Right...
What to say... ? This isn't the easiest blog I've ever written.
It's fine if you want to stop before it starts. I mean, at the best of times this blog isn't an exercise in in self discipline, so y'know, I'd totally understand if you want to metaphorically leave before it gets ugly with long sentences and metaphors from 6 paragraphs before being returned to in a way that doesn't fully make sense and do something more constructive with your time. This isn't going to be a linear journey from A to B. I think we may digress at points. That's yer health warning. It's up to you.
Lets initially cut to the chase.
The game.
Fuck me. Fuck my fucking life. Fuck the curse that was put on me. (and you. We're all in this. We must have done something collectively really awful in a previous incarnation.)
I don't know what to say about it.
It was shocking.
Like, actually shocking.
Generally, when people say a performance was 'shocking' I think 'was it? really?' because it's not actually a 'shock' that you've just lost 2-1 at home to, I dunno, Barnsley or Rotherham and actually, the 'shocking' performance tends to be fairly typical of a league 1 game and what's happened is one or two mistakes have been made and one team has got the better of the other and actually, you can make a case for how it might have been different. I mean, c'mon. If you've supported us for more than 10 minutes, you can't actually be shocked if we lose 2-1 to Stevenage or someone. It's been my fucking life apart from about 6 seasons for fucks sake.
This game though, was actually, shocking. I've always done my best not to say 'spineless' and 'gutless' and 'abject' and all of that - because y'know, those words get used a lot and they cease to have any meaning but if I carry on writing, they're going to get used here.
There was no world in which that game ends up in our favour. We don't even come slightly close to not losing it. The referee was a stupid twat dressed as a drink of Vimto who gave an absurd free kick when CJ got sort of near goal once, but lets be honest, that's hardly a moment like the Lampard goal against Germany and to cite that as reason for hope is delusional.
Partway through the second half, looking at Crainey giving a good impression of a bloke with a kind of emerging PTSD on the touchline as Argyle poured forward again, I asked myself, 'why am I still here?' and I couldn't find an answer. This was as bad as it has been in a long time.
In this blog, I've always tried to find the positive and to praise as much as condemn. Football is a brutal and unforgiving game. I deeply respect the effort and fortitude of the young lads who live out their professional lives on the pitch in front of a baying mob of one eyed, foaming at the mouth, often pissed up half paying attention but ever 100% certain critics. I am really, really going to struggle to do a positive spin today.
I mean, I could say 'they all had their shirts on the right way round' or 'there was a nice range of haircuts' but in terms of collective praise for their team play, overall effort, general sense of unity and execution of a game plan, I'm really struggling to think of anything that is even a neutral comment, let alone a positive.
In terms of individuals, the task is equally demanding.
Things I remember looking upon positively amount to: A really, really nice first time pass from Clarkson. Walters sometimes running forward with the ball and looking like he had some level of fitness. Bowler generally looking like he gave a fuck and trying to do something. I think that's it. I could be wrong, I don't know, I don't really want to think about it.
I've nothing more to say. I could describe their goals, but why? Just watch them. It's the same shitty goals we always concede.
I'l tell you what they felt like though.
Imagine an army marching upon what looks like a castle. They stop, prime the cannons and load up the trebuchet. The first shot is fired. The castle walls just fall over. It turns out it isn't actually a castle, it's just some pallets nailed together and painted to look like a castle. The advancing army rejoices. The vanquished defenders hang their heads, hastily re-erect some of the flimsy walls and then the whole thing repeats with an inevitable outcome as the pathetic facade of pretend defences gets flimsier each times
It's not fair to just blame the defenders and the goalkeeper. We also failed completely to attack. To further the ye olde military metaphor, what looked like muskets aimed from the ramparts, turned out to be empty water pistols.
I've not looked at the statistics but I don't remember us having any kind of semi convincing effort on goal or even more than a brief flicker of pressure. This was a home game against another team in the wrong half of the table. It looked like a non league team against an in-form Premier League side. There was an inevitability about it, they looked fitter, faster, better with the ball, better without the ball. They dominated us and we just seemed to accept it as if we were Matlock Town and they were Manchester City. Reading that back, it might be a little bit hyperbolic, but the gist is true, you can argue about the size of the gap, but the central point, that we were totally outplayed, is beyond reasonable doubt.
What else to say?
