AS WE ENTER the final straight, Vanarama Conference leaders Barnet are still within our sights.
Yes, the margin seems a large one – seven points – but we know to our cost how pressure can impact on teams who have spent a large part of the season dominating the league.
Back in season 1999/2000 Rovers were charging away at the top of the Second Division as we approached the final run-in under our manager at the time, Ian Holloway. We had an exceptional team playing exceptional football, strikers Jason Roberts and Jamie Cureton taking most of the plaudits.
I recall a couple of memorable away trips during that period, where we put on a masterclass of attacking play to destroy Brentford 3-0 and Luton 4-1 with Roberts and Cureton heavily involved in those momentous wins
What is carved painfully on every Gashead’s memory is how things went so wrong after that.
A quick glance at Wikipedia suggests Big Brother and the thought police have been at work attempting to erase the disastrous end-of-season run from our history.
The only reference to that season is that “Bristol Rovers finished seventh, and just missed out on the play-offs.”
Yet at one stage automatic promotion seemed a cert, and when Rovers beat Wycombe 1-0 at home on March 7 we were four points clear of a Preston side managed by David Moyes and seven points ahead of third-placed Millwall.
Most Rovers fans would have considered a place in the play-offs at that stage tantamount to failure, but a fate even worse befell us as we slid down the table and missed out on the end-of-season lottery by losing to already relegated Cardiff City on the last day of the season.
Arguably things haven’t really been the same for Rovers since. We lost our best players, sunk into the bottom division for the first time in our history and, though we had a brief revival under Paul Trollope and Lennie Lawrence, it seems we have been fighting fires for the majority of the 14 seasons that followed.
There are still plenty of conspiracy theories as to what went wrong. It’s even been suggested players might have sabotaged our promotion bid to negotiate moves away.
I think it was down to the pressure of the situation, though, and once a couple of results went against us we ended up on a helter-skelter without brakes.
When we went into that Wycombe game we had exactly 13 matches to play, so the parallels are there. I just hope that Martin Allen’s men experience the same squeaky bum sensation that we did and Darrell Clarke and his men can take advantage.
It won’t be easy, and it’s a shame we have missed so many opportunities away from home. We have visited all 12 sides in the bottom half of the Conference and bagged just 18 points.
It leaves us with games at fellow top-five teams Grimsby and Macclesfield (tough, uncompromising places to visit), together with outings at other play-off hopefuls Kidderminster, Gateshead, Halifax and in-form Dover.
Let’s hope Darrell can rise to the occasion and galvanise us for the run-in. Catching Barnet must remain top of the agenda, because there won’t be any easy rides in the playoffs.
Nick Rippington is a journalist working on national newspapers in London. He has been an ardent fan of Bristol Rovers for 47 years, seeing them through the highs of promotion under Don Megson, Gerry Francis and Paul Trollope as well as many painfully remembered lows. He is currently working on his first novel, a thriller called Crossing The Whitewash, which he intends to publish this year. Follow his progress on his website:
buckrippers.wix.com/theripperfile or catch up with nick at @nickripp on twitter.
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