon. At points, we've hit a blend and it's worked. In the run in, we played brilliantly against Barnsley (for 70 minutes) with the skilful players picking up the pieces Beesley made their defence drop but Beesley is typical of the season overall in that he's not dominant enough to do that to every defence he comes up against. He can do it *sometimes* but he's never going to assert himself against every centre back in the league.
It's early in the season. We're optimistic. Critchley is talking up 'front foot football' and seems to have thrown off the bodywarmer of caution and embraced the hoodie of attack instead. We've brushed aside Burton and played really well at Derby in the league cup, I can't wait for this game!
I feel like I'm still waiting for this game. It just doesn't seem to happen. Port Vale are happy with a point and we're not sure what to do about that. At some point it feels as if everyone says 'well, a point will be fine' to each other and we're treated to a game where both sides mostly defend whilst the other team doesn't attack. That is not 'front foot football' in anyone's book. Not even some party apparatchik rewriting Soviet history and turning Stalin induced famine into a glorious triumph of agrarian plenty would have the gall to describe this game as 'interesting'
This game is part of a run of 0-0 draws. We then lose 5-0 to Wolves and suffer the aforementioned indignity at the hands of Lincoln. It is evident that we aren't very creative. In fact, it is evident that, in creative terms, we look like a set of dried up felt tips. We press... and nothing else. There's this young lad with the touch of an angel and an eye for goal Neil. His name is Rob. Rob Apter. Worth a try? Pop him on as a sub perhaps?
We don't score for five games and loan him to Tranmere. He's 'not ready' but Callum Connolly is bristling with preparedness and offering goal threat and skills, tricks and impudence... It's all fine.
I'm riffing on things that have annoyed me. I was already annoyed by Critchley before he came back so it's kind of natural that I will seek to find fault - and I think there are faults in his rigid thinking and lack of risk. I think we have made too many decisions calculated around solidity and avoiding defeat and not risked losing to win a game often enough. Have we ever chucked Marvin up for the last 10 minutes? It's simplistic stuff and it doesn't come from a spreadsheet analysis of data bra numbers but it's a bit of symbol - we've very rarely chucked the kitchen sink - in fact, some weeks, I don't think we've even gone into the kitchen and instead, just slumped on the couch in the lounge and accepted defeat or a draw with an apathetic shrug.
Lets be fair though. It's not been
that bad. I'm writing as if we'd got relegated. I'm writing as if Steve Bushell and Steve Garvey were running about for us. They weren't.
CJ had a run of games earlier in the season that convinced us to make a chant for him. The fact he got a contract out of it may or may not be a coincidence. He was actually really good for a bit (*). Jimmy played out of his skin for a good while at the start of the year. He wasn't just 'solid' - he was remarkably composed and doing it at both ends of the pitch. Dougall looked a class above the division in the run up to Christmas and got us ticking and players like Carey benefited massively from it. Jordan Rhodes arrived and was the definition of 'if there's any young players watching out there, take a lesson from how he does it' and alongside him, the other strikers seemed to be touched by his presence and gifted with a newfound understanding of what to do. Owen Dale surprised me in how effectively he played the wing back role and the determination with which he performed each week, Ollie Casey showed he'd learned something at Forest Green and could play with a calmness. Grimmy played himself into some rare form and pulled out some stunning saves. Sonny clatttered shots against the woodwork, whistled them just wide and then eventually found his range. Albie Morgan had a similar and even more convincing journey, going from a bit of a whirlwind where not a lot came off, to looking both solid and dangerous consistently.
* He was!
There is and has been quality this year. It would be churlish to say otherwise. We've also had poor luck - we've not been decimated by injury or misfortune, but we've seemed to suffer from key players being unavailable whenever we've hit a run of form. It's that sense that whenever we've got the Volvo up to speed, it's stalled. Sometimes I think it's Critchley's foot on the brake, but I don't think you can blame him for everything. We've finished the season with a greater solidity. We're not a clown car of a team as we were the year before - but we are a division below so perhaps the relative gains are par for the course?
Lavery's continuing patchy availability has murdered us. It's not that I think Lavs would have scored 40 goals - but that to play a possession and pressing based game, you by definition need the energy of that kind of player to stretch and worry a defence. If you doubt me, remove Yates from our last League 1 team and now try and imagine us getting promoted. You can't.
We needed Lavery (and another Lavery to back him up) - Instead, we got Rhodes - who was magnificent - but not the player the system needed to work as intended. As soon as Lavery (and indeed Joseph) were unavailable, we were playing a Frankenstein version of our original plan. When that plan became embedded, then Rhodes himself got injured and we had even less options.
Kenny Dougall probably played some of his best football in a Blackpool shirt this season. He was tremendous for a period. We all know what happened next. Albie Morgan came in and picked up his mantle to an extent. He got himself playing really well. I began to grudgingly think 'Critch has done well with this lad - he's learned the discipline to choose his moment and is looking like a real player' and then he got injured.
