“What the hell is Darrell Clarke doing in America on holiday and why isn’t he back managing Bristol Rovers until next week?” I was asked today, by someone who thought I should know the answer. “He should be in his office, signing up players. If we leave it all to the last minute, we’ll miss out on all the best players. Typical Gas!” The conversation got better after that: we talked about something else.
If we hadn’t talked about something else, I’d have been one acquaintance down. “Are you really stupid enough to think that Darrell Clarke, Wael Al-Qadi and Steve Hamer have spent the last few weeks sitting on their arses, still celebrating promotion to League One? You do? You really do? Puh-lease!”
This is, I’m afraid, a common view. If you cannot see what’s going on in terms of player recruitment and just about anything else, then it’s obvious nothing can be going on. This is Bristol Rovers, after all, where luck and chemistry has usually represented what passed for a strategy at the club. Something will turn up. Hopefully. If not we can sell someone.
I do not think this is a common view among Gasheads, even though I no longer look at forums or follow all that many Gasheads on social networks. I have the feeling, based on mountains of evidence, that Clarke has known for some time the type of players he will want to recruit and, given that he has just been handed a three year contract, he might just have passed on his thoughts to the board. He has probably scouted players a long time ago, some may have already signed pre-contract agreements; in all probability things are well in hand.
And so what if Clarke is on his holidays in America? I don’t know about you but I use this thing called a mobile telephone – you must have seen them – and you know what? They work pretty well all over the world, except if you are in certain parts of Somerset. And knowing Clarke as I don’t, I’ll bet that phone is never off, even when he is enjoying the sights in, and I am guessing here, Disneyland.
Part of this wild speculation or concern about the manager’s lethargy is because some people cannot switch off and I get that. There was a time when I could not go a single day without checking on the Bristol Rovers forum to see what was happening or more often what wasn’t. It was at first a hard habit to break but once it’s broken there’s a great big world out there, one that I had largely forgotten about.
That Bristol Rovers is, for the first time in decades, being run on a professional basis by people who give a very good impression of knowing what they are doing should be a source of great comfort to us all. The manager and board are not infallible, of course, but they are less likely to get things wrong than the old guard frequently did.
It’s only just June. Darrell Clarke is away enjoying the sun. I’d politely suggest that those panicking that he is away enjoying the sun should get away and enjoy it too. The new season will be here soon enough.
