Football fans are fickle as fuck. I am a football fan. Therefore, I am fickle as fuck. You wouldn't have to reach very far back in the MCLF archive to find me eulogising Steve Bruce and extolling the virtues of the 90s football fun house with its wingers and its pleasing throwback playground simplicity in contrast to the AI driven, algorithmic, systems football favoured by many others. I lavished praise on his release and rebirth of Carey, rebooting of Fletcher and indulgence of Apter. All of this happened and all of this is still true, but time has ticked on...
I like Steve Bruce. I didn't really expect to when we appointed him, but he's shown himself to be a man of charm, intelligence and, through some really difficult circumstances that go far beyond football and the remit of this blog, amazing dignity. He's shown himself able to care for players and to speak with honesty and depth about football. He's erudite and engaging, in a way I had never previously given him credit for and in a way that many of our recent managers haven't been. It isn't, therefore the case that I'm in some kind of frothing rage, wanting to 'get this prick out of our club.'
It's also too simple to just say 'football is a results game' as if that justifies everything. It's one of the stupidest sayings in the world. All sport is 'results driven' - that's literally the point of sport. If you went fishing and didn't put bait on your hook, then you aren't actually fishing, no one plays golf purely for the walk and sacks of the bit where you try to put the ball in the hole in the least shots you can. The point of all of it is competition against others or against yourself. It is to try and win otherwise it just isn't sport, football or not.
There is, however, a bit more to it than that. Winning doesn't have to come immediately. Sometimes you need to take your time, practice your skills, hone a new technique, develop your confidence. At times, in the moment, the purpose is simply to get better and the results come later. In terms of the prior images, the fisherman might try out a new bait, the golfer might work on their swing, in football terms that might involves blooding a set of young players with an eye on the future or installing some new tactical ideas. History is littered with teams that didn't quite work, until they did and then who looked stronger for the fact they'd been through a period of development in contrast to sides who might have got short term gains, but who were built on less solid foundations.
So far, this reads a bit like a 'plea for patience' - I'm almost convincing myself as I write that 'we just need to give time and wait for it to come good' - but this is not what I'm trying to say, as much as I'd really like to.
So far we've played 8 games in all competitions. That's not a huge sample size, but it's enough to say a pattern has emerged. It's not a definitive pattern, but nonetheless, there's recurring evidence and we could feasibly say we can see trends at work, or at least establishing themselves.
Firstly, we keep conceding bad goals. As a rule, I'm not hugely bothered about conceding 'bad goals' from time to time. All goals against you feel bad, the myth that it's only ok to concede an unstoppable drive from 25 yards is rubbish. No team goes through the season without conceding goals that couldn't feasibly, in an alternative universe, have been stopped. Football is simply too much chaos for a defence to make the right collective choices every single time.
We keep conceding really bad goals though. Like, every fucking week we let the other team score one or two really easy goals and it's not even when we're playing teams who present a real threat. It's not like Exeter, Northampton, Stevenage presented a maelstrom of total football movement, false nines and overloads. They weren't sides full of world class footballers. They're just quite well organised teams of fairly midtable-ish players. We get undone by the simplest of football and we look worried by the most basic of tactics. We have conceded a few less goals in the last couple of games, but we played an out of form Bolton and Northampton who don't score goals and in neither game did we really convince. We lost to the Cobblers and we could have lost to Bolton. Simply 'not conceding quite as many' isn't really 'turning a corner'
I'm not generally someone who wants to hang defenders from the lampost for their missed tackles because I'm more interested in the attacking play. It's not as simple as 'finding defending boring' - I don't, I love defending, I was first a goalkeeper and then a defender when I played football and the art of reading the game, timing a tackle, making an interception, throwing yourself full length to block a shot is every bit as engaging as a shot or a pass. I miss Richard Keough and Daniel Grimshaw nearly as much as Gary Madine and Jerry Yates so to speak - I just don't subscribe to the idea that a good defence is more important than a good attack - If you don't have the ability to go forward, you end up under pressure and as above, football is too much chaos for defenders to keep guessing correctly forever. An attack is a defence so to speak, because whilst you attack, you don't need to defend but a defence isn't an attack cos no matter how well you sit in, it doesn't ever score a goal.
I want to reference numbers in this piece - not because numbers are everything, but it's important not just to opine. Who cares what I think - I'm no one and more to the point, I'm a fan and fans aren't objective. Lose and we hurt, win and we get carried away. I'm no different. What then, does the data say?
