Jogging on shale

 9 March 2013 - Bristol City 2 Middlesbrough 0

Something a bit different this week.  I was going to write a standard blog, but like many City fans at present, my mind is filled with permutations, with considerations of other teams’ results and with the vexed question of when we can stop running to stand still and start running to move somewhere.  Also, I’ve just watched the finale of Dexter series 4 and frankly haven’t much of my mind left for creativity just now.

Everyone watch Dexter.  It’s bloody amazing.

Anyway.  This week, a bit of maths to give me a sense – just a sense – of how the final Championship table might look.  And a few specious conclusions drawn from it.

Basically, I wondered how far our current form might take us. It’s vaguely encouraging – we’re closing the points gap between ourselves and the thin dotted line above us slowly but steadily – but my concern is that time will run out before we can turn it from the present -2 points to 2 or 3 points, and safety.  All the teams around us are giving a solid impression of being on equivalent form.  The teams above, Wolves aside, seem to just about resist being dragged in.  And we keep jogging on shale, unable to make a purchase.

So what I’ve done, purely as an experiment, is see where the teams from 11^th down – ie those 9 points and below ahead of us, who one might reasonably consider to be in some danger of relegation – can expect to finish if they perform as well over their remaining 9 (say) games as they did over the 9 before.  I’ve taken the current points total, added to it the points gained over the last x amount of games (where x is the number of games remaining for that team) and worked out how a league table on that basis might look.

So we have:

BURNLEY             Points 48 Games remaining 9 Pts from last 9 6 Total 54

CHARLTON          Points 47 Games remaining 9 Pts from last 9 8 Total 55

BLACKPOOL        Points 46 Games remaining 9 Pts from last 9 12 Total 58

BIRMINGHAM     Points 46 Games remaining 9 Pts from last 9 15 Total 61

DERBY                   Points 45 Games remaining 9 Pts from last 9 7 Total 52

BLACKBURN       Points 45 Games remaining 10 Pts from last 10 9 Total 54

MILLWALL           Points 44 Games remaining 11 Pts from last 11 7 Total 51

HUDDERSFIELD Points 44 Games remaining 9 Pts from last 9 11 Total 55

SHEFF WED         Points 43 Games remaining 10 Pts from last 10 18 Total 61

IPSWICH              Points 43 Games remaining 9 Pts from last 9 11 Total 54

BARNSLEY           Points 41 Games remaining 10 Pts from last 10 20 Total 61

PETERBORO’      Points 39 Games remaining 9 Pts from last 9 13 Total 52

WOLVES               Points 39 Games remaining 9 Pts from last 9 6 Total 45

BRISTOL CITY      Points 39 Games remaining 9 Pts from last 9 14 Total 53

Final table:

11= Birmingham                              61 points

11= Sheffield Wednesday              61 points

11= Barnsley                                    61 points

14. Blackpool                                   58 points

15= Charlton Athletic                       55 points

15= Huddersfield Town                    55 points

17= Burnley                                       54 points

17= Blackburn Rovers                     54 points

17= Ipswich Town                             54 points

20. Bristol City                                  53 points

21= Derby County                            52 points

21= Peterborough United                52 points

23. Millwall                                         51 points

24. Wolverhampton W                      45 points

So.  What have we learnt?

A few things, I reckon.  Bear in mind that this isn’t science, despite using counting and adding.  I’m not saying that these are the final places.  Form will change – Kenny Jackett’s a good manager who may well use Millwall’s Wembley boost to improve their form, whereas conversely Blackpool might not get that many points as the Bloomfield Road surface deteriorates.  There's not a "joint 21st", but frankly I thought that including goal difference would be a shade tenuous even for me.  And I’ve not run this through the BBC Predictor to check whether it’s possible.  But chances are, the final table will look a little like this.

If it is, it would mean that the record high number of points for survival may well need to be equalled, but it won’t be an absurdly large figure that teams are aiming for.  That’s good news for City – our last nine games contained 5 home and 4 away, with those figures being reversed for the run-in, so 53 points (pretty narrow anyway) might be pushing it a little.  It would be nice to think we’re not aiming for 56 or 57.

It’s quite possible that anyone from Blackpool, at 14^th, down could be within 3 points of the drop on the final day.   Since that includes Burnley, currently 11^th in the real world, and given that my top 3 may well not in fact hit the heights of their recent form between now and May, I think that it’s “case proven” in terms of including all those teams in the relegation fight.  And I hadn’t realised how awful the run some of them are on is – Derby will want to pull this round pretty quicky, for instance.  Their young players were excellent at Ashton Gate earlier in the season.  But as Aston Villa are finding, a relegation battle (and Derby might soon be in one) is a tough place for an inexperienced squad.

