This season has been strange. The last season was odd too. In fact, the season before that was odd as well. I don't know about anyone else but I feel as if Blackpool FC has fallen into some kind of weird uncanny valley - a kind of mist shrouded slightly shadowy version of itself. It is Blackpool FC but somehow, it feels a little bit 'wrong'
Let me expand a bit. It's not just this season. This season has been odd (and we'll get to that soon enough) but it's the last couple of seasons. Firstly, Michael Appleton returned, like a spectre at the feast, a weird forgotten memory suddenly front and centre. That season was bizarre. I've never wondered before what would happen if you set 'The Walking Dead' in Yorkshire, but Mick McCarthy's reign is probably quite close to the truth. When you list the players we had at our disposal it seems kind of incredible we went down and were so consistently shit. We had Morgan fucking Rogers for fucks sake, and he didn't even get in our team all the time.
Then Neil Critchley was reanimated and back, back, back but that never sat right. We did win quite a few games but it strangely didn't feel as if we were doing so and Critchley seemed to have undergone some kind of tactical lobotomy which left him dependent on reliving the same experience over and over and over again, forever sending on Matty Virtue for his weekly 8 minutes regardless of the situation. Critchley 2.0 was a hollowed out figure. Something had happened to him.
This season started with car crash football. Critchley's few games were horror smashes. The kind where you'd close the motorway and need the air ambulance. Crazy Uncle Richard's were more a lurid high tempo dodgem ride kind of smash up, fun in their own way but probably not really the best mode of transport towards destination Championship.
Then the club announced Steve Bruce and my head fell off. Nothing seemed further from the vision I still clung to of us, playing exciting youthful football with exciting young players and an exciting young coach. The dinosaur tag is a lazy one but honestly, Bruce's craggy features, looking like a combination of a particularly gnarly cliff face and a big hessian sack full of oats as he spoke about 'being back in football' was like a particularly surreal dream. I couldn't work it out. Was this really happening? Was Beadle about to pop out and declare 'surprise!' and capture my astonished face for the amusement of a prime time ITV audience?
Then we were brilliant for a few games and it seemed like it might be a dream, but the good kind, the football version of when you have a dream about someone you didn't previously fancy but then when you wake up, you do. Then it fell apart for particularly awful reasons and it felt as if possibly Bruce might not come back because this is only football and it seemed we might need to start all over again as really not very crazy at all Uncle Aggers masterminded a series of abject and stubbornly poor displays and everything was really quite shit. Thankfully, Steve '90s football genius' Bruce reappeared in the dugout and the floundering ship was steadied and we even won some away games in a row which feels mental and pretty good.
Thus far this year we've stared the relegation places in the face, gone on a couple of runs that have had us believing, won a few games in fine style, got battered a few times and served up a few really stultifying stalemates in between. We're on our best away run for ages, we haven't won at home since September. At one point we'd scored more goals than anyone else in English football, but we also look like we can't score and lack a forward line. We're actually quite tight at the back of late, but at the beginning of the season (and for a while after 'the beginning' had ended) we couldn't stop conceding, regardless of whether the opposition were any good or not.
I think Bruce is doing a decent job: Stats would bear this out:
He's been physically present in the dugout for 13 games - We've won 7, drawn 3 and lost 3. That record over 46 games would, without doubt have us in that most specific of football locations - 'there or thereabouts'
I think he's shown a canny approach, he's made the best of what he has and navigated some extremely difficult challenges (not to speak of his personal circumstances but to come in to a club, go out again and then come back in isn't easy whatever is going on) with wisdom and calmness. I get the sense that he calls a spade a spade and a crap performance a crap performance but at the same time, by the time midweek rolls around, bygones are bygones and he's willing to give everyone a chance afresh. He's certainly addressed our inability to play football away from Bloomfield Road and whilst 'changing things from time to time' shouldn't be something remarkable for a football manager, recent history makes Bruce look like an inspired and flexible tactical guru for having the imagination to sometimes put an extra striker on or move the tricky player into the middle for a bit.
