Cod Almighty | Diary

Trick or treat?

25 October 2017

You learn far more about your club during a relegation season than during the good times. During the good times you get bigger crowds and you think oh look, this club has loads of potential. It doesn't really though. The extra people who come out during the good times quickly slope away again when you hit the next lean spell. It's during the tough times that you really get to know what you're about.

One of the things that your original/regular Diary learned when Town were relegated in 2003-04 was that the fans' favourite players are nearly always the ones who aren't actually playing for us. How you adored Graham Hockless! How you reviled Paul Groves for not putting him in the team very often! It was similar under Russell Slades slightly later – and this time I include myself – when Thomas Pinault couldn't get in the team. Well, he wasn't in the team when we got all the way to the play-off final, so.

Town fans – like many other sets of fans in 2017 – are a bit like that with managers as well, every time things aren't going so well. Let's sack the guy, eh? That'll do the trick. It's predicated on the same deluded belief that a transformative quick fix is possible. Bring a particular player into the team, or change one manager for another, and suddenly everything is profoundly and lastingly sorted – despite the figures with the greatest influence over the club remaining in place. You keep telling yourself that.

There are exceptions. Sometimes it works. One year ago yesterday a club that looked odds-on for relegation to the Football League's bottom division took a chance on a new manager, and look at Shrewsbury Town now. Booo Hursts, tainting Jim Dobbin Day forever, booo, you successful Yorkshire man, booo. If you're only going to read one interesting and quite long interview (or one more) about the astonishing turnaround this dour, negative, fan-hating individual has achieved at his current club, then make it this one.

I actually laughed out loud at that bit.

Now that Russell Slades is back for another go, I'm the same about Harry Clifton as I was about Thomas Pinault. The difference this time is that at least the Frenchman got a few games to prove he was the only member of the squad who could pass a ball before he was dropped and frozen out. That's exactly a few games more than some of the current players seem to have been given.

When Chris Clements began a three-month loan to Barrow the other week, all hell seemed to break loose for three hours. Slades said one thing: that the move was solely to build up the player's fitness. Supporters said two things – the first being that Slade's thing baldly contradicted another thing they'd heard from the player's girlfriend on Facebook or something. The second was that's all very well, but three months? Really? How long does it take to build up match fitness?

The day after joining Barrow, the ostensibly unfit Clements played a full 90 minutes against Maidstone. He has gone on to play every minute of all five matches Barrow have completed since he joined (including an FA Cup game, so Slades clearly isn't bothered about him being cup-tied either). Now that he's clearly match fit, what are the two remaining months of his loan actually for?

Akwasi Asante's return to Solihull on a similar deal elicited a similar reaction. Last Saturday Asante played the entirety of the first game after his move, and then managed another 70 last night. Not bad for someone who was nowhere near a spot on the subs' bench at Blundell Park.

The suspicion with both transfers is that fitness is not the issue, that in fact Slades just doesn't like the look of players brought in by the previous manager and is looking to get shot of them. Maybe it's true. But it must be possible to loan a player out for three months and still believe he has a longer-term future with you. Nothing would surprise me about modern football, but even the most cynical of GTFC fans would be hard pressed to argue that Slade was secretly planning the permanent disposal of Reece Hall-Johnson within two days of signing him.

Then again, Hall-Johnson, despite having been without a club before he joined Town the other week, has played the full 90 for Chester twice in four days. Four minutes into injury time last night he found the energy from somewhere to score on the volley from the edge of the box. Confused? I am.

While we're obviously very fond of the Town players who aren't playing for us because they're out on loan, nothing comes close to the love we retain for the Town players who aren't playing for us because they're not our players any more. Next Tuesday's shindig at Blundell Park won't just be a benefit for Craig Disley: it might do the crowd some good too – by helping us get some closure on the traumatic demolition of the most charismatic and successful squad in a generation.

The addition of Nathan Arnold to the line-up for the game will only ratchet up the emotion further. The line-up as a whole will serve as a standing rebuke to the club for ushering the heroes of 2016 hurriedly out into the night like an over-zealous bouncer. We might move on a little next week, but I can't see how we'll ever stop being haunted by their loss. And if it's possible to learn through mistakes then that might not be such a bad thing. I don't know about you but I need a break from the tough times.