We’d all like to see our team sweeping opponents aside, owning the pitch with the confident swagger of an unbeatable army. But, for many fans this reality is unknown, and matches are often closely fought contests between two evenly matched opponents. This is bearable providing your team can compete and has a chance of victory. However, if your team ends up in a league where the average standard appears unachievable then your ability to enjoy football is rapidly eroded. The Championship has a history of placing teams in this horrible predicament by promoting them to the Premier League completely unprepared.
Gaining promotion is euphoric, but a season long slog of inevitable defeats is a joyless existence. This is the scenario Crystal Palace faced when Ian Holloway departed in the early stages of this season. Palace had chalked up one victory, but lost their other seven fixtures, including a 4-1 home defeat to Fulham. Derby’s miserable 2007/08 record breaking campaign total of 11 points was suddenly looking evidently beatable. Holloway suggested the new players he acquired in the summer had disrupted the team spirit from the previous campaign. They had also lost Wilfred Zaha – the star player responsible for scoring or creating all of the goals that secured Palace’s promotion through the playoffs. To pretty much everyone Palace were as good as relegated by mid-October, but Tony Pulis made a different assessment of their fate and decided he fancied his chances.
What Pulis has achieved since is one of the most sensational managerial achievements of the past decade, eclipsing his early triumphs at Stoke. The problem with acknowledging what Pulis has done is that it requires people to accept that he has some skills and insights that other managers do not, when it is easier just to dismiss him as a Luddite. The kind of football played by Pulis’ teams doesn’t get blogged about, it doesn’t appear on YouTube videos, and it doesn’t get turned into graphic designs and printed on t-shirts. Pulis’ football is characterised by a mantra of results first, with entertainment a distant second, if you’re lucky.
Some people buy a match programme at every game as their keep sake. I have a fairly solid collection of 1990′s Watford programmes myself – who doesn’t – but after a while I decided they were too expensive, and the content was often awful. In terms of banking some nostalgia, my old tickets have proved to be a more reliable currency, prompting vivid memories of my travels to watch football. Take this one (left) from a 3rd round cup replay at Hillsborough. This is my equivalent of a grizzled Soldier’s flashback to a particularly brutal tour of duty. It was a midweek fixture in early January; the match went to extra time and penalties, which Watford lost. We were quite late getting out of the stadium and back to the train station, but still had enough time to catch our train.
