Goodbye Irene?

I’d just got home from a little retail therapy at Sainsburys – oops, I mean Asda! – when I switched on my radio for the football results.

Imagine my horror when I found out that Bristol Rovers had lost at Braintree?

I gather that something in excess of 500 supporters went to Braintree to witness what I hear was an abject performance. I congratulate the home side, of course, because the players so frequently confound their part time status, but what the hell has happened?

When we were relegated to the Conference, the chairman Nick Higgs said we had now hit rock bottom but that was always going to be wrong because wherever Rovers finish will be the lowest position in their history, even if it’s top.

Geoff Twentyman’s post match phone in featured a lot of people I know well, all sounding as if they’d stood in a massive dog turd and found they had a hole in their shoe.

Some have followed Mr Higgs’ line in that our problems would not have occurred had we acquired a centre forward. That view could be valid but the decline of Bristol Rovers must surely be attributed to other reasons.

It can’t be money because since 2007 we have had trips to Wembley and promotion, the JPT final in Cardiff, a trip to the 6th round of the FA Cup and we sold Rickie Lambert (amongst others).

Maybe it’s the managers because, god knows, we have had enough of them. You would think at least one of them would have some idea of what they were doing? And the board always supported the manager with big playing budgets and funding long contracts and large wages. So, it’s been the managers and the players.

And the current manager Darrell Clarke isn’t very experienced, some say he is out of his depth. The people on the terraces who obviously don’t play or manage know far more than people who have spent their entire lives in football, right? He’s had a big playing budget because the chairman said so.

Well, it didn’t bloody work, did it?

At a recent Q&A session, Clarke revealed to supporters that his playing budget was around £900k, which is less than half of his predecessor John Ward’s. Hey hang on: if Clarke is out of his depth, then he could do with someone as experienced and knowledgable as Ward with him in the dug out. No, that didn’t work either. It’s a quandary, isn’t it?

The problem at the Rovers is certainly not in the boardroom, or any lack of leadership and it’s nothing to do with piss poor governance. Without the board, don’t forget, there would be no Bristol Rovers. The logical next step is for fans to not turn up at all for the next game because it is the directors who keep the club alive, not them. Nick probably didn’t mean to say that, but he probably didn’t mean to say a lot of things but he said them anyway.

So the problems are the managers, the players and of course the supporters. Anyone else? Wycombe Wanderers? Sainsburys?

I am not sure the supporters are to blame. They are the one constant at the club. Yes, there is a certain novelty being a very big fish in a small Conference pond but will that novelty value of visiting Braintree still be there next year and the year after? And will the visiting clubs find coming to the Memorial Stadium something they want to repeat year in year out? That will have financial implications because it’s easy for a club to get used to playing in a new lower division.

I keep hearing that “a club like Rovers shouldn’t be in the Conference”, but why not? Relegation from League One to League Two followed by this year’s relegation to the Conference was richly deserved.

There are loyalists who accuse people of being trouble makers and for playing politics but the truth is that the trouble makers just want the club to be better. They don’t think that the grinding inertia that has gripped the club in recent years has created success.

The more extreme say “If you don’t like it, just fuck off to Ashton Gate.” The reality is that many people did that years ago, even from areas like Kingswood which are, unthinkably, more red than blue and white these days.

Losing at Braintree did represent a new low but if things stay the same at the club – and there is no evidence that they won’t – there will be plenty of new lows to come.