Maybe Derby will be fine.  But if they do win some games, who will the wins come against?  Ipswich?  Blackburn?  Barnsley?  Peterborough?  Us?  It’s becoming the sort of scramble where it will only be possible to escape by pushing somebody else back down.  That’s not bad news for us, already down at the bottom.

But I’m clutching at straws a little.  Even our fine form, extrapolated until May, only saw us survive by a point in this experiment.  One rogue result could change that.  A significantly worse run would surely relegate us.  And given the closeness of the race, we’re unlikely to have pressure-free opposition late on.  Hull will presumably be going for a top-two spot when we play them a fortnight from the end of the season.  It’s hard to see Huddersfield already being more than six points clear when we meet a week later.  And the Valley will be a tough place to go on final day if Powell’s Addicks still need something from the game.

It’s not science.  That won’t be the final table.  It mightn’t be a million miles away though.  It’s going to be tough.  For everything O’Driscoll’s done, it might be unsuccessful.  But blimey, look at City above the line there.  That’s something to cling on to.  We’re bottom of the table.  It might very well get worse at the weekend.  But surely the likelihood that this one will go all the way is something positive to take at this stage.

Surely?

The little things they make me so happy

23 February 2013 - Bristol City 5 Barnsley 3 (plus bonus England 2 Brazil 1 and Barcelona 3 Real Sociedad 1)

So I thought that after a relatively long absence from this thing, I’d grab your attention with a series of controversial statements.  Prepare to be blown away by the force of my iconoclastic opinions:

-          Over the last five years, Barcelona have been the best team in Europe!

-          Gareth Bale is currently playing at as high a level as anybody else in the Premier League!

-          Jack Wilshere is a fine player who will play many times for England!

-          Bristol City have improved in form since Sean O’Driscoll was appointed!

OK.  Perhaps these don’t quite constitute the blistering sideways-on look at football you expect from your blogs.  They’re all true, though, which is a good start.  And they’re connected, too.  I think that the reason that teams have great spells, that players rise to success, and that poor sides can regain form are actually very simple.  Or, to put it another way: it’s simplicity itself that connects all these points.  Keeping it simple (stupid) is the key to success in each of my examples above, and in football as a whole.

Watching Barcelona last year was one hell of an eye-opener.  Not only because I saw Lionel Messi play (and really, you owe it to yourself to do the same thing), but because what Barcelona were doing was something I’d never really seen before.

Their opponents, Real Sociedad, were playing what I recognised as 11-a-side association football.  I’ve seen it at Ashton Gate and at my local park in Peckham.  I understood the guiding principles  and I could see what they were trying to do.  Their basic plan of attack was to try to score when they had the ball, and try not to concede when they didn’t.  They weren’t bad, either, and gave Barca a few problems.

Barcelona however weren’t following the same strategy.  Or at least they didn’t appear to be.  When they got the ball, they didn’t seem to see scoring a goal as being paramount at all.  They didn’t force the issue, content to move the ball around the back line, probe down one wing, move the ball back through the midfield, start again.  Only when this process lead to a chance too clear not to attempt to score from (or when Messi, content most of the time to jog across Sociedad’s back line knocking the ball into Xavi’s feet, suddenly exploded into a legs-and-pace footballing Tasmanian devil) did they threaten the opposing goal.  And yet you felt that the goals must come, must come inexorably.  They didn’t win the game by scoring goals.  They scored goals by winning the game.

And this utter dominance was achieved, with only a few exceptions, by doing very, very simple things. By moving the ball three, four, five yards at a time and by moving on as soon as the ball had been released.  By closing down their opponents on the rare occasions possession did drop away.  By jogging around and giving the ball to the nearest person.  This was without doubt the most technically adept group of footballers I’ve ever seen in the flesh.  And yet they rarely did anything I didn’t feel that I could do myself.  It was so simple, it looked so easy, that it was hard not to wonder why every team didn’t play this way.

Of course the answer is that every team can’t – this is deceptively tough stuff.  It takes skill, coaching, perseverance.  It takes confidence to keep doing it even when things aren’t going well (such as right now, for instance).  But for all that it’s difficult, the fundamentals are nevertheless the simplest skills in football.

Gareth Bale’s another good example.  This typically excellent article from our friend the Secret Footballer is strong on the little things he’s improved in his game in order to hit his current, destructive level of form.  They’re all simple things – they’re all things one feels could be mastered by a player of even moderate quality with practice alone.  But moderate players don’t put in that practice.  Gareth Bale’s done so and it’s given him a fighting chance of achieving genuine greatness.

Much the same strikes me about Jack Wilshere.  He’s not currently at the same level of form as Bale, sure, but he’s a fine young player who’s come back from a pretty awful injury in better fettle than anyone might reasonably have expected.