Defensive stats are really not great - We've got the 8th worst XGa (essentially, how likely we are to concede goals) and the 4th worst ratio of shots conceded per game - so, put simply, if we'd cut out a few of the the shit goals we've conceded, we'd still be losing plenty of games because we've given away a lot of good chances. We've got the lowest rate of successful tackles in the division and rank 18th in the possession table. It's perfectly possible to win games with low possession, but if you also can't tackle well, then you're not going to win the ball back very much and therefore be under pressure a lot.
What about going forward?
I've watched all of our football this year and some of the preseason. I would say, out of the 1200 minutes or so of football I've watched, we've probably put together about 50 minutes of decent attacking play. We were 'ok' at the start of the second half yesterday and we obviously had a great 20 minutes against Huddersfield where Niall Ennis looked tremendous. Other than that, we've had a few moves, the odd moment here and there, but I genuinely couldn't name another spell where we've seemed like a convincing attacking force. We haven't just given goals away, we haven't really looked like scoring many either.
Looking at the stats again backs this up. We have the lowest XG and the 3rd lowest ratio of shots per game in the division. XG isn't everything, but it's a pretty clear and simple indicator of the quality of chances you've created and we simply haven't created a lot. In fact, we've created the least of anyone. Which is pretty terrifying considering who we have in our squad compared to who some other teams have in theres.. In fact, we've scored slightly more than our XG would suggest - so we can't fall back on 'it's just individuals missing chances' with any real justification.
In terms of our work in between the boxes, the story isn't much better. Our passing is only the 16th best in the division, so fluid team football isn't really evident in the data. Breaking this down a bit further, we're 4th and 5th most likely to play either an accurate or inaccurate long pass (and 9th for long key passes) but only 14th in the tables for short passes (both inaccurate and accurate) and only 21st for short key passes which adds weight to the idea we're not playing very developed football, despite having some obviously gifted players who are capable of it. We're also only 16th in the league in terms of 'aerials won' which, given we evidently like to knock it long isn't ideal and perhaps suggestive of a mismatch between forwards and attacking style.
There are lots of ways to attack, from side to side patience and probing, to all out direct bombardment and physical intimidation and whatever comes in between. There's no superiority to any of them. If they work, they work and if they don't, they don't. What they have in common is simple enough. If players are confident in each other, they will execute their skills faster, more instinctively and therefore, it will be harder to play against for the opposition. Man City zipping the ball round quickly with dizzying movement or John Beck's Cambridge hitting the corners with long balls and whipping them into the box for Dion Dublin share the simple truth that when on song and when playing with belief, the players doing what they need to do first time and fast makes it harder to play against.
We look ponderous and uncertain at the back, but I'd argue we look as shapeless and mismatched going forward. Danny Imray and Josh Bowler combined reasonably on Saturday - it wasn't a razor sharp slicing to bits of the Northampton defence - but it was notably better than we've seen so far, simply because it was two players who looked on the same wavelength and whose attributes and gameplans seemed to compliment each other. I would genuinely struggle to identify any other attacking partnership so far this season where I could say that. It's felt, not so much like the players are interlocking cogs, where the clever arrangement of parts using the magic of gearing to make the machine capable of feats of great power as something shoved together where none of the teeth interlock and the cogs all just spin independently.
'Patterns of play' is one of those phrases fans like me say because people on the radio and telly say it and it makes you sound like you know what you are talking about. I'm going to say it anyway, because it seems to best suit the situation. I've watched us lose a lot of games. I've watched us play a lot of poor football. I've been frustrated more than I've been in raptures in my time as a Blackpool FC fan. I'm not unfamiliar with a struggling side. What concerns me really quite deeply is that we don't seem to have any particular strategies. Whilst open play can be a battle more than a ballroom in league 1 and thus, expecting rhythm and grace every week is not realistic, we don't seem to have threatened at set pieces or worked out ways to maximise the moments where we've got the ball. We don't have the relationships and movement that suggest much awareness of each other, much less the telepathy that really good sides display.
I gave Neil Critchley a hard time at the end of his tenure, because the football was so timid. On Saturday, I noticed a detail that I simply couldn't imagine happening under Critchley. I used to be so frustrated that we never took a quick throw, but watching us, not once, but twice manage to get the ball high up the pitch and win a throw in, only to fecklessly throw it straight to the opposition seemed to scream of 'lack of detail.'
