What just happened? - the Mighty vs themselves (Richard Keogh's Tangerine Army)

'Listen, Yeah, so, I've not really got a clue to be fair. Listen, nah, I'll given it a go.' 

What the fuck was that week?

I don't normally pass direct comment on games I didn't attend. Talking about matches you weren't at isn't what this is about. It's about being there. Being in a crowd of people all wanting the same thing is the best thing about football. The rising tension and explosive release of celebrating a goal is the ultimate experience in life. It's better than the best things on the pitch (far post headers, passes played by a player with the vision to see what no one else can and outfield players in goal) - the crowd is the point.

It's not possible to let that game slip by though. It was too important for that.

Why though? Surely a 4-4 draw against a tinpot team who've spent the majority of their footballing lives being tinpot and don't have any Ballon d'or winners isn't anything to celebrate. How can we be happy with not beating a side whose greatest ever player is Dion Dublin? He's a competent presenter of light entertainment but he's hardly Alan Ball, Jimmy Armfield, Stanley Matthews, Stanley Mortensen et al.

It doesn't really matter who we played yesterday though.

It's a results game of course - but every now and again, style triumphs over substance. Perhaps a better way to put that is, once in a while, the style is more substantive than anything else.

Let me expand slightly. On Monday we were managed by a man whose idea of a thrill is a Chris Rea guitar solo. A man whose entire conception of football is about risk-reduction, control and shape. Neil Critchley was, what you might call a 'percentages man' - he believed in a kind of bastardised version of Arrigo Sacchi's meticulous approach. The problem wasn't that Critchley was fundamentally shit - we just didn't have a Ruud Gullit (or any of the other Milan 80s superstars) to make that careful, careful... explosive! type of football pay.

A day later, it all changed. Critchley was sent on his way. I imagine there was a sigh before he climbed into the Volvo, smoothed down the beaded seat covers, carefully placed the string back driving gloves on his hands and took one last look at Bloomfield Road. It wasn't to be this time. He'd given it his all. Sometimes you try to make something special and it doesn't work out. The recipe that looks great on paper can end up bland and tasteless.

 
It was probably better to end this way than for it to drag on, turn to true rancour. Last time was special. Maybe the most special thing he'll ever do. It was one of our best times. Maybe, just maybe, there was a tear in the corner of his eye. For all the 'cold towel moments' and 'not getting carried away' underneath all the control, the spreadsheets, the shape (in and out of possession) - Neil Critchley loves football. Football had just kicked sand in his face. 

The man, once the diminutive king of the North Stand, now shunned, on a one way trip back to his sensible bungalow, his frequently jet washed drive (paved by a reputable company to a very high standard, each interlocking brick set square perfectly) and his collection of pale coloured polo shirts, hung in his wardrobe with equal precision. He doesn't deserve hate. He made a big mistake in the way he left last time. He gave his all to putting that right. I respect him for that. Failure doesn't make you a bad person or worthy of scorn. 

He had the courage to try something, he had the stubborn will to stand up to criticism and do it anyway. When that works, people call it 'genius' - when it doesn't, you just look daft. Looking daft is part of life. Shit happens. He'll get another job. He'll be back on the grass, he'll a cog in another machine sooner or later and life goes on. Cheers Neil. 

Then there was Keogh. Have you ever been having a really lovely long sleep and been woken up suddenly by an urgent situation? You know when you're stumbling about, looking for your shoes, putting your underwear on backwards, trying to do up your shirt whilst eating a piece of toast and getting all the buttons wrong and your buttery fingers leave greasy marks on your clothes that you don't have time to do anything about. When you manage to get outside, your mind's all fuzzy, hair askew and the light is hitting your eyes like the torch of a Stasi interrogator asking you brutal and accusatory questions that you don't know the answers to or why they're being asked. 

That appeared to be how yer man Richard felt on getting the job. Then, when Grimmy got sold, it was like finally getting to the car and facing up to the task, only to find you've got a flat tyre and on top of everything else you've got to sort that out and are just going to have to drive really fast and far on the donut spare wheel in the boot even thought it's only good for low speeds and about 50 miles. 

Madness.

Crazy Uncle Richard is probably the most enjoyable footballer I've ever written about. There's just something about him. We signed him on the back of a low point in his life - discarded by Derby, unloved by the clubs he'd moved on to, aging, his name sullied by disgrace. We fell in love with him, he fell in love with us. What a player. What a brain. What a man. There are few more generous footballers with their emotion and attention. Keogh never played alone. He pointed. He shouted, he hugged, he cajoled, he applauded, he had a little word in their ears. He laughed, he hugged, he got them together in a group and talked them through it. I absolutely adored him and it was clear his teammates felt exactly the same.

