This was fucking awful... It's so bad that before they've even scored, I'm thinking of a list of things I could have done with my time instead of watching the execrable performance by some sort of poorly drilled half hungover bunch of timid imposters masquerading as a Blackpool FC team.
My car needs new tires for example. I could have gone and got those and then, ran over my own foot several times*. I need to do some DIY about the house. I could have gone and bought a nail gun and fired it into my own knees. I need to cook food for the week and I could have done that then placed my fucking head in the oven**
*I don't know how I'd run over my own foot in my own car
**It's an electric oven so don't worry.
I'm not normally given to hyperbolic statements of negativity - but the actions above would probably have been more pleasurable than the afternoons 'entertainment' at Bloomfield Road. To try and describe the game seems ridiculous because, there's essentially nothing to describe. That said, a match blog without the match is equally ridiculous, so I'm going to have to try and wade through it. I'd rather wade through dog shit studded with broken glass in my bare feet to be honest, but a blogger without a blog ain't a blogger so let's give it a go.
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We started as a 433, an idea I might have quite liked had it not involved Ollie Casey playing (and looking painfully uncomfortable) at right back. Barely anything happened for about 20 minutes. I'm really not exaggerating. Nothing happened of any interest or note.
What did happen was we played some painfully hopeful balls into the channels and some hopeless long balls up to the front 3 who were Taylor (a technical footballer and definitely not a target man) CJ (pretty shit in the air) and Josh Bowler (who has headed the ball about 5 times in his entire career and that's not really exaggerating very much). Not surprisingly, this wasn't very fruitful.
Hayden Coulson sat down and Zac Ashworth came on. At least that was something that happened - even if it wasn't the sort of thing you pay to watch, it made a change from us giving the ball back to Wimbledon for a few minutes and watching the players have a drink was about as interesting as watching them play football.
We then switched to 532 for a while, with Ollie Casey now not so uncomfortable but with us now having Josh Bowler up front, somewhere I've literally never imagined he could play. Nothing happened for ages apart from Bowler trying to slip Taylor through after a nice bit of control and a spin away from his man. It didn't work, but it was the nearest thing you could say resembled a moment of quality.
I've got to be honest, by the point that Wimbledon scored I was that bored out of my mind that I couldn't get that worked up about whether the penalty was inside or outside the box. Whatever it was, we got cut open and Jordan Brown made a wild challenge because their lad got wrong side of our defence and needed stopping, if not in such a clumsy way... The penalty was dispatched past a static goalkeeper and the clouds felt a little heavier.
We mustered a feeble Morgan shot after what could be generously described as a nice passing move on the break (the only one of the game I can remember) and a scuffed Jordan Brown shot that went well wide. I shouted "fucking come on Pool, you're fucking better than this" at them, but it didn't seem to have the impact I'd hoped.
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The football was terrible. The atmosphere non-existent. Wimbledon are nothing special but their fans are noisy and their team committed. I can't believe this is a side with Josh Bowler, Albie Morgan, Dale Taylor, Jordan Brown, Fraser Horsfall and so on. We look languid and totally lacking in imagination. It's been so bad that it can only get better.
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Now we're playing 442. We've taken off Fraser Horsfall who, for reasons I can't really even begin to understand, seems to be Steve Bruce's version of Neil Critchley's Jordan Thorniley. For want of a right back, we've put Jordan Brown (the best of our midfield in the last few games) at right back, even though, as I've already said, we've literally got an actual right back on the bench. Ash Fletcher is on. It's 442 again. What a surprise.
Nothing happens for a while. The Kop tries some half hearted 'come on you Pool' and it just sounds sad. This place can be magical and it wasn't so long ago that we sung them home against Huddersfield, but it's just flat, really, really, really lifeless. It's not turned properly either - yes, we're not exactly singing this team to greater heights, but I've seen far more visceral reactions to managers' bad runs and teams playing badly than this.
At some point Josh Bowler has a shot that is reasonably well, but nonetheless quite comfortably saved by the keeper. We take some awful free kicks. We keep hoping that Taylor will morph into someone who is really grreat at chasing hopeful long balls. We try a few long throws. Nothing remotely approaching passing and movement breaks out.
Tom Bloxham is warming up and they buy a free kick. I think 'that's exactly what they want' and then, as they launch the ball into the box and end up poking it home as we fail to deal with it, I think 'that's it then' and about 2000 people seem to think the same and file out of the ground as those who remain chant "sacked in the morning" - but even that singing seems to lack the anger it can have. Tom Bloxham comes on and nothing changes.
We continue to be fucking awful and the only thing I can think of that was of any sort of entertainment value was the black comedy of us going from a free kick 25 yards out at their end, to nearly conceding a goal at ours in about 4 seconds, thanks to some piss poor sideways football that gifted them possession with the entire pitch to run into. Well done everyone.
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I don't think I've effectively put into words how bad we were. In all the time I've been doing this blog, that was as poor a performance as I can remember. Nothing Appleton served up was this bad apart from maybe Rotherham away. Blackburn away under McCarthy stuck in my mind as a game I particularly disliked and Crtichley's last home game was horrific - but I think this was worse than all of them. The first two were away in the Championship and the quality of the opposition was thus much better and the latter, we had the misfortune to face an on song Louie Barry in a really good team. Today, we just played a side (at home) who stuck to a fairly basic plan, who didn't have any players who really shone or looked impossible to contain and didn't do a whole lot themselves and yet, simply by doing some basic things, won comfortably and really didn't ever look like conceding.