Say what you like about the Polo shirted one, but 'lack of detail' was never a criticism that sprung to mind and yes, his obsession with possession absolutely hamstrung his second reign to a point where it reached absurdity - but 'releasing the shackles' shouldn't mean just giving haplessly giving possession away for no reason because the team doesn't have a prepared plan for the situation in front of them. There's a happy medium between instinct and preparation and whilst you can easily imagine Critchley giving a 3 hour seminar on optimal relative positions at throw ins to minimise possession loss and that not really being the perfect input either for a group of league 1 players, I'm struggling a bit to see the influence of coaching in certain basic things at all on this group.
We played 'a bit better' perhaps on Saturday - but we were playing a very limited side. I don't want to be snobby and aloof about it all, but Northampton's budget compared to ours isn't a big one. and their football is fairly straightforward. out of a certain necessity. They don't have many players with the quality of Ennis, Honeyman, Bowler and so on. We did make a few chances and maybe a draw would have been fairer. In fact, if I'm totally objective, a 1-0 win wouldn't have been a total injustice - but that said, losing the game, it doesn't feel as if we've been mugged either. It seemed like 15 minutes of us putting some pressure on in the second half, 10 minutes of them putting some pressure on in the first and us panicking a bit, a lot of nothing and then a sucker punch goal that felt like it was going to happen as we seemed to have given up after about 65 minutes and let them go at us.
We had a couple of nice moves and definitely the moments of 'quality,' but we also had so many moments where basic passing was poor, either because players didn't have an obvious pass to make, or their execution of simple things wasn't great. The players who made the passes hit them long or short and the players who received the passes often seemed to make a meal of it and looked a bit surprised to be receiving the ball. Playing together didn't look natural to them, we didn't look comfortable in what we were doing and moves broke down as much as they reached a conclusion. Again, we should check against the numbers and again, sadly, the data shows us that one of the few metrics we're top half in is 'possession loss' (i.e. we lose the ball more than most teams)
It isn't all 'awful' - there are some elements of the side that look ok and points of data that aren't as bad as the rest - but given the depth and quality of the squad, it would be incredible if we simply lost 5-0 every week and could take nothing at all from any game. There are scraps and straws to cling to but these are really good players. This isn't the post Brett injury Nigel Worthington era where yes, tactically we were painfully limited, but so were the players, this isn't Colin Hendry, who I still think is the worst football manager I've ever seen, but you have to say that he didn't have an embarrassment of riches at his disposal. This isn't even Mick McCarthy, who yes, served up some of the most ill suited tactics in relation to the squad at his disposal that I've ever known, but had the at least partial mitigation that he hadn't bought any of the players and was dealing with a injury blighted and demoralised squad playing in a division where we are financial minnows as opposed to having signed most of them and playing in a league where our spend makes us relatively big fish.
To come back to the opening, what troubles me about things at the moment isn't simply that we're not very good and will get relegated - I think it's almost inevitable that we'll get better, because we have enough good players to do so and just playing together enough will forge some understanding. I don't really fear for our survival in the league because quality does tend to tell. That's not really a ringing endorsement though. Manchester United have been awful for 3 or 4 years but they're not going down because they've always got enough individual quality to win some games. In this league we are ultimately more Man U than we are Ipswich.
What I fear is a bit more long term. Steve Bruce is a lovely bloke etc, but he's in the twilight of a career that seemed to have been over before he joined us. He is, even if we turn up next week and give a dazzling display of tikitaka and won 20-0, not the longer term future of Blackpool FC. Taking the club's words at face value, Bruce was designed to bring some stability and hand on something to the next guy.
Right now, I'm not sure what is being handed over. Sometimes a manager's work can only be really evident in how the next man runs with things - a legacy perhaps of excellent fitness or of a club with very strong youth development, maybe a deeply embedded set of skills that a new manager can refine or compliment or a set of characters/culture that is positive and strong. There's an argument that we thrived last year because whilst Critchley had stifled the creativity of the side, he had instilled a set of non-negotiables. Critchley might not have got things tactically right on the match day but the training ground work was very sound perhaps. Bruce was therefore able to be an affable gaffer and focus on 'getting the lads playing a bit' as the underlying work of forging a squad and a set of values was done. Further to this, Keogh had done a few weeks where we'd not been able to stop scoring goals, so part of that work was in progress.