It was, not for the first time this season, a total waste of my time and I'm getting actually, really, properly, no irony here, genuinely fed up with turning up, seeing us be shite and going home thinking 'I enjoyed that less than had I done something else' I mean, watching Obafemi literally hop round the pitch for 5 minutes whilst Ennis and Bloxham warmed up, then us bringing on Bloxham out of the two (which can only leaving me concluding that Ennis is far from actually fit or Evo's mental because why would you not bring him on) - I can't think of any way to frame that as anything other than grimly depressing.
I looked at us and thought 'why can't we tackle?' - players would get to the right place, look like they were going to win the ball and then just, well, not win the ball. Time and again.I thought the same about aerial duels as well.
It's those things you notice in a mismatch. One team just does the basics better. One team looks like the peak of physical fitness and conditioning and the other not. It's the difference in touch and control and the pace of the pass. It's the way that's true throughout the team, so overall the effect is multiplied and it seems hopeless to even try after a certain point. We've been outplayed too often this season for it to be not actually worrying now.
I actually, genuinely thought 'if we put Horsfall upfront, at least we'd get some possession at the other end of the pitch and have some impact there' - I'm not being sarcastic either. We were totally toothless and yet again, when we can't play football, we can't do anything, because we can't win the fight so going direct is pointless. It's only been a problem basically since Madine left but hey ho. I mean, there's no rush to solve it and give us an option which every other fucking team appears to have.
Were this a one off, were this a strange, anomalous blip of a game then I'd probably have written 8 sarcastic paragraphs about us being shite this week and then something vaguely optimistic about football being football and hey, we go again it's the great game, owt can happen and that why we love it really and if we didn't get caned from time to time it would be boring etc etc etc.
Onward...
... being shite though, is becoming habitual.
We're on a trajectory of decline. Not just the last few weeks. The sending off at Port Vale hasn't derailed an otherwise faultless season, the last few years haven't been glorious near triumphs, we aren't playing some brand of bold exciting football which warms the soul as much as it frustrates, we aren't pluckily battling above our level, clinging on and fighting for our lives with sinew and bone and muscle. It's just depressing regression. The first season in League 1 was boring competency. We're now really *actually* shit with a 'meh' season in between. That is a slow but clear decline.
To enjoy football, we don't have to win all the time. Football, is, of course, about wanting to win, trying to win and hopefully winning more than not, but generally speaking, fans will accept things other than a 100 point title season if there's other things going on. That could be a style of play, a sense of overall development, an atmosphere, a feeling that everything is being given, that there's a purpose and an intent and if you've reached a ceiling, then that everything is being tried to get the little bit of extra you need to survive or push that little bit further. Our motto is 'Progress' and progress isn't 'promotion right now or we riot' - but equally, 'Progress' is the opposite of 'regress'
What I get from the club at this point, is not that sense of everything being given. Ian Evatt is not the object of that point. It feels, almost moot to discuss the manager. It feels like blaming the tyres for the fact the car won't start. We've gone through manager after manager and it hasn't got any better. We've gone through player after player and still, Jimmy (love him as a I do) is there trudging about getting sent off like it's 2020 and CJ is still the lightning rod for all the world's ills and we look less and less convincing as time goes by.
We keep rebuilding with a different style but each time, it seems like the castle is made from flimsier bits of wood and gets knocked down more easily. We have brief periods where, freshly painted and propped upright, in the right light, you think 'yeah, that looks ok' but then, each time, the truth of the thing becomes painfully evident. It's not a castle, it's actually a load of fucking shit.
In a recent interview, it was put to our CEO, that we were 'drifting' and he audibly bristled at the idea. 'No', he said, and cited a range of things we'd done, like 'stitching the pitch' and various infrastructure developments.
Now, it would be wrong not to acknowledge where progress exists. The pitch is, indeed, excellent. The developments around the ground are great. The rail seats are exactly what we need (barring rebuilding the actual Kop and ideally the scratching sheds and south and west paddocks too,) Rob Purdon's murals are fucking amazing and, i dunno, the retro shirts are quality items and actually, in the realm of overpriced tacky football merchandise, really well executed and a decent price. We've got the Oystons out of the attic as well. All good. All true. Well done. Knighthood for the CEO...
... and yet I feel there's a counterpoint here. In the interview, the investment of the owner was repeatedly cited as proof of our purpose. I don't question that. Very few do and even those who do can't really argue with the numbers on the balance sheet. The investment is there for the club to compete at this level.