What made it particularly unpalatable was the lack of enjoyment on the pitch. I've rarely seen a side look so out of sorts. The body language was negative. The players looked so fed up with it all. There was no anger, no passion, no energy to any of it. It looked like we just wanted it to be over so the ground could collectively swallow us up. This is not what anyone wants to watch. Football is a game, it's a game we love or loved to play because it's fun and this was no fun at all, for anyone.
It's pointless running through the individual performances, because collectively, we were dreadful. We were tentative and hesitant with the ball, we lacked movement all game and we were second to everything. I don't think it's possible for any one player to be blamed much more than the next and very difficult for any one player to thrive in the midst of such a performance. In fact, it was way beyond the simple 'he was shit' level - the whole thing was a write off - had it been down to a few mistakes or a particular player's performance, then that would be frustrating, but at least explicable - but today, it all just seemed totally and utterly wrong and sadly, I can't say it's felt 'right' very often this season at all.
And then... just as I sat down to write this, he was gone.
I can't say anything other than it is the right decision. Today was fucking horrific - but it's in line with the rest of the season. Pretty much every metric shows we're shit and can't play 442 direct football and for all the words about 'playing attacking football and being unlucky' we haven't been unlucky and we haven't played attacking football and every time we divert from 442 direct football, we just revert to it after 45 minutes anyway, so it doesn't seem as if we're ever going to stop doing what we clearly can't do and I'm not sure how we get out of this tailspin without trying something else properly.
Steve Bruce is a good man I think. I don't know him, but in his interviews in general and in his manner and from the little I know about his relationships with players, he comes across as a decent human being - but he's the wrong man for this squad and the job of work to be done at this time, because he, and/or the coaching staff he's put his faith in, palpably failed in instilling the basics into this squad. We don't compete, we don't create, we don't look fit. In his last interview, he looks haggard. He clearly has no answers to give.
Changing managers every ten minutes isn't a recipe for success - but absolutely nothing at all was pointing to triumph or even mere improvement and the performance today was just a slightly more extreme version of what's been happening all year - very little created at all, no sense of cohesion and reliant on breaks (which as Wimbledon had the sense to sit in, weren't on) or a bit of magic from an individual (which never came because it won't happen every week anyway) - don't create, you invite pressure, invite pressure and you concede goals.
I have no idea who the right man for the job is. I'm pretty sure it's not most of the people who get named because they're either past their best (most managers do their best work early in their careers), not realistically coming to us or more of the same.
I want to see us take our time and step back from the immediate demands of 'a name' to appease the crowd and to think about what we want and who we want to be. As a football club, I have no idea what our footballing 'identity' is - whilst 'identity' is a shit word, ultimately, some sort of continuity would be helpful - we seem to go from a to be to c and back again with each appointment. This is costing us, quite literally, as one set of players is unsuitable for the next manager and we rinse and repeat, rebuilding and re-imagining ourselves each time. As it stands, we've got a blank slate because we've just played nearly 25% of a season with no discernable identity and a set of players who absolutely do not fit with what we've been doing and it is thus, the perfect time to step away and decide what we want that style to be because it can't be '90s football based on last ditch central defence and breakways' (and that's for sure)
I want to see a manager who works hard, who values technical ability, who is willing to take risks, and shows some tactical flexibility and an attacking mindset. I want to see us scour every corner of the globe and listen to every applicant with anything like a semi-serious case to be listened to.
Instead of someone giving it 'one last shot' or 'another roll of the dice' - we need someone who is deeply committed to what should be the chance of a lifetime, someone who desperately needs this break to prove themselves to the world and to themselves. That person needs to have a really clear idea (in fact, several clear ideas) about how they want us to play in different situations and the passion and energy to get them across to the players effectively.
There's literally thousands and thousands of coaches, assistant managers and managers out there across the globe, and the chance of managing an English football league club is an incredible one. To simply use the contacts book to come up with a name of a mate or a former manager would be appalling when, whether in this country, or in Ireland, Scotland, in Scandinavia, in South America, in the Far East, in Eastern Europe and so on and so on there are so many potential candidates.
Somewhere in amongst them must be someone with the verve, the desire, the footballing intelligence and the force of personality to grab this fucking incredible club by the scruff of its tangerine neck and shake us out of our torpor. If we can't trust ourselves do that and just take a punt on a name, then we've got to look very carefully at the makeup of the leadership within the club because we've got this wrong too many times by grasping at names - we need to go back to the beginning, decide what we want to be and find the best fit, whoever that is - and we have to have the footballing intelligence to do that. It feels like we need to do more than just 'get someone in to win some games' - we need to work out who the fuck we actually are first, because right now, we're nothing, we're noone, we're nowhere and that has to, in part, come from the last 3 or 4 years of jumping from one thing to another with no continuity of style or ethos.
This has to be the low point for the season. We have to start on Monday with some serious effort at building relationships within the squad, building relationships on the pitch, building some patterns of play, some fitness, some aggression and some confidence in ourselves. In Stephen Dobbie, we have a man I thought was right for the job 2 and bit years ago - I have no idea if he's right for this moment because the world has spun many times since then - but, in terms of coaching and a response to that coaching on the pitch - it can't be much worse than it has been so far this year and if he takes the approach he took last time around and can get them playing with some energy, attacking mindset and some joy in their feet, then that would be a very big start to the job ahead.
In Dobs we trust because we must!
Onward
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