I don’t want to go to ChelseaWhilst Elvis Costello’s titular ditto may not be something you would often hear in 21st century football parlance, recent events leave me pondering whether a remix entitled ‘I don’t want to go to Bristol’ could be genuinely applicable or is just an excuse for repeated local failure?
Many Rovers fans may be tempted to snig-ger behind the bike sheds at how difficult it has been for our noisy neighbours to sign any real life football players this season, but if we have any ambition ourselves we need to be careful to learn from their mistakes and mull over whether some of the headline grabbing excuses can affect us as well.
It is well documented that large bids for Andre Gray and Dwight Gayle were accepted by their own clubs, but neither decided to move to City; indeed Gayle never even came to check the vibe out. Other summer targets also failed to get a one-way ticket to Temple Meads, and before they knew it City were left with a small squad, short on Championship experience and very short on league points. They did have an expensive Director of Football though, and as we Gasheads well know, the second a DoF starts to either sign expensive flops, or not be able to sign anyone at all, is the second the head coach suddenly becomes the Eric Cantona genius of the relationship, and the DoF becomes the Didier Deschamps water carrier. More recently bids for relatively unknown League One players such as Bradley Dack and Alex Gilbey never even got accepted by their clubs, and Zach Clough came, saw and did not cash the cheque.
What Robins must find particularly galling is that they not only have a billionaire as a benevolent owner, but also that they have a top heavy structure that really should have been able to get players in, with a Director of Football, and now also a Chief Operating Officer. If that structure cannot identify and land players you do wonder why on earth it exists. We have rarely used a DoF position and when we did it was probably the right person at the right time, when Lennie Lawrence came in to team up with Paul Trollope, who was a rookie 33 year old coach at the time. Thankfully the next use of it was jettisoned pretty quickly, with John Ward barely half way up the flight of stairs before he was sacked following relegation.
Getting a good start to a season is of course amongst the opening chapters of the Dunce’s Guide to Football, but watching City’s problems spiral out of control should have really rammed it home to us how difficult life gets once you are struggling. The lower you are the more the pressure gets to everyone involved and the less chance there is of the right players coming to join your relegation battle. A weak start and no clear and sustained improvement leaves a manager almost guaranteed to be walking a tightrope at exactly the time (i.e. the winter transfer window) when he needs to have his full wits about him, and the full backing of his Board, the players, and the fans. We are certainly not immune to that feeling, and several times in recent seasons we have scuffed around in February and March trying to find decent loans and free agents. Invariably even the best manager will end up with the likes of Jerel Ifil. Enough said.
The main lesson we need to learn seems to be a simple one. Get your core business done in the summer and get it done as early as possible. Thankfully this is something Darrell Clarke has proved to be pretty good at, although he also likes to continue to build squads slowly throughout the season, using his reputation as a ‘tinker man’ not only on match day but also on the overall squad.
Another lesson could be to get your marquee signing in first, and potentially even pay slightly over the odds if necessary to use him as bait for future targets and as an example of your serious intent. For the Robins the writing was on the wall by 10th August when owner Steve Lansdown was quoted as saying “It [the cost of Championship players] demonstrates the silliness of football. It’s not a proper business”. As a very clever man who has become a billionaire without producing a single tangible product he may need to go back and look at the reality of what modern life is these days, and precisely how he earned his own wealth.
Which brings me onto the second part of this soliloquy. Is modern day Bristol really such an un-inviting place on a personal and geographical level? Do players really not want to go to Bristol?
Obviously I’m biased as a West Country lad, but I simply don’t buy this excuse. Yes there are always human dynamics involved in any possible football transfer (are you close to friends and family where you currently are? do you really enjoy where you are in London, Oxford or even Wolverhampton? do you have kids settled at a school?) but to suggest the Bristol area may be putting players off beyond the above complications is surely bunkum.
Bristol is one of the most culturally dynamic cities in the whole of the UK, and is less than two hours from London on a train, has a decent airport, and has two of the countries’ principal motorways running alongside it north and south, east and west.
Maybe players just don’t know how agreeable our area is until they try it? Last week on Geoff Twentyman’s new weekly BBC Radio Bristol ‘Life’s A Gas’ programme, Geoff not only had ex- Rovers man mountain Steve Elliott as a guest, a Derbyshire lad who came to Bristol in 2004 and still loves it here, but also regaled us with a personal tale of when he himself came down from Lancashire to sign for Rovers in 1986 and was told by local hero Harold Jarman that ”you’ll never move away”, as he rattled off about five big names who came to the city and stayed. 30 years later and Harold’s prediction is still accurate for Geoff.
I have however heard some lower league players declare that the high cost of living in many parts of the South does affect their quality of life, especially those with families. Championship wages may not make this an issue, but League Two wages can.
Is Bristol a footballing backwater? Well, we have to hold our hands up on this one. It just about typifies the laid back Bristolian mentality that it took Rovers almost 40 years of its early life before it joined the Football League and since then has enjoyed only 19 seasons in the Second Tier in nearly a century. City of course were in the League like a rat up a drainpipe, barely seven years after forming, but even they’ve only had nine seasons in the top division, and 53 in the Second Tier.
So when a player is weighing up his future and wondering which potential suitor might take him higher, a club like Burnley, with a relatively decrepit stadium and an icy Pennine breeze even in mid-July, can still tempt Andre Gray more than Bristol can. That cycle is really hard to break and will affect even us, down in League Two, especially with spartan training facilities and a stadium made for rugby and virtually untouched for two decades.
There is little to snig-ger about here, only lessons to be learned and realities to be overcome.
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Martin Bull became a Gashead in 1989 and immediately fell in love with Twerton Park, standing near G pillar.
Two of his six books have been about Bristol Rovers. ‘Away The Gas’ is packed full of over 50 years of ‘I was
there’ away game moments, all written by fans, and ‘Print That Season! - One man’s weekly meanderings
throughout Bristol Rovers’ promotion campaign of 2014-15’ is the antidote to obedient season reviews, with
none of the hindsight that most writers rely on. Full details of both are available at
www.awaythegas.org.uk