In short, I think we're in safe hands for the time being. I think we have a manager who knows both what he's doing and why he's doing it. Is he the next Kieran Mckenna? No. Is he serious about his job with us and thinking hard about it and having a positive impact? Yes. He'll do for me whatever I thought initially.
Lets go back to the beginning. It's been a really underwhelming few seasons. The atmosphere shows it. The dwindling crowds show it.
There was a real shine to us for a few years. A sense of a new beginning and an optimism. A sense of being 'part of something' - Perhaps COVID was a little bit of a curse turned into a blessing in that respect, in that we'd not really fully appreciated being 'back' when it was snatched away again and whilst everyone reemerged into the football world salivating and that little bit more edgy and appreciative of the sheer liveness of it all, we really, really grasped that and for a year or so, it felt as if we were louder, bigger, more colourful and more together than ever.
That seems like a distant memory.
The last few seasons of mediocrity, mixed with calamity and some questionable commercial decisions/ill thought through communication from the club itself seem to have meant we've regressed to a state of shoulder shrugging rank averageness and surly antipathy/apathy towards the whole thing.
Let me qualify that. In the black hole years where I know pretty much nothing about us, we finished 10th and 12th in this division despite being the weirdest club in the league and having next to no one at games. It feels as if we should be doing a bit better now, what with having supporters and a few other normal things that normal football clubs have.
That shoulder shrugging averageness applies to the squad too. I don't want to single anyone out to damn with faint praise but we're a squad of unremarkable players who just seem to have ended up here because they have. It's hard to discern a whole lot of variety within or any great plan behind the make up of the 22, especially as the man of neatly ironed polo shirts and the fully safety equipped Volvo (with its '5-3-2' steering wheel) who was responsible for the make up of so much of who and what we now are is currently plying his trade of sensible string back driving gloves football over the border.
Supporters trade in outrage because that's the currency of the day for all public discourse and you don't have to look far on an any given match day to find someone being labelled as 'shite' but the truth is, they're mostly fairly adept at football. The problem isn't that they are all rubbish at the basics of the game - it's more that very few of them stand out as being actually remarkable at anything. The squad isn't so much 'shite' as 'bland' and poorly balanced for what we're trying to do. If I was an opposition fan, I'm not sure I'd noticed that much about us most weeks.
I think there's a cynicism beginning to set in - I can feel myself already glumly accepting that we've signed a 19 year old on loan from Stoke reserves (and nothing else) on deadline day but in the interests of optimism and finding some kind of purpose to the whole pointless affair of following a club who mostly aren't very good, I think it has to be said that this January might be the most crucial one since the (no longer quite so new) ownership took over.
Here's why:
We've turned this way and that way over the last few seasons. We've tried things, abandoned things, gone from one style to another and whilst initially, Bruce seemed to be one more stab in the dark, the presence of Dobbie and Keogh in the background suggests a semblance of future proofing ourselves and a degree of hitherto unseen succession planning. In fact, we've got what must be one of the more expensive dugouts in the division and for it to flounder around for a couple of years making do with a squad defined by it's averageness and lack of depth in key positions would be a strange way of using it. It's like hiring a top architect to design a 2 bed semi detached bungalow and asking him to make it look like a Barratt Home. It makes no sense.
If we don't have a good go at addressing the obvious defects in the squad (we've got one goalie who can catch and the other who can kick, half the number of wide players we need, a back up left back who can't be trusted to play left back, no real natural finisher (assuming Rhodes doesn't find the elixir of youth), no target man, only really one 'tough' midfielder who is seemingly always injured therefore his toughness is a bit of a moot point) then you have to ask what is really in this for Steve Bruce? - He's been around the game forever, he's managed his boyhood club (and their deadliest rivals) - he's got to cup finals, he's won things, he's lifted Premier League trophies - and whilst he clearly loves the game, I'm not sure scraping us to 9th for a couple of seasons is the most attractive option.
