G is for Gas blog
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A Fresh ChallengeWhat can Gasheads expect from a season back in League Two? Personally I anticipate more of the same, with a tight-knit team improving as the season goes on, and staggered signings and loanees coming and going to fill gaps. My heart says we could well continue our upward momentum, as many teams have done in the past, but my head reminds me that in nine previous seasons in ‘the easiest League in the world to get out of’ we had August optimism every season but reached the play-offs just once, and only finished in the top half of the table two other years, and they were both a statistic scrapping 12th. If a cheeky wag had made a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan, ‘Bristol Rovers - Lowering Expectations since the 20th Century’, we couldn’t really have feigned indignation at it.
Although I’m obviously still elated at our swift exit from non-league, the reality is that for most of the 21st Century I have been shaking my head when I comprehend what division we’re playing in. They can rename it as many times as they like (‘Third Division‘, ‘League Two‘) but if you put lipstick on a pig it’s still a pig. We all know it’s the Fourth Division, and when inelegantly trying to explain it to a non-football fan I often find myself lapsing into that dreaded phrase, ’the bottom division’; a division we had always successfully evaded.
For more than four decades since the creation of the Fourth Division in 1958 Rovers cemented their quirky position of being the last remaining club to have never experienced the highs or lows of either the top or the bottom divisions of the Football League. Whilst that lot south of the river lived their decadent footballing life like Ian Ogilvy dressed in a white suit and recreating the Russian roulette scene from ‘The Deer Hunter‘, we ploughed a somewhat dull, but maybe under appreciated, middle ground.
All that ended in 2001 with the meltdown of Ian Holloway, and the patented first AND second ‘worst decisions ever made…ever
TM’, when giving the rescue job to Garry Thompson, who would look out of depth even in a toddlers paddling pool and managed a deplorable 49 points from 43 League games in two separate spells. Yes, that’s not a typo, he was given another crack at it despite relegation at his first attempt, and would have achieved a landmark double relegation if it wasn’t for a Halifax Town charlatan XI masquerading as a football team and the glory days of only one horrifying team being relegated into non-league. How exactly did that all happen? Let’s just not go there, eh…
Statistically there is good news for our forthcoming season. Analysis of the first year performances of teams that have been promoted from the Conference since two clubs have gone up (2002/03) shows, well… that quite frankly just about everything is possible except instant relegation.
So, for those worried about being drawn into a relegation dogfight the average placing of newbies like us is greatly comforting. The Conference champions have finished their fresher year in League Two occupying an average position of 12th, with 64 points, whilst the Conference play-off winners are neatly just a smidgen behind, in an average position of 13th, with 62 points. This does somewhat hide an important detail though; namely that only in a golden period of four seasons in a row from 2005 to 2009 has the play-off winner ever finished above the champion. Since then it has all been downhill, with only one of the last six Conference play-off winners even crawling into the top half (twelth!), so recent history suggests we may need to hope for Barnet finishing in the top three so we can tag along into the play-offs.
My desperation to reach that hallowed ground is because seemingly nothing can go wrong if you do manage to reach the top seven in your first season in League Two. Four of the teams that have done so since 2003 have gone straight up to League One via the automatic promotion places and the only team to have finished in the play-offs went on to win at Wembley (Stevenage Borough in 2011, who incidentally are the only team in the Division we have never played before, in League or Cup, as we oddly always seem to be passing like ships in the night, going up and down divisions at the same time). What does tend to happen though is that clubs on a stratospheric rise tend to find themselves back down to earth about three years later; four of those five instant promotees are now back to playing with the Football League dregs this season.
More good news is held by the fact that no promoted team has suffered an immediate relegation. Let’s hope we don’t see that as a record made to be broken. Several promotees have flirted with relegation but the worst League position has been Shrewsbury Town’s lowly 21st in 2005, with a joint-record low of 49 points. And, in general, the survival rate over the years is very good. Only five of the last 24 promoted clubs have since been relegated back to non-league.
Let’s be Bert Tann’s Pirates this season, rather that Ray Graydon’s Gas.
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Martin Bull became a Gashead in 1989 and immediately fell in love with Twerton Park, standing near G pillar. In 2006 he wrote, photographed and published the first independent book about the artist Banksy. Having been exiled for much of his past, away games have always been special for him; so much so that with 40 other fans has published a new book about them -
www.awaythegas.org.uk