What is a bigger and more vital question is - has the money been well used over a period of time?
If the money has been committed to do these things, then, in terms of things like rail seats or murals, it isn't a remarkable achievement that they've been done. It's simply what you'd expect to happen next. It's certainly better than them not being done - but whether it's evidence of truly high performance by the CEO is a different question. It certainly demonstrates investment - but that investment in itself is outwith the CEO's control.
Whilst the club is a sizable body, it's essentially no different to a school, a hospital, a supermarket, institutions who engage in redevelopment, put up new buildings, have their grounds redone and so on. Infrastructure projects happen, people manage them. Competency in that respect isn't proof of overall delivery...
...Lets stretch the metaphor and come back to the point of the club, the football. If, in a hospital or school or supermarket, people are dying or exam results are terrible or the fish counter is full of rotten fish, then saying 'it's disappointing, of course,, but we've got an excellent car park and we've refloored the canteen' doesn't really answer the core question.
It's positive that there was an acknowledgement of some of the failings in the last few years, particularly around a lack of communication. It was positive to have some details of work undertaken but... yet, it wasn't especially convincing.
In terms of our football strategy, we learned that we hired Steve Bruce essentially because Steve Bruce is a big name who was available and might not otherwise be. We learned that Ian Evatt really, really wanted the job. We didn't really learn much more. We learned that David Downes doesn't seem to think that there's much difference between what managers want and they just want 'good players' - we learned that we don't know why there's endless injuries, but 'we've got loads of data' and that 'it might be about preseason' - the word 'disappointing' was used endlessly and lots of mentions of 'reviews' were cited.
Here's the thing though. I don't know if I'm missing something but preseason was 8 months ago and if, as was suggested, the players wear GPS bras and have GPS knives and GPS forks in the canteen and clean their teeth with GPS toothbrushes and void their systems on GPS toilets and are issued with fucking GPS condoms on a night out, then why the shitting fucking hell haven't we got some solid conclusions to draw upon now? The data is there. It's not sitting in a greenhouse growing for 8 months till the data flower blooms, It's not a fucking data foetus waiting to be born - we've literally got it. What's the plan?
If all we need are 'good players' then why are we also then talking in the same interview about 'playing players out of position' being a reason for our failings? Might that possibly be something to do with the fact that quite a few of our players this season now literally don't fit the current style of play because we don't field their preferred position? Emil Hansson, Scott Banks, Josh Bowler, Tom Bloxham, CJ Hamilton - that's 5 players who will never play in their ideal roles (or had to be let go) because we made a decision, again, to switch to a new idea in mid season. We've then got Michael 'long contract' Ihiekwe and his gammy toe anchoring a possession based back three, something that Michael 'long contract' Ihiekwe (and his gammy toe) is fundamentally not designed to do. We've not had a first choice keeper we owned since we sold Grimmy virtually in the fucking warm up of a game we were about to play, up till we signed BPF to the solidity of.... a short term contract. Yesterday in the second half was the first time we've had two *actual* wing backs on the pitch for a long time - in a system in which the key defining characteristic of it is that it needs good wing backs.
The question is about whether we've got an appropriate level of strategy guiding the bigger decisions and as above, guiding the investment.
We've made ONE undeniably successful signing in the last two seasons (Fletch) and the rest have failed or had any impact undermined by injuries. The answer 'we don't know why, but we'll look at it' is a shallow answer.
That's what leaves me feeling like I can't muster the enthusiasm to try and talk us up, because I can't work out what it is we're trying to do.
I can see what Evatt is trying to do and I'll defend his right to try it - because someone needs to try something, but in the end, if it isn't right, we'll just end up burning him on the great managerial pyre and then trying the next thing, by which time we'll have a squad full of wing backs, so we'll go to a back four system and repeat the rebuild and then abort it and so on till we stumble upon something eventually, sometime around 2031.
We've always got 'total confidence and alignment' and then we don't and we then have total confidence and alignment in a different thing and repeat.
To cite Neil 'lets be brutally honest, he's looking more like a football guru by the week' Critchley, there has to be a 'process' but the process has to be purposeful, there has to be a picture guiding the process, an aim to work towards. To visualise a good football team, you can't just visualise 'good players' lifting the FA Cup and everybody cheering - you have to visualise the complex relationships between those players, the style they're playing within, the way they adapt to different challenges, the different combinations that can be used to overcome or nullify different situations, the blend of youth and experience, the right characters to pick the team up and the right characters to calm the team down.