There was something surreal about watching his claymation Wallace and Gromit face express itself in interviews. He gave off vibes that suggested he felt exactly what you or I might feel if you got up to go to work as normal and then, by the end of the day you were the boss and everything rested on what you decided. His words might have said 'football manager shit' but his eyebrows said 'my god, what the fuck is going on?' and his deep, sad, soulful eyes screamed 'I am actually terrified'

I loved that. 

Critchley 2.0 had lost the awareness of that fear. His eyes were once icy arctic blue. They now seemed dull. Monotony can murder your soul. In any job, you can fall into the trap of believing that 'carrying out the routine' is doing effective work - when in fact, all you are doing is 'carrying out a routine' because that's what you've always done. The fear is so deeply ingrained that it doesn't serve it's purpose an impulse for action anymore. Sometimes it takes a nervous and naive new perspective to see what is happening.

Would Keogh see that? Would he conclude that we needed something different? Would he fall back on the comfort of imitating what had gone on so far? 

Imagine being the apprentice on a job and no one with any experience comes into work. Would you have the courage to make a decision for yourself or would you just follow the rule book? Only a game of football would yield the answer. 

On Saturday we played the opposite way to almost the entire Sadler tenure. This wasn't Critchball or Appleball or Larryball. This wasn't a bastardised Pep tactic, nor was it a cynical hold and hit them on the break set up. This was playground Keegan football. This was a crude crayon drawing of Ian Holloway stuff. It was a throwback to a bygone era where teams turned up, attacked all game and the one who scored the most goals won. It was everything Critchley wouldn't do, for better, for worse. It was rock and roll in its purest form - visceral and exciting but ugly and self destructive. 

It was shit. It was brilliant. There were players who struggled badly shorn of the team's shape and structure. There were players who looked reborn in a set up where they had to think for themselves and make some decisions. There was quality set pieces, there were lightning breaks, there were horrendous mix ups and howling errors. In a nutshell. Stuff happened. I wish I'd have been there. I'd probably still be writing the match up this time tomorrow, trying to edit it down to something less than a short novel. 

After the game, Keogh looked like he'd just experienced some kind of mind expanding drug experience and finally come back to earth about 30 seconds before the camera switched on. The eyebrows, the eyes. The breathless half formed answers. He swore! It is not possible to not fall in love with a manager who accidentally saying 'fucking' on the official club TV interview. He was proud. I think he was right to be so. 

Yes, we were awful. We were also great though. We genuinely could and should have scored more. Evans' free kick, numerous situations in the box, Rhodes hit the post. This was every bit as much of a game of 'fine margins' as any sensible polo shirted, good shape and quality in key both boxes 0-0 draw. If Rhodes had scored, we genuinely might have got four more. Rhodes misses and we concede a bucketful instead. Football is like that. You can try and tame it, or you can go with it. When the storm hits, you can hide in the cellar or you can stand in the street with your arms outstretched and scream into the wind and the rain.

I have no idea if Keogh will have any chance of getting the job. I, of course, predictably and wilfully naively want him to get a 10 year contract. I am not ever going to say 'the sensible thing' - fuck that. I don't want a 'sensible and experienced manager' who spends his time on 'game management' and all that. I hate that. 

I love football. I love the game I played with a stone in the playground, I love the game I played with a tatty mitre ball shorn of all the surface and reduced to the cloth underneath on the rec. I love the impractical and expressive, I love the game stretched and ragged, I love horrible mistakes and genius improvisation, last ditch tackles, diving saves, lightning breaks, long direct balls, short passing, crunching collisions and not being able to take your eyes off it for a second because 22 blokes are simply trying to put the 1 football in either of the 2 goals. That game, such as it can be can move me to near tears just thinking about it. 

It is freedom and beauty and escape. It is dreams and joy. It is heartbreak and pain. It is whatever happens, there'll be another whistle and then it all resets and we live it out all over again. Football is cruel. Football is forgiving. Football is timeless and universal and inclusive. Football is the greatest game on earth bar none. 

Whilst Keogh's interview wasn't polished (who actually gives a fuck about that though?) I thought two things really shone out that were intelligent points. Firstly, he didn't try and sum the game up. He said, he'd need to look at it and think about it. That's a humility we haven't had for some time - and a bit more reflection might have served us well. Secondly, he talked about the fine line between instructing and stifling the team. I think we all knew where he was heading there. 