This season, it's not really evident at all that we've done this foundational stuff. We're currently playing a vaguely 442-ish style which isn't being executed with any particular zeal, energy or aggression and is something I very much doubt many future managers would want to run much further with. 90s football is fun, but only if it actually works (and every metric screams 'it isn't!) and whilst we might want it to, just as in the 90s the habits of the 50s were forgotten, there are legitimate football reasons why very few people adopt the tactical preferences of 3 decades ago. Anyone of my age or older will bemoan 'side to side football' but roll back to the 90s and people were complaining about things not being what they used to be just the same. Football, like life, evolves and we all want to be young and en vogue forever, but we all end up shouting at the clouds about 'bloody woke nonsense and young people today with their stupid ideas and their goalkeepers who pass it round and their tiktok, things ain't what they used to be, remember when you could buy a penny sweet and it cost a penny and the telly had the test card and you could buy proper petrol with good old lead, what's wrong with lead anyway, never did me any harm, bring back Gary Briggs, bring back moustaches, bring back white dog shit, I want my Sonny Carey/country/football/youth back etc'
The problem is, football managers now are managing the players of today - players who've grown up in an entirely different era to the one we recall with fondness. It means nothing to them, just as the football of the 50s meant very little to me in my youth. I'd have been be as confused by being told to play 'wing half' with a brown leather ball and massive boots as potentially some of our players might be in being coached to play a particular way that doesn't wholly chime with their prior experiences. The past is, as they say, a foreign country.
In terms of 'legacy' we've got a relatively expensive and not very young squad. There's quality there yes, but it's not overwhelmingly stacked with bright young talent. A new manager would inherit quite a lot of players who probably don't have huge resale value because of age but who have big contracts. We also don't look anything like a team yet, we don't seem overwhelmingly fit, we don't seem on the cusp of breaking into wild pass and move nirvana or to be incredibly together, so whether that notion of 'creating a culture' would be handed down to whoever comes next is quite uncertain at best. If anything, we looked a lot more 'together' last season than this. The big problem we have is, we probably need to make this set of players work, because this squad doesn't have a massive resale potential to fund its successor.
On several occasions we've turned down the chance to give a young and yes, unproven, managers a job. We've invested significantly in experience and, by the standards of any prior Blackpool FC side large coaching staff. The idea of this, was presumably, that it would be more likely to bring success than gambling on someone unknown - we are possibly at a point where having sunk those costs and despite not seeing any huge evidence of anything that looks or smells like success, we can't really back out of it without incurring further costs. The irony of this is that we're possibly going to spend the season giving time to people who are at the end of their careers and thus have lost the opportunity to give time to someone younger to forge a career and learn their job. As we said at the start, Grayson, Mcmahon and Critchley all had difficult starts, but all of them were young managers with limited experience - appointing a young manager and granting them time is a risk - but it's a risk with a potential reward and a risk we've not taken of late aside from obviously, the time it worked with Critchley.
In short, this is a difficult point for the club - it's hard not to sympathise with the ownership in the sense that, regardless of what you think of the decisions, you can't fault the effort this season (in several different ways.) It's hard not to continue to hope that, despite what is mounting evidence to the contrary, Steve Bruce will forge a fluent, fit fighting force that we all fall in love with, simply because it feels a bit like we have to and we're sick of bemoaning the lot of our football club. I want the likable man in the dugout to get the romantic end to his career and less romantically, I'm sure the owner wants the considerable investment in better pricing, better facilities, players and coaching staff to have some kind of positive outcome, whether in terms of simple good vibes or more cynically, in terms of making the club a more salable asset. I don't know what Sadler's long term intentions are, but either which way, a season of humdrum drudgery and underachievement isn't going to make him a happy deck shoe wearer.
We've put a lot of eggs in the Bruce basket in other words. The problem for me as someone who wants to write positive stuff (no, really, I do), is that I'm increasingly unconvinced that we've got what it takes to make an omelette out of them, or perhaps, to put it more accurately, the omelette recipe we're using is simply not a very good one. This is a rubbery and tasteless football team at the moment - and yet there are definitely herbs and spices in the basket along with the eggs. A side that doesn't tackle well, gives up twice the chances it creates, passes long to players who aren't great in the air and bypasses players who are good at passing isn't a blueprint for success.
