The good news about Bristol Rovers is that, thanks to Darrell Clarke, they are winning football matches. The season is never over by the beginning of November but they are encouragingly tucked in a play off position now and the league table does not lie.
Yesterday’s win at Telford was to be expected. The home team are, after all, adrift at the foot of the Conference and, as we have just said, the league table doesn’t lie. I have not seen them play this season – I don’t think many people have – but the fact that they are bottom of the league suggests that they are pants.
“You can only beat what’s in front of you” goes the old cliche and I should fucking hope so too. We are talking Bristol Rovers here, a team which when I started supporting them back in the 1970s was a top half of the Third Division (that’s league one for the benefit of the youngsters) team, occasionally playing in the Second Division, or the Championship as we are meant to call it nowadays (ridiculous, I know, but that’s commercialisation for you).
The descent has been painful and has been happening since 2000. In 2001, Rovers were relegated to the Fourth Division and spent several years knocking on the door of the Conference. Some scouser called Rickie Lambert came along and briefly the club returned to the Third Division. Are you still with me? Then Lambert went to Southampton and Bristol Rovers merely went south, again.
Relegation to the Conference did not come as a shock to some of us because it had been coming for years. Luck and chemistry, the three words most closely associated with the governance of the club, has a limited shelf life. And last year the luck ran out.
There is a lot of luck and chemistry in football. Sometimes you buy a player who turns out to be a massive success, other times you buy Ralph Milne, Sir Alex Ferguson’s first signing at Manchester United. You don’t make your own luck because then it wouldn’t be luck but if you have a plan, a realistic, modern and progressive strategy that everyone can understand and buy into, you’re halfway there. Sadly, Bristol Rovers never got halfway there because they were living on a prayer and as it is very unlikely that God exists, prayer in itself isn’t enough. Quoting bits of the bible on social networks is not really a plan for running a football club or for life. There’s a bit of Pascal’s wager going on here!
You do not need me to tell you about the mess the club has made with a series of duff managerial appointments that took the club into non league football. Every appointment they made seemed a good idea – well, perhaps not Paul Buckle – but for some reason(s) none of them ever worked out. It must be the managers’ who were to blame since they were backed to the hilt with money and money, money, money, which is all you need in a rich man’s world. Whoops.
Clarke knew non league football which is dead handy since no one else at Bristol Rovers had a clue. He is very well respected within the game and is dealing with the huge pressures of being a relatively big fish in a small pond with remarkable success.
Only a few weeks ago, there was a clamour amongst large numbers of supporters to have him sacked. Rome wasn’t built in a day and it turned out Bristol Rovers wasn’t either. But the mood has changed.
With the club doing well, it is not surprising the supporters have returned. Large numbers travel to the arse end of beyond to support the boys in blue (and white). It must be an exhilarating feeling arriving at a ramshackle little ground where the crowd is often counted in hundreds to see a club that once plied its trade a division away from the Premier League. Oh happy day.
I say it is doing well, but everything is relative. They’re not doing well compared to the hated former rivals in BS3 who are top of League One and they’re certainly not doing well compared to Bournemouth who are knocking on the door of the Premier League, at least for now. Are Bournemouth really bigger than Bristol Rovers? That, for me, is the measure of where Bristol Rovers are. We’re patting ourselves on the back for beating Telford but Bournemouth beat Brighton yesterday and – whisper it – are currently in an automatic promotion position.
I have given up on Bristol Rovers listening to its supporters because under the current regime that’s never going to happen. Under Nick Higgs’ autocratic ‘leadership’, assisted by Toni Watola’s dead hand on the tiller, does anyone really see a brighter day beyond the occasional glimpse of the sun? No chance.
I suspect that Darrell Clarke will see Rovers make it into the play offs this season which to me is the bare minimum you would expect the club to achieve. Anywhere lower would surely be abject failure. No one with any ambition or understanding of football could surely disagree with that? From a long way off, I see a positive outcome to a play off campaign as absolutely vital because a second year of visiting non league grounds might not be the novelty it appears today. Anything lower than play offs would surely represent miserable failure.
Supporters should certainly demand more. A City supporting friend of mine told me a City chairman would have been run out of town by now if they ended up in the mess that Rovers fell. I don’t advocate sacking the board – how can you do that anyway at a private limited company? – but failure to deliver League Two football for next season would be very poor.
