Cod Almighty | Diary
Ombudsman's gonna get ya
9 February 2016
Which are you more concerned about? Town having the best possible chance of promotion? Or punishing a manager who has not yet achieved it?
Your original/regular Diary, like most other football fans, would like to see my team win matches and get promoted. If my club doesn't get promoted, it'll still be my club. That will never change. (That, I think, is pretty much the definition of support: that it should be unconditional, including on the issue of which division you're in.) But I would like to see my club get promoted. So I would like the conditions to be in place which give Town the best possible chance of promotion.
What are those conditions? Stability. Strong, unconditional support. A good, confident squad. An able manager.
These don't guarantee promotion – particularly in a league of 24 teams where only two can attain it. But they are all necessary. Fulfil all four conditions and you might go up. Fulfil less and you almost certainly won't. In the Conference that's as good as it gets for any team, I'm afraid. Even one that takes 1,600 fans to Kidderminster. And Town have at last – perhaps only since this time last year – fulfilled all four conditions.
Come 30 April, Hurst will have attained a top-five finish for four seasons in a row. You don't do that without being an able manager. And the signs are that he is continuing to improve. This is not enough for some Grimbarians, however, who believe that Hurst's "failure" – by which they mean the fact that he hasn't achieved promotion so far – means Town ought to sack him.
These people have become so carried away by the modern, Sky-'n'-tabloid-fuelled mindset of constant "speculation over the manager's future" that they've lost sight of the main objective of promotion.
It sounds daft and counterintuitive to say it, given the brain-bludgeoning regularity with which they reassert the "need to get out of this shit league". But let's accept for a moment their proposition that Town will lose in the play-offs again this season (maybe), that we are utterly desperate to return to the Football League (probably), and we absolutely have to be promoted in 2017, otherwise BAD THINGS (hmmm). And let's ask a simple question: who is more likely to achieve that promotion next time?
Will it be an unknown quantity, who will want to ship out half of the existing squad to bring in his own players, stamp his mark on the club and the squad, establish his own style and tactical approach, and need time, even after his new players have been identified and acquired, for them to settle in to the club, adapt to one another, and gel into a cohesive unit? Or a manager who began by turning round a club that had been in freefall for a decade, where his several immediate predecessors had failed to impress, which was for all the world heading the same way as Stockport County, and who then attained successive finishes of 4th, 4th, and 3rd, who knows the existing squad inside out, and came within a penalty kick of promotion in 2015?
To the rest of us, football is a beautifully complex and nuanced game, and a season that doesn't end in promotion has a rich infinity of possible variations. To the Hurst-out lobby, coming within one penalty kick of a return to the League is the same as finishing 17th, or 24th
Alright, so perhaps this hypothetical replacement for Hurst might not be a totally unknown quantity. Perhaps a genuinely excellent manager, who is verifiably at least as able as Paul Hurst, could be identified and persuaded to come to Blundell Park with a minimum of fuss, and left to get on with their job. It's never happened before under John Fenty, but let's assume for a moment that it could.
And to be fair to Hurst's detractors, they themselves have been able to identify such a manager from time to time. Gary Mills. Mark Cooper. Someone like that. Let's get someone like that in. So you've definitely fulfilled the condition of an able manager. Let's assume he'll sign lots of really good players really quickly, and they gel into a unit really quickly. So you've definitely fulfilled the condition of a good, confident squad. At a stroke, however, you have undone the other two.
Hurst is a manager who is popular with a majority of fans. The Hurst-out lobby won't have this, because they believe the equally miserable sods who sit either side of them – muttering darkly, barracking their own goalkeeper on his recovery from meningitis, and pissing off eight minutes before the full-time whistle blows – are a representative cross-section of Town fans. But they're not. By sacking Hurst you will fracture Town's strong, unconditional support, which is overwhelmingly behind the current manager. And you will undermine the stability that has rewarded that support with hope in the past two seasons – for the first time in a decade. Make a change that you feel addresses one of those conditions for promotion, then, and you bugger up two of the others.
If Town had shown signs of drifting under Hurst, or Hurst proved incapable of development, I'd have a bit more time for the manager's critics. But his team is hardly in decline. Alan Alger got it wrong: that penalty competition last May has not, in fact, resulted in a recoil a la Wrexham 2013–14, and Town are not, as it happens, languishing in 17th place. Paul Hurst has made mistakes – but he shows every sign of learning from them. This time last year he was being criticised, probably justly, for an unnecessarily defensive tactical approach. That's no longer the case. There's no Parslow point this season. We've pushed on.
But no. To the Hurst-out lobby, football is far simpler than that. Anything other than promotion is failure. To the rest of us, football is a beautifully complex and nuanced game, and a season that doesn't end in promotion has a rich infinity of possible variations. To the Hurst-out lobby, coming within one penalty kick of a return to the League is the same as finishing 17th, or 24th.
And because their view of the game is constructed by this insane modern media-driven obsession with managers "paying the price" for this "failure", they will tell you Hurst has "had his chance" and must go. No, we probably won't win the league this season. But never mind that we might win the play-offs. And never mind that, if we don't, Hurst is far more likely than any realistic replacement to steer the club over the line in 2017. Punishing his "failure" – by sacking him – is more important than taking the most likely step to promotion next time – by keeping him.
Why are they like this?
They're like this because they've forgotten what football is actually about.
For the Hurst-out lobby, football has ceased to be about the visceral joy of Danny North twatting a hat-trick past Barnet, or Bobby Cumming clattering Allan Clarke into a board advertising Peter Sheffield coaches in a blizzard of mud. For them football has become the version of football that's interpreted and spoon-fed back to us by the mass media. More than fans of football, they are fans of meta-football. The version where issues off the pitch, which may or may not make a difference to the actual game, become more important than the actual game. In this world the thrill of football lies in the power of a transfer budget or a potential boardroom takeover. Or in "bragging rights" and "banter" at work on a Monday morning. Or the immaculate skill and timing with which deadline-day signings are revealed, or chairmen sack managers.
Do you love football? Or are you obsessed with meta-football? If your answer is B, stop reading the Sun, go out for some long walks, and don't go back on the internet until you love football again. You'll feel much better for it. So will the rest of us. And, as a little bonus on the side, you'll be ready to allow your club its best shot at getting that promotion you're apparently so concerned about.