My opinions are far from definitive. I still rate Simon Wiles and expect him to play in at least the Championship at some point. I remain convinced that Sullay Kaikai is a world class footballer just misapplied and everyone else is wrong. The data is also never definitive either and the sample size is small, I wrote a similar piece about Neil Critchley at around the same point in 2020 and the numbers did change and of course, the little imp twinkled all the way to Wembley and beyond, despite my initial scepticism. I think the numbers this time are worse though, Critchley's side was missing chances and we were doing some things well, if also some things very badly. The stats to date are really quite alarming. Stats are not football, but they can serve to challenge or support assumptions or appearances. It doesn't give me a lot of pleasure to say that sadly, it appears that my impressions of our football this season are not false and fundamentally, we've not been very good for most of the time we've been on the pitch.
*long sigh*
We need a massive improvement.
Perhaps when he's fit, Josh Bowler will just run round everyone every game and score twice a match and it will all be ok.
Onward.
In terms of our work in between the boxes, the story isn't much better. Our passing is only the 16th best in the division, so fluid team football isn't really evident in the data. Breaking this down a bit further, we're 4th and 5th most likely to play either an accurate or inaccurate long pass (and 9th for long key passes) but only 14th in the tables for short passes (both inaccurate and accurate) and only 21st for short key passes which adds weight to the idea we're not playing very developed football, despite having some obviously gifted players who are capable of it. We're also only 16th in the league in terms of 'aerials won' which, given we evidently like to knock it long isn't ideal and perhaps suggestive of a mismatch between forwards and attacking style.
There are lots of ways to attack, from side to side patience and probing, to all out direct bombardment and physical intimidation and whatever comes in between. There's no superiority to any of them. If they work, they work and if they don't, they don't. What they have in common is simple enough. If players are confident in each other, they will execute their skills faster, more instinctively and therefore, it will be harder to play against for the opposition. Man City zipping the ball round quickly with dizzying movement or John Beck's Cambridge hitting the corners with long balls and whipping them into the box for Dion Dublin share the simple truth that when on song and when playing with belief, the players doing what they need to do first time and fast makes it harder to play against.
We look ponderous and uncertain at the back, but I'd argue we look as shapeless and mismatched going forward. Danny Imray and Josh Bowler combined reasonably on Saturday - it wasn't a razor sharp slicing to bits of the Northampton defence - but it was notably better than we've seen so far, simply because it was two players who looked on the same wavelength and whose attributes and gameplans seemed to compliment each other. I would genuinely struggle to identify any other attacking partnership so far this season where I could say that. It's felt, not so much like the players are interlocking cogs, where the clever arrangement of parts using the magic of gearing to make the machine capable of feats of great power as something shoved together where none of the teeth interlock and the cogs all just spin independently.
'Patterns of play' is one of those phrases fans like me say because people on the radio and telly say it and it makes you sound like you know what you are talking about. I'm going to say it anyway, because it seems to best suit the situation. I've watched us lose a lot of games. I've watched us play a lot of poor football. I've been frustrated more than I've been in raptures in my time as a Blackpool FC fan. I'm not unfamiliar with a struggling side. What concerns me really quite deeply is that we don't seem to have any particular strategies. Whilst open play can be a battle more than a ballroom in league 1 and thus, expecting rhythm and grace every week is not realistic, we don't seem to have threatened at set pieces or worked out ways to maximise the moments where we've got the ball. We don't have the relationships and movement that suggest much awareness of each other, much less the telepathy that really good sides display.
I gave Neil Critchley a hard time at the end of his tenure, because the football was so timid. On Saturday, I noticed a detail that I simply couldn't imagine happening under Critchley. I used to be so frustrated that we never took a quick throw, but watching us, not once, but twice manage to get the ball high up the pitch and win a throw in, only to fecklessly throw it straight to the opposition seemed to scream of 'lack of detail.'
Say what you like about the Polo shirted one, but 'lack of detail' was never a criticism that sprung to mind and yes, his obsession with possession absolutely hamstrung his second reign to a point where it reached absurdity - but 'releasing the shackles' shouldn't mean just giving haplessly giving possession away for no reason because the team doesn't have a prepared plan for the situation in front of them. There's a happy medium between instinct and preparation and whilst you can easily imagine Critchley giving a 3 hour seminar on optimal relative positions at throw ins to minimise possession loss and that not really being the perfect input either for a group of league 1 players, I'm struggling a bit to see the influence of coaching in certain basic things at all on this group.