Players we might have thought we could have relied upon had dodgy spells. Marvin (who I think has actually been decent overall) had the worst spell of his career early on. Callum Connoly looks like he's forgotten anything he knew 2 years ago about playing football. This was the man who smashed his way to dominance in the midfield at Craven Cottage against a side now well established in the top flight. Where is that player? Even Grimmy, the darling of the latter half of the season was wobbly early on. Kyle Joseph's confidence has been in the gutter and Ollie Norburn just hasn't worked out as we hoped he would. If anyone can tell me what Matty Virtue was for this season and why he was there at all then I'd be very grateful... I think he partly sums up something - I like Matty. He's a wholehearted player. He's got a decent football brain. He's had no chance to find any form at all. Other players (Joseph) have been waterboarded - pushed into the team, taken out, repeat, whilst others (CJ) have been able to play themselves into form and back out again with no real consequences.
I'm really trying to be balanced. I could quite easily write a polemic about everything that's pissed me off but I don't think that's how I want this blog to be.
To me, it's been a strange season. It feels like it's never quite started. I've picked a few games out but there's loads I feel as if I can't remember. We won plenty but we didn't wholly convince. We lost a fair few but we didn't get twatted. It felt a lot of the time as if we were playing within ourselves. Sometimes it seemed as if we didn't have a plan - and that (in a curious and counter intuitive way) made it seem as if we were sticking stubbornly to a plan. By that, I mean at times, I found it baffling that 11 players who play football every single day of their working lives couldn't fashion a way to attack more effectively between them. I also couldn't understand why a bunch of coaches who spend all their time thinking about football couldn't come up with anything to change that.
I come to the end of this season not sure how I feel about next year. I know that Sonny Carey is a rare talent and those who doubt it are fools. I know Grimmy is brilliant. I know I like Marv despite his shaky early season form. I know that Beesley will always try his best and that counts for something and so on. I know what I know but I don't know what I want.
I know Critchley will talk up 'quality and intent' and I know he's previously put together a very effective team. I know he's found some diamonds in the past. I also know that no matter what he says, he's fundamentally pragmatic and I think this season has been him trying to stretch the idea of 'learn a system' as far as he humanly can. He's pushed the notion of 'I don't care about
this win - I care more about the overall picture' to an extreme. At times, the deliberate lack of intervention and like for like substitutes can only be an attempt to play the long game. I'm just not convinced that you get out of League 1 like that - that no matter what preferred system you play - you have to adapt because the variation in styles is more pronounced than at higher level where every team has the technical ability to play a certain way.
I have a grudging respect for that stubbornness but I also don't see the same impishness and connection that was there first time around. I see a man who can still palpably coach and instruct - but who seems, rather than bravely 'sticking to a principle' (like, say Postecoglou or perhaps at our level, Darren Ferguson) has got a bit lost within his own idea. He seems frozen sometimes. He looks pained - as if he knows he should be doing something, but he can't break out of the preconceived plan. Essentially, the season is summed up by 'when it works, it works and when it doesn't it doesn't' and that's the problem. I loved how managers like McMahon and Holloway had a similar ethos - in the sense that, they were committed to a style and a set up and would go at teams. It would backfire and we'd forgive and move on because there was a real poetry and spirit to what we did. It's harder to forgive that fixed thinking when the highs are more sparse and the style is based more around containment and calculation of risk.
The whole thing is now underscored by an element of uncertainty. What happens next? The possibility that Simon's steady ship may not be as stable as we thought is a concern. It's probably not wise to speculate too much on the legal business of very rich people but it's a clear symbol of how football clubs (that mean the world to thousands of people) are (as we know all too well) at the mercy of the whims and status of individuals. There seems an imbalance in all of this. I have no idea of what the charge against Sadler even means really. I don't really know what a hedge fund is and I don't give a fuck. I care about Saturday at 3pm when the world is a green field and the team is tangerine and I couldn't give a shit about gambling on stocks and stuff. I think that's how most people feel. It all feels kind of 'insecure' in the sense that the circumstances of one person (for good or ill) can have so much impact on the other 99.99999999999999% of people connected to 'the club' - that's football and it's too important to too many people to be subject to the capricious fortunes of the very tiny subset of people who can buy into it.
Who knows? I don't. We need a page turning and we need a real overhaul. It's inevitable now. Our best players were on loan and the ones who weren't might well leave anyway. We've got a small core of decent players but we need more variety, more pace and a proper forward line. We need some plan B football to go with the plan A football and we'd like the plan A football to be more risky.
We may be stuck with him, but he's got to get it right this time and we've got to get what's around him right too.
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| Cheers Kaddy! |
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