With Bristol Rovers winning yet again, this time 2-0 at Oldham, we need to avoid getting carried away. After all, it’s October not April and, according to my Bumper Book of Football Cliches, the Football League is a marathon not a sprint. It was only yesterday we were in the Conference. Let’s have some perspective. In other words, the Gas are going up.
That’s absolutely ridiculous, you are probably saying. This Eclectic Blue character has had one over the eight, he’s been on the Wacky Baccy, he’s lost the plot. How the hell can he possibly say Bristol Rovers are heading for the Championship? Well, mucker: I just did.
I don’t know this, of course. How the hell could I? I am not some kind of psychic because, and I don’t know how to tell you this, no one has psychic powers. I just have this feeling. Sometimes you just sort of know.
I just sort of knew, as some 5000 of us knew in 1990, that the Gas were going up. I would say that that team, in terms of football, was not as good as this one. I am not disrespecting Gerry Francis and his miracle-workers because what they achieved is impossible to knock. That was, one way or another, a team of disparate parts, of players who never made it elsewhere but somehow clicked at Twerton Park. That team did not know how to lose and hardly ever did. They came back from the dead on a regular basis. Can you see any comparison with the current team?
Darrell Clarke has unleashed something very special. His team is palpably not made up of jobbing journeymen, or Flash Harry’s after a final lucrative contract. This is the spirit of Bristol Rovers on steroids.
League One is better than League Two. Of course it is, otherwise the league would not bother with league tables. This means that Clarke and his players have raised their game. Many of the players were not even league players BC (before Clarke), so the step up is impressive. Everyone, including the people who run the club, are a step up from what they were before.
Don’t think the supporters have nothing to do with this. They believe, too. They believe in the vision Darrell Clarke is offering them and they believe in the players who are performing or near the top of their game. And they believe that finally the people who own and run this club have a clear idea of what they are doing. This matters too. I am not turning this into an anti Nick Higgs diatribe because he is a footnote in a miserable piece of history at the club, a near irrelevance now whose greatest achievement was buggering off and selling the club to Wael Al Qadi.
We might not go up, of course, and my gut feeling could be hopelessly wrong. But I don’t think it is. I don’t know why, but the resurgence of Bristol Rovers is far from over. In fact it is just beginning. Tomorrow – or rather next year – the Championship and the day after?