I was at the England-Brazil game at Wembley last month.  It was my international debut – I was there with a guest of the sponsors, the Teenage Cancer Trust.  While I wasn’t marvelling at my luck at getting a genuinely enjoyable England friendly (that’s got to be, what, 15-1 against?) I was very much enjoying the contribution Wilshere made, particularly in comparison with the much-vaunted Neymar.

Neymar seemed to spend the entire game forcing the issue.  He tried to do everything – move the ball around at the heart of attack, take on multiple defenders, shoot, tackle – the lot.  All under that ridiculous haircut.  And he didn’t impress – partly perhaps because in the first half Ronaldinho was also trying to turn the game into a personal display, but still.  His colleague Oscar, slightly less extravagantly talented perhaps (and certainly less extravagantly barneted) was the pick of the Brazil side.  He was technically very able, sure, but he also knew when to test the defender and when to move the ball to someone better placed.  Simple things.

Jack Wilshere seemed to get all of his decisions absolutely right.  He didn’t demand the ball all match, but given his central position he saw a lot of it.  And he didn’t feel personally obliged to change the game with every touch he had.  A great deal of what he did was about keeping position or moving an attack through the phases.  His performance was subsumed to England’s; the midfield was exactly as good as he was, so vital was he to the team’s strategy on the night.  And when he did go for the (calculatedly) risky passes he set up the chance that led to the first goal.  It was the type of performance we rarely see from young English players and it was immensely encouraging.

Bristol City have improved by doing exactly the same things.  Concentrating on the simple things – defensive organisation, keeping possession, preparing to win the ball back from a throw-in or from a goal-kick.  Rocket science this is not – but a group of players very low on confidence (unsurprisingly; O’Driscoll took over a side seven points from safety having just been destroyed 4-0 at home) have been given simple, clear tasks to do.  They’ve had the pressure of results taken away and it’s working.

When you’re feeling low, when you’re feeling as though work isn’t going well, you don’t want to be presenting at a Board meeting.  You want something nice and simple to do – a spot of filing, an audit of your emails, a catch-up with a friendly colleague.  City’s players have been given the equivalent.  Don’t worry about trying to change the world, trying to force the issue of getting out of the relegation zone.  Just worry about your own job.  Get that right and everything else will come.

It’s the hardest thing in the world to stick to, to believe that this is the right method.  If we need to win on the final day at Charlton, and if it’s 0-0 with 10 minutes remaining, to keep passing the ball, to keep in control of the match, to resist the temptation to hit 35-yard efforts will be difficult for players and manager alike.  But we absolutely must.  We criticise Barcelona sometimes for their “lack of a plan B”, and yes their style is one that should be more flexible – there’s no need always to press, to constrict the game, to allow one’s opponents to keep 10 behind the ball.  But their belief in their philosophy is absolutely right.  Their amusing draw with Chelsea a few years ago came about partly because of some baffling refereeing decisions, partly because of a standard Andres Iniesta piece of brilliance, but partly because they kept playing their football in order that Iniesta could have the shooting opportunity in the first place.  They were injury time away from a semi-final Champions League elimination and they continued to believe totally in their system.  That was impressive.   They went on, of course, to win the tournament.  Had they abandoned the simple things in a desperate chase for a “result”  gained by mad headless football as opposed to calm, controlled stuff, they would plainly not have done so.

City may or may not go down.  It’s hard to say.  But if we stay up we’ll do so by sticking to the simple principles espoused by Sean O’Driscoll.  The idea that we should react to reaching the most important moments of the season by doing anything other than what’s working is madness.  We’ll keep it simple, we’ll trust the system, and we’ll have a real chance.

Things Fall Apart

12 January 2013 - Bristol City 0 Leicester City 4

When he arrived at Bristol City, Derek McInnes must have been presented with one of the most difficult in-trays in the League.

“Here’s what you have to do, Mr McInnes.  First of all, you have to keep a side on six points from eleven games in the division.  Comfortably, if you can, oh and by playing good football please to keep the fans onside.  Having done that, you’ll be wanting to overhaul the playing staff.  It’s bloated and full of mediocrity at present.  Move players on, bring new ones in, shrink the squad – oh but you won’t be able to spend many of the savings you realise because the wage bill has to reduce significantly.  In parallel with that, well, frankly the whole club needs work. You’ll be removing key coaching staff and identifying your own, who we’ll assume will be recruited on lower wages.  The pipeline from young prospect to first teamer needs clearing out and polishing up.

“And while you’re doing all those other things on a bit of a shoestring, if you could avoid another relegation battle and move the team up the table with a bit of flair and panache, that’d be marvellous.”