We desperately need a bit more. We need some 'points of difference' - that would ideally be some top class players who possess everything but being realistic, we're unlikely to get any of them, so instead, it probably needs to be a couple of quick lads, a couple of lads who are pretty hard and a couple of lads who are pretty big and hopefully all of them possess a basic level of technique.
However tempting it is to give in to a doom laden fatalism, the season is really far from over and the right signings could transform us. Kyle Joseph runs literally miles further than the average striker and will make space for the right partner. Everyone wants a goalscorer but we've got no one who you'd really back in the box (Rhodes maybe a finisher still, but it's becoming increasingly evident that he's not going to be able to play a harrying, intense game such as we've played at our best.) Someone to protect Evans and dominate midfield would make the world of difference as currently, the nearest thing we've had to a play maker for years is having to be his own enforcer. Others in midfield don't lack talent either, but neither Morgan or Carey are going to protect anyone either. More width is a must because we're so over reliant on Robbie Apter it's painful because literally no one else in the squad can actually beat a man. A target man would be an excellent option from the bench because when we're struggling to get through and go long, we look blunt as manfully as Kyle tries, he's really not Dave Bamber and neither is anyone else. If Husband gets injured we're screwed at left back. Maybe Harry Tyrer will become a good keeper, as despite him doing a really good impression of being not very good, I think he actually probably is a good keeper in waiting who just needs to get his head right, but that's Everton's gamble to take really, not ours and a solid goalkeeper to replace the pretty good one we flogged at the last on deadline day is probably needed too.
It seems a lot to ask for but it's what's needed and you could make a case for even more. It might seem far fetched and wise sages (and idiots like me) say things such as 'January's no time to buy really' - but in the first January window of the Sadler era, we brought in, Maxwell, Thorniley, Ward, Ronan, Dewsbury-Hall, Taylor Moore, made Husband's loan permanent and also signed some big Geordie lump with a dodgy groin whose name I forget. Wonder what happened to him?
That's 8 signings, all of whom you could argue were a success in tangerine, whether immediate or longer term. That window goes to show the current management of the club that it's not impossible to add significant strength in January and, if we aren't in a position to enact that now - with one of the game's most well connected and experienced figures in charge (and someone who knows him well in charge of recruitment,) then it begs the question - when will we ever be in a position to do so and if we're not going to place our faith in Steve Bruce then who the hell are we ever going to place our faith in and if not Bruce, why on earth get a manager who is such a change in direction?)
Getting rid of Critchley so soon after spending all summer presumably recruiting for his quite particular style and replacing him with someone who made few bones about publicly declaring 'we'll be doing something different' almost as soon as he took the job is a decision that if we want to make a success of it, then we'll have to take the chance in January to do what we didn't do in summer and recruit some of the pieces that are needed to make the Steve Bruce jigsaw whole. January is where odds and sods are on the market - and to bring the piece to a close, perhaps one of the reasons we've just not felt wholly 'Blackpool' of late is precisely because that kind of 'slightly raggedy, bit of a gamble, left out somewhere else, needs a shot in the arm and a bit of bracing seaside air' player has been lacking and maybe, whilst I'm almost certainly thinking wishfully, January could just bring us a few of those and things could look and feel very different.
There's no guarantees in football (another hackneyed cliche) but unless we have a go at stirring up the pot, and add a bit more bold flavour to the mix whilst we're at it then I can't see this season really going anywhere and that cloud of tedium and apathy that seems to cling to Bloomfield Road will not be dispersed. If we get that bit more depth, that bit more spice, that little bit more bite - then it might just create a bit of a chain reaction - those players currently with us are lifted, it might unlock that bit more space, that new partnership might blossom and so on. Why not this window? When have we ever been 'right up there' at this point and made a success of it? We always come good later on. It's what we do.
The energy we all feed on has been missing for quite some time.
Now is the time to find it.
Onward
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