Cod Almighty | Diary
Everybody is clever nowadays
14 December 2015
To talk about how football has changed in the last generation – changed "beyond recognition", to use a common and exaggerated phrase – may have become a cliché. But it's one that bears repeating. We fell in love with the game because anything could happen: a low-scoring sport with muddy pitches and little in the way of 'outside investment' meant a joyfully anarchic spread of potential outcomes. We're falling out of love with the game because money is narrowing those possibilities, like a throttling grasp to a windpipe, choking out the air and life.
There are many ways in which supporting is different now. Instead of their team choosing them, as God intended, millions of grown adults see nothing amiss in choosing their team from the top of the league, as if selecting the most effective brand of washing-up liquid. But even among those of us who adopt the team that's in their blood – we proper supporters, rather than the legions of plastic shitlarks – expectations have altered.
When your original/regular Diary were a lad of seven or eight, cheering on Kevin Kilmore because I liked alliteration, you just used to go to the game, cheer if Town won, and probably boo if they lost. You didn't deem it necessary to profess expert knowledge on the way the club and the team were run. In moments of extreme frustration you might occasionally denounce the board of directors as "a bunch of tight buggers", or the manager as "that bloody clown". But as far as administrative and coaching issues were concerned that would be the limit of your input.
Far more is expected of the modern football fan. Rather than just curse your luck if several key players are injured at the same time, you will be called upon to express a view on the aptness of the club's "training methods". Rather than simply lament the sale of your favourite player, you are expected to be mindful of the club's financial status and pronounce upon whether the transfer represents "shrewd business". Rather than want your team to win every game, you are supposed to have an opinion on whether players should be "rested" and squads "rotated". Supporting the team is not enough any more. Every fan is meant to be an expert.
On balance there's probably more good than bad in this. Although the game's lax governance still permits rogue owners to get away with far too much, the John Batchelors of this world are held to account in a way that would have been unimaginable just a generation ago. And when, as is still regularly the case, some idiot Apprentice wannabe rides into town "envisioning" big things for a club they've chosen by sticking a pin into a map, only to ride out again a couple of years later having spectacularly buggered everything up, at least supporters now have the knowledge and confidence to take control and steady the ship.
Still, the demand for expert knowledge seems at times to distort our sense of perspective. Take the 'Sharp End' section of When Saturday Comes magazine. This regular feature updates the reader on clubs in crisis.
The current edition features the plight of Charlton Athletic, quoting the chair of their supporters' trust. "Our main question has been knowing what the plan is," he explains. "Things haven't been making much sense… This regime have done some things well, some things half well and other things we have just had no understanding of at all." There is also a section on Bolton Wanderers, who face a second relegation in four years should they survive a winding-up order for unpaid tax and pay off debts of one hundred and seventy-three million pounds.
Just a couple of decades ago it took the threatened loss of their stadium, and by implication their club itself, for Charlton fans to declare a crisis (and, of course, rally magnificently to save the day). In the modern, fans-as-experts era, by contrast, the same club is deemed to be in intolerable turmoil because the chairman isn't personally emailing every fan twice a week detailing the measures being taken to retain second-flight status. If that's a crisis, then it is surely the kind of crisis we'd love to have at Blundell Park.
Similarly, while Town fans have always liked a moan, it's only very recently that issues like "squad rotation" have come to be included in their subject matter. We only have to go back as far as 1997 for this sort of talk to disappear from the radar. Some supporters were calling for Alan Buckley to be sacked just months into his second spell in charge. But this was solely because of the Mariners' lowly league position – not because he was seen to be unnecessarily fielding fragile first-team players in a tournament perceived as "tinpot" and beneath our dignity even to enter. I seem to think the Windscreens thing actually ended quite well, by the by, as did the whole culmination of that 68-game season.
There's obviously a strong argument for supporters in the boardroom. The skills that directors bring to the running of clubs are not exclusive to affluent, middle-aged white men in suits. And the money they bring brings its own problems. Clubs where fans have cleared away the wreckage left by idiot chairmen – and adjusted their expectations accordingly – are in many ways the future of the game. (Hell, even Town have done a fair bit better for the past four or five years, without even having a chairman, than we did for much of the four or five years before that, when we had one.)
It's different when it comes to matters on the pitch. Not that there's any shortage of expert views in the stands, but there's a good reason why we have managers. If we are to have a manager at all, then we must leave Town's approach to the FA Trophy in the hands of Paul Hurst, who, even his detractors must admit, is in a better position than anyone to gauge his players' fitness and focus from one game to the next. Ultimately, the alternative is the debacle of the Fans FC experiment at Ebbsfleet, or the New England Patriots' defensive back buying Chester, getting rid of several managers and taking charge of the team himself. Trophy or no Trophy, I'd sooner we kept us shape.