BRISTOL ROVERS BLOG: G is for Gas - Champagne for the tinkerman?Posted: December 31, 2015
If ‘Tea for the Tillerman’ was Cat Stevens’ breakthrough album exactly 45 years ago, what price on this season being Darrell Clarke’s magnum opus?
This time of year gives a clear indication of how your season is shaping up, having played everyone once, although strangely in our case we have played six of the other top eight teams at home, and only one away, whereas it is the opposite against those teams currently placed 10th to 17th.
Whilst there doesn’t seem to be any real pattern to our results thus far, except excellent away results, the overall position is more than many expected. Sixth place and enjoying the second best away record is certainly a remarkable achievement, even if a brace of clubs below us, and one just above us, have a game or three in hand on us.
Being in a play-off place should not be taken for granted, especially when our only direct comparators (Barnet) languish in 18th and possess the worst away record in League Two. As we have seen many times this season margins are tight in football; just ask our noisy neighbours, who had a large bid accepted for an up and coming striker, only for him to decide to go elsewhere, and then score a haunting hat-trick against them. So you might as well enjoy the times you‘re on the right side of the knife-edge.
In our nine previous seasons of bottom-tier football (‘the easiest League in England to escape’
TM) Rovers were consistently nowhere near the top half of the table by mid-season, and thus had little chance of a getting out of this division (the right way at least). In fact our average position on New Year's Eve was a dismal 17th. How can you have a successful season if you constantly run the first half of a marathon struggling along in a fancy dress clown outfit three sizes too big for you?
Darrell Clarke has three promotions in four seasons as a manager, which makes the negative attitude to his ‘tinkering’ even more galling. This negativity happened a lot last season, especially when not doing so well (no surprise there...), and it has certainly returned this season.
I can appreciate that five changes at AFC Wimbledon did seem a lot when seen briefly on a press report, but those changes didn’t deserve the meltdown that happened in some minds. They say you should stick to writing what you know about so outside of Bristol Rovers my other topic is the artist Banksy, and he once wrote that: “A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to.” In football it seems that a lot of people never analyse the evidence because they can’t be bothered to, or because it doesn’t fit into their pre-conceived suppositions.
Injuries to Will Puddy, Stuart Sinclair and Daniel Leadbitter led to three of the changes, including a ‘no-brainer’ start for Steve Mildenhall.
Mark McChrystal was most probably favoured over Tom Parkes as his man-marking performances against big strikers have been impressive (just ask Jon Parkin, who spent two days living in his sweaty pocket during the play-off games six months ago), and strikers rarely come any bigger than Adebayo ‘The Beast’ Akinfenwa.
Ellis Harrison was favoured over Rory Gaffney because the on-loan Cambridge United striker was struggling with a minor calf complaint.
Whilst we may not all agree with Jake Gosling and Billy Bodin being the chosen pairing to start on the wings, surely we can understand the logic behind the change, especially when setting up in a 4-4-2 at Kingsmeadow, rather than the 3-5-2 used at Dagenham & Redbridge.
I feel we should consider ourselves fortunate to have players well coached in the ability to play different roles for different projects, rather than jumping to the conclusion that we have a manager who has a limited attention span and players who can’t specialise.
In more general terms I can see four clear lines of reasoning in favour of taking a more prosaic approach to the inevitable 2pm team sheet release where between two and four changes will usually be announced.
Firstly, DC has always considered each game to be a different ‘project’. I can’t see how anyone can argue with that. Imagine if every piece of work you undertook, every sales call you made, every customer you served, every bathroom you tiled, or every child you taught, was rigidly given exactly the same resources, ticked off a dull checklist. You’d get mediocrity at best, and unmistakable failure when one size didn‘t fit all. I am very glad that our manager looks at each game and tries to give us the best possible chance to win the match given the resources at his disposal that day. I wouldn’t expect anything less from a professional manager. Often this approach will involve changes, although other times it may not.
Secondly, we are hardly blessed with many players who will be ‘first on the team sheet’ type picks, those who are rarely omitted or asked to play elsewhere for a different ‘project’. Lee Brown is probably the only player at the club who has little competition for his place, and as an almost ever present for his four and a half seasons so far at Rovers, I personally don’t feel this is a problem position anyway, as he does an admirable job, be it as a left back, or as a left wing-back. Currently Stuart Sinclair, Tom Lockyer and maybe Matty Taylor are the only other undroppables, and even they may be offered a ‘rest’ under my next point.
Thirdly, squad rotation is always a difficult issue for any manager, and any set of fans. If the tinkered with team plays well the manager is suddenly a genius, but if they lose he’s pilloried like Claudio Ranieri was at Chelsea, even though he improved them every season and set the foundation for Jose Mourinho's success. Keeping a squad of 20+ professional football players happy, especially competitive men when not regularly playing, must be one of the hardest aspects of being a manager, and it seems to me that DC is doing it pretty well. Maybe we should let him get on with it, especially when faced with two games in three days?
Finally, and probably most significantly, why should we expect a young manager with new ideas to stick to the conventional wisdom of rigidly keeping the same side for every game? Returning to the Banksy theme, it makes me think of the time the illusive artist wrote in reference to ‘thinking outside the box', that you should actually “collapse the box, and take a… sharp knife to it”.
Why let even the box itself, um… box you in?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Bull became a Gashead in 1989 and immediately fell in love with Twerton Park, standing near G pillar. His sixth book has just been released. It is entitled ‘Print That Season! - One man’s weekly meanderings throughout Bristol Rovers’ promotion campaign of 2014-15’ and is the antidote to obedient season reviews, with none of the hindsight that most writers rely on. It is a signed and numbered limited edition of only 462 books, and is available via
www.printthatseason.club
