Cod Almighty | Diary

You can't sell what you don't own

14 April 2015

Here's a question for you. What is the most bizarre instance of non-supportive 'supporting' you have witnessed, from Town fans and from supporters of other clubs?

Middle-Aged Diary often remembers a shot from an end-of-season game at Molineux. Wolves were serial promotion bottlers then and, true to form, they had, on that last match, blown their promotion hopes. The TV cameras picked out amid the sad detritus of a game and a season gone wrong – the empty plastic seats, the litter, the small knots of tearful or angry fans – two indignant-looking fans holding up a banner which read: "Thanks Wolves – you've let us down AGAIN".

That was a banner. A piece of cloth held up on two sticks, not a message scribbled on the back of the nearest scrap of paper. It wasn't particularly elaborate in its design but there was no way it was not prepared in advance. Fearing the worst is a supporter's prerogative. As Retro Diary said on Friday, it's a necessary psychological ploy. But there is no way those 'fans' did not go to the Wolves game with some quite sizeable part inside them wanting the team to fail so they could get on TV with their puerile message.

Support like that, with its hardly even implicit sense of entitlement, must feel like a weight on the shoulders of the players.

And before we get too self-congratulatory with our #bestfans hashtaggery, let's recall a couple of our own darker moments. In 2004, the club lost the services of one of its greatest ever servants – a man who had been handed the poisoned chalice of sustaining the club's frankly unsustainable status – amid a hail of angry exhortations to "sort it Groves".

A poison had entered into the relationship between the club and its supporters which made impossible our recovery from the hole in our finances wrought by Bryan Huxford, Doug Everitt, Lennie Lawrence and ITV Digital. I still sometimes wonder if Darren Mansaram might not have turned into a fairly effective Town striker. Groves's treatment of him – playing him on his own up front – was unsympathetic. But unsympathetic does not even begin to be the word to describe people who boo a teenage striker.

The poison persisted. It must have made easier the decisions of Steve Mildenhall and Russell Slade to walk away from Blundell Park. The club itself must take a fair share of the blame there, of course.

The relationship between the board, the fans and the players is a complex one, and when it starts to go wrong, as we have seen over the last decade, it is hard to put right. Lately, as I said two weeks ago, we seem to have been making progress. The decision to "try something different" for the player of the year awards night is another welcome sign that someone is thinking about the way the club presents itself and asking constructive questions about how they can do it better.

Objectively, we have a playing squad that is capable of promotion and a fan base that is more than capable of supporting a Football League club. It is the quality of that support that we need to make count now.