We played 'a bit better' perhaps on Saturday - but we were playing a very limited side. I don't want to be snobby and aloof about it all, but Northampton's budget compared to ours isn't a big one. and their football is fairly straightforward. out of a certain necessity. They don't have many players with the quality of Ennis, Honeyman, Bowler and so on. We did make a few chances and maybe a draw would have been fairer. In fact, if I'm totally objective, a 1-0 win wouldn't have been a total injustice - but that said, losing the game, it doesn't feel as if we've been mugged either. It seemed like 15 minutes of us putting some pressure on in the second half, 10 minutes of them putting some pressure on in the first and us panicking a bit, a lot of nothing and then a sucker punch goal that felt like it was going to happen as we seemed to have given up after about 65 minutes and let them go at us.
We had a couple of nice moves and definitely the moments of 'quality,' but we also had so many moments where basic passing was poor, either because players didn't have an obvious pass to make, or their execution of simple things wasn't great. The players who made the passes hit them long or short and the players who received the passes often seemed to make a meal of it and looked a bit surprised to be receiving the ball. Playing together didn't look natural to them, we didn't look comfortable in what we were doing and moves broke down as much as they reached a conclusion. Again, we should check against the numbers and again, sadly, the data shows us that one of the few metrics we're top half in is 'possession loss' (i.e. we lose the ball more than most teams)
It isn't all 'awful' - there are some elements of the side that look ok and points of data that aren't as bad as the rest - but given the depth and quality of the squad, it would be incredible if we simply lost 5-0 every week and could take nothing at all from any game. There are scraps and straws to cling to but these are really good players. This isn't the post Brett injury Nigel Worthington era where yes, tactically we were painfully limited, but so were the players, this isn't Colin Hendry, who I still think is the worst football manager I've ever seen, but you have to say that he didn't have an embarrassment of riches at his disposal. This isn't even Mick McCarthy, who yes, served up some of the most ill suited tactics in relation to the squad at his disposal that I've ever known, but had the at least partial mitigation that he hadn't bought any of the players and was dealing with a injury blighted and demoralised squad playing in a division where we are financial minnows as opposed to having signed most of them and playing in a league where our spend makes us relatively big fish.
To come back to the opening, what troubles me about things at the moment isn't simply that we're not very good and will get relegated - I think it's almost inevitable that we'll get better, because we have enough good players to do so and just playing together enough will forge some understanding. I don't really fear for our survival in the league because quality does tend to tell. That's not really a ringing endorsement though. Manchester United have been awful for 3 or 4 years but they're not going down because they've always got enough individual quality to win some games. In this league we are ultimately more Man U than we are Ipswich.
What I fear is a bit more long term. Steve Bruce is a lovely bloke etc, but he's in the twilight of a career that seemed to have been over before he joined us. He is, even if we turn up next week and give a dazzling display of tikitaka and won 20-0, not the longer term future of Blackpool FC. Taking the club's words at face value, Bruce was designed to bring some stability and hand on something to the next guy.
Right now, I'm not sure what is being handed over. Sometimes a manager's work can only be really evident in how the next man runs with things - a legacy perhaps of excellent fitness or of a club with very strong youth development, maybe a deeply embedded set of skills that a new manager can refine or compliment or a set of characters/culture that is positive and strong. There's an argument that we thrived last year because whilst Critchley had stifled the creativity of the side, he had instilled a set of non-negotiables. Critchley might not have got things tactically right on the match day but the training ground work was very sound perhaps. Bruce was therefore able to be an affable gaffer and focus on 'getting the lads playing a bit' as the underlying work of forging a squad and a set of values was done. Further to this, Keogh had done a few weeks where we'd not been able to stop scoring goals, so part of that work was in progress.
This season, it's not really evident at all that we've done this foundational stuff. We're currently playing a vaguely 442-ish style which isn't being executed with any particular zeal, energy or aggression and is something I very much doubt many future managers would want to run much further with. 90s football is fun, but only if it actually works (and every metric screams 'it isn't!) and whilst we might want it to, just as in the 90s the habits of the 50s were forgotten, there are legitimate football reasons why very few people adopt the tactical preferences of 3 decades ago. Anyone of my age or older will bemoan 'side to side football' but roll back to the 90s and people were complaining about things not being what they used to be just the same. Football, like life, evolves and we all want to be young and en vogue forever, but we all end up shouting at the clouds about 'bloody woke nonsense and young people today with their stupid ideas and their goalkeepers who pass it round and their tiktok, things ain't what they used to be, remember when you could buy a penny sweet and it cost a penny and the telly had the test card and you could buy proper petrol with good old lead, what's wrong with lead anyway, never did me any harm, bring back Gary Briggs, bring back moustaches, bring back white dog shit, I want my Sonny Carey/country/football/youth back etc'
The problem is, football managers now are managing the players of today - players who've grown up in an entirely different era to the one we recall with fondness. It means nothing to them, just as the football of the 50s meant very little to me in my youth. I'd have been be as confused by being told to play 'wing half' with a brown leather ball and massive boots as potentially some of our players might be in being coached to play a particular way that doesn't wholly chime with their prior experiences. The past is, as they say, a foreign country.