In football terms, that's definitely about being totally committed to the broad idea - you might be a strong running, movement based team. you might be a set of physical bullies, you might try skill, total football - you get the idea... I've made this argument multiple times. The guiding picture seems to live in the manager head, but I'm not sure it lives anywhere else
It's like we're providing the same paint for the artist, regardless of who it is and what their medium is and then blaming the artist when their delicate brushes get clogged with thick gloss or the painting is shit because they needed oil paints but got watercolours and then just saying 'well, we bought them paint, that shows ambition, don't see what the problem is, we'll review the paint in 6 months'
Downes and Winter talked, correctly about injuries having impact and the subsequent load on players draining the fit and that forcing people out of position to cover and so on - but without any reflection on why that seems to have impacted us so badly, or why, we only seem (for the second season in a row) to be able to perform if the absolute first choice best XI is fit...
... the season we went up 5 years ago, we were decimated by injuries and yet we won a lot of games with 12, 13, 14 fit players. Why can't we perform now like we could then? What's the difference? Why don't they have some analysis of that?
*Deep Breath*
We have stopped speaking of us being a club that knits together the disparate experiences of the very disparate Fylde coast. We've stopped feeling 'local' and as if there's a real understanding of what is on our doorstep. As much as we didn't talk about football strategy in any depth, we didn't really discuss anything about the culture of the club as a whole - we discussed projects to change fllodlights and 'matchday experience' but the club isn't just 3pm to 4.45 on a Saturday.
The football club is potentially the thing that really unites Blackpool. It's potentially the thing that brings in people, that connects people, that is Blackpool and for Blackpool and that Blackpool is truly proud of in a way that nothing else is.
It's the small things that matter. I'd suggest watching this to see how simple it is to make people feel cared about and how it's painful to see how they feel when they don't. Does seeing a lad who misses his dad feeling like this cut painfully into the soul of the leadership of the club.? It should. The club is the people like this. We're all this fan. The game is the crowd. We're all united by one thing. If we don't make the simplest efforts to show that matters, then what have we got? We're literally the reason everyone has jobs in football. Without fans it's just a game no one cares about where there's no industry, no strategies, no 'product' to be sold to anyone.
The saddest thing is, it felt like we had that in the not too distant past, like we were working towards being *something* both on and off the pitch and that enthusiasm towards and belief in and understanding of where and what and why, was, more or less there and yet, whilst I can say 'yes, *some* positive things have happened and we've got a decent enough playing budget' it's really hard to honestly say there's anything 'special' about us in terms of the culture and the connection between the club and the community that follow it, nor can I really honestly say it feels as if we're doing anything inventive or innovative that's giving us an edge in terms of our football either. In fact, there's stuff distinctly lacking in both areas.
Maybe I'm just a shallow fan sulking cos we lost. Maybe I'm just lashing out at 'faceless suits' in a childish way because my team lost again and I've not emotionally got past the 13 yr old stage. Maybe I don't understand the world of football properly and I'm missing the point somewhere - but when you're at a moment where it feels like you don't really care who the manager is or who he picks and going to the game is something you do with more than a bit of a resentment, when there's no atmosphere, when there's no fun, then it's not unreasonable to hope for a degree of enthusiasm for the task of fixing that and some sense of a vision and purpose about what that involves.
Mistakes happen in life. It's good to see at least some acknowledged. I make them all the time*...
(I wrote a enthusiastic piece telling Sadler to spunk his money on signings for Bruce because *nothing could possibly go wrong there* to name but one....)
...but, if there isn't the willingness to really, genuinely, deeply, properly self reflect and essentially, a willingness to accept, to fully grasp that this has, regardless of the fact of investment, been a stagnant period of drift with, yes, some infrastructure improvement , but long term and increasing under performance on the pitch and dwindling enthusiasm in the fan base, then I'm really not sure we've got the right people running the club and managing the investments made.
We can and must be far better than this.
Onward.
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The actual football side of the club is obviously run very poorly, Sadler seems ok with his lead managers flushing money down the toilet. We were sort of better off under Karl Oyston's zero investment regime. Low expectations, no pressure to succeed, zero waste. Dreadful people obviously. But McMahon and Holloway seemed to enjoy the autonomy they had, despite the ridiculous austerity culture.
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