What we learned on Saturday is this: We learned what we knew already. We're a side with a lack of pace at the back and an ongoing problem when teams get at us. This is not a revelation. We also (and this is the important bit) learned that we're a side who can attack. We're a side who - if thrown into a situation and given the instruction 'go and have a go' - we can actually do that. 

Scoring some goals against Cambridge is obviously not quite proving that we're Brazil 1970 just yet - but there were almost twice the number of shots on target than we managed on the last day of the season in a 'must win-no possible reason to defend' game and almost as many as the last 3 league games combined (that includes that one off, must win game) This matters. It matters hugely. We've been managed for 3.5 years of the last 5 by one man. 

His overriding ethos is described above. It is not easy to just change that overnight. It's not been easy to imagine us creating anything without that one magical player (Bowler,/Dembele) or to see any coherency when we go forward. We achieved that. We shifted the mentality. We played with freedom and expression. We attacked. We did that so much that it bit us on the arse in the end and left us feeling stung and hurt and furious that we'd thrown it away. 

Think about it though. We threw nothing away at Burton, at Port Vale, at Cheltenham, at Lincoln and so on. We threw nothing away against Wycombe at home or Port Vale again... (and so on) - we didn't lose those games because of naivety or poor 'game management' - we lost because we showed zero intent and sat there, letting inferior footballers bully us. We offered nothing. This week - yes, we blew it and did so in a nauseating series of awful decisions and comically inept moments but the point is - we threw something away, we squandered something we'd worked hard to achieve. We capitulated, but we capitulated after we'd done so much good, not after twenty minutes of gentle probing around the box and subsequent retreat to the edge of our own. It was the same problem in some senses. It was very different in terms of what you take away from it about what to do next.

Suddenly, we've got a front three. Suddenly we didn't miss Kaddy quite so agonisingly obviously. Suddenly Kyle Joseph looked worth a few quid after all. Suddenly Dom Ballard was running about giving off quite serious Jerry Yates vibes and Ash Fletcher made sense as the irritant that would win the ball for those two. Suddenly Evans had someone to knock raking balls to. Suddenly (horrendous defensive work aside) CJ didn't look ridiculous chasing those into the corner and stretching play. We had set piece routines and we didn't leave 8 players back at corners and as such, overloaded them several times and scored twice from them. 

What we failed to do was obvious. The work that needs to go into this team is evident - but last week the answer to 'what do we have to better?' was 'literally everything' - this week the answer is far more focused.

Sometimes, you have to try something out to see what you are capable of. Sometimes you have to make mistakes to learn. Keogh was brave. The players played some brave football (alongside some shockingly inept stuff) and I've not felt 'brave' is a word I would attach to us for a long time. It sounds ridiculous, but I left Carlisle after a win, far more frustrated with having watched us sit on a 1-0 for 89 minutes than I felt after this game because all though we won, it was the same game that ultimately would never be quite enough. This was almost enough, should have been more than enough.

We are the team whose unlikely comeback from 3-1 down to win 4-3 is responsible for the popularity of football as a televised spectacle. We are the side who entranced the nation with our ridiculous, brilliant and ultimately doomed attempt to out football the worlds best players with a bunch of ragtag journeymen. We are colour and noise, we are glory and frustration sat side by side holding hands, the divine and the disastrous forever entwined.

We are tangerine. Tangerine is beautiful, impractical, inspired. It is flawed and brilliant all at once. 

It is not a colour that suits grinding it out. It is a colour that suits flying down the wing, a colour that suits a diving header, a colour that suits some flamboyance and style. I just thought Keogh felt the moment and delivered what we needed. A blowout. A reset. Some madness. Let the players show who they are and then see what you've got. 

There's owners, there's consultants, there's strategy and there's key goals, ethos, alignment, targets, mid year reviews, regulations, regulators, court cases, the media, public relations and everything else in this grotesque circus - sometimes, you might just need to stop and get the players to remember what the point of being a footballer is - to play football.

That's the point of a football club.

For all the politics attached to it, there's actually no more than that really needs to be involved.

We've been really quite poor for quite a long time. The genius of Dembele masked that. What we achieved last season was deceptive. A decent points tally but glaringly few really decent team performances. So many games where one man dug us out of a rut with a brilliant bit of skill.

It will take more than two training sessions to put that right and to make us a genuine force. We're clearly still short of some players (not least a goalkeeper and some more pace defensively if we're going to bomb forward) and that needs work.

All I can say to sum up is this - The football was so often soulless. Saturday, it was not. More of that type of thing please. Just next time, if you're going to concede four, make sure you score FIVE

Onward!

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