In terms of 'legacy' we've got a relatively expensive and not very young squad. There's quality there yes, but it's not overwhelmingly stacked with bright young talent. A new manager would inherit quite a lot of players who probably don't have huge resale value because of age but who have big contracts. We also don't look anything like a team yet, we don't seem overwhelmingly fit, we don't seem on the cusp of breaking into wild pass and move nirvana or to be incredibly together, so whether that notion of 'creating a culture' would be handed down to whoever comes next is quite uncertain at best. If anything, we looked a lot more 'together' last season than this. The big problem we have is, we probably need to make this set of players work, because this squad doesn't have a massive resale potential to fund its successor.
On several occasions we've turned down the chance to give a young and yes, unproven, managers a job. We've invested significantly in experience and, by the standards of any prior Blackpool FC side large coaching staff. The idea of this, was presumably, that it would be more likely to bring success than gambling on someone unknown - we are possibly at a point where having sunk those costs and despite not seeing any huge evidence of anything that looks or smells like success, we can't really back out of it without incurring further costs. The irony of this is that we're possibly going to spend the season giving time to people who are at the end of their careers and thus have lost the opportunity to give time to someone younger to forge a career and learn their job. As we said at the start, Grayson, Mcmahon and Critchley all had difficult starts, but all of them were young managers with limited experience - appointing a young manager and granting them time is a risk - but it's a risk with a potential reward and a risk we've not taken of late aside from obviously, the time it worked with Critchley.
In short, this is a difficult point for the club - it's hard not to sympathise with the ownership in the sense that, regardless of what you think of the decisions, you can't fault the effort this season (in several different ways.) It's hard not to continue to hope that, despite what is mounting evidence to the contrary, Steve Bruce will forge a fluent, fit fighting force that we all fall in love with, simply because it feels a bit like we have to and we're sick of bemoaning the lot of our football club. I want the likable man in the dugout to get the romantic end to his career and less romantically, I'm sure the owner wants the considerable investment in better pricing, better facilities, players and coaching staff to have some kind of positive outcome, whether in terms of simple good vibes or more cynically, in terms of making the club a more salable asset. I don't know what Sadler's long term intentions are, but either which way, a season of humdrum drudgery and underachievement isn't going to make him a happy deck shoe wearer.
We've put a lot of eggs in the Bruce basket in other words. The problem for me as someone who wants to write positive stuff (no, really, I do), is that I'm increasingly unconvinced that we've got what it takes to make an omelette out of them, or perhaps, to put it more accurately, the omelette recipe we're using is simply not a very good one. This is a rubbery and tasteless football team at the moment - and yet there are definitely herbs and spices in the basket along with the eggs. A side that doesn't tackle well, gives up twice the chances it creates, passes long to players who aren't great in the air and bypasses players who are good at passing isn't a blueprint for success.
My opinions are far from definitive. I still rate Simon Wiles and expect him to play in at least the Championship at some point. I remain convinced that Sullay Kaikai is a world class footballer just misapplied and everyone else is wrong. The data is also never definitive either and the sample size is small, I wrote a similar piece about Neil Critchley at around the same point in 2020 and the numbers did change and of course, the little imp twinkled all the way to Wembley and beyond, despite my initial scepticism. I think the numbers this time are worse though, Critchley's side was missing chances and we were doing some things well, if also some things very badly. The stats to date are really quite alarming. Stats are not football, but they can serve to challenge or support assumptions or appearances. It doesn't give me a lot of pleasure to say that sadly, it appears that my impressions of our football this season are not false and fundamentally, we've not been very good for most of the time we've been on the pitch.
*long sigh*
We need a massive improvement.
Perhaps when he's fit, Josh Bowler will just run round everyone every game and score twice a match and it will all be ok.
Onward.
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