So Derek failed.  So he had to go.  So the thrashing which – accursed fate! – I said on Thursday would lose him his job came along at the first possible opportunity.  But what did for him wasn’t, in particular, managerial ineptitude – clearly he made mistakes, significant ones sometimes, but the man’s no fool and if given another chance he’ll do well.  He’s far savvier than Keith Millen ever was.  What did for him was failing at just one of those many tasks.  Sadly, it was the most important of all - keeping us out of the relegation zone. But no manager should have been burdened with such a convoluted job description in the first place.

I’ve thought before that in many ways, reaching the play-off final was the worst thing that could have happened to the club after promotion. Ross put this well during the game – his argument is that because we’d shown that Johnson’s harum-scarum managerial style (long on motivation and bonhomie, short on long-term strategic planning) could achieve success, that became how the club worked.  We liked the team we had, we liked the togetherness Johnson was spectacular at fostering between club and support, so we stuck with it.  Where there were gaps – a striker for instance – Johnson pulled in first Dele Adebola and then Nicky Maynard to fill them.  When we had a goalkeeper crisis, in came Dean Gerken to do a decent job.  When Adebola didn’t sign a contract – umm, let’s bring in a loanee or two.  When the midfield wasn’t functioning quite as well – oh, we like Gavin Williams, let’s bring him in.

The club was successful, by its own terms, but it was reactive.  There was no long-term plan.  We had to run ever faster to stand still.  And all the while, the wage bill shot up, and all the while, ageing players looked at their contracts and saw with delight that they had three years still to go.

The other problem caused by the play-off final was that supporters’ expectations rapidly changed.  A year previously we’d been happy enough just to be a Championship club.  At a fellow supporter’s wedding that promotion summer I predicted a 14^th-16^th place finish and saw that as optimism.  Most would have been happy with it.  It took dropping into the relegation zone before anyone would be again.  Johnson didn’t lose goodwill by signing Stefan Maierhoffer or letting all our goalkeepers walk out of the club at once.  He lost it when the wounds in the team became too large for a sticking-plaster to hold, and we became the lower mid-table Championship club we’d always threatened to be.  I know we’d take it now, but we didn’t take it then.  The fans were dissatisfied, the players didn’t seem to be with him any more, and he went.

In the short term, Gary Johnson was a victim of overachievement.  In the long term, I wonder whether we’re not victims of his “taking each season as it comes” policy.

I’ve followed City for over twenty years, and most campaigns have seen us either struggle in this division or battle for promotion in the one below.  Really great seasons and really terrible seasons have been those outside of that fairly narrow band.  That trend goes back way beyond my personal experience, too – while we’ve been in all four divisions in living memory, our sojourns into the very top or very bottom flights haven’t been prolonged.  Bouncing between the middle divisions is what City historically do.  What goes up must come down, and as most clubs ultimately do we’ve reverted to the mean.  It’s not much fun, but it’s not the end of the world, either.

The problem isn’t really that our momentum ran out before we hit escape velocity.  It’s not that we came back down to Earth.  That was always likely.  The problem is that we were so badly prepared for it, we crashed and there was a lot of wreckage.  Gary Johnson, Steve Coppell, Keith Millen and Derek McInnes were all collateral damage, really.  In different ways, they were all consumed by the flailing, directionless beast Bristol City became.

What’s vital now is that we’re ready for relegation if it comes.  Not that we accept it, but that we understand what to do if we go down, how the club needs to marshal itself in order that this doesn’t turn into a death spiral that costs us Sean O’Driscoll and another decade of potential.

There are promising signs at the club.  There’s a strategy now, signing younger players, reducing the wage bill, bringing youngsters through.  If executed properly this should be manager-proof (although we’ve appointed a manager who, to my mind, has succeeded following exactly the same strategic direction at Doncaster).  The frustrating thing though is that we’re doing this now.  Six years in the Championship, and we’re figuring out how to be a Championship club just as we fall out of it.

I think that O’Driscoll has an easier job than McInnes.  Not in the short-term, perhaps – McInnes had far more time to get us out the relegation zone.  But medium-term there should be a lot less on his plate. The club’s been overhauled.  We have professionals who aren’t necessarily former players in each behind-the-scenes role.  We’ve got promising youngsters – Bryan, Reid and Burns now, perhaps Krans, Jones and Carey next – on the fringes of the first team. We’ve sold three players for a fee in the past 12 months, for goodness sake.  When did we last do that?

The work Derek McInnes did means that Sean O’Driscoll can now concentrate on his primary job – managing the team.  I think, and hope, that means that he’ll end up with a better win ratio, a longer stint at the club, and ultimately more success.  I think he’ll end up being remembered more fondly than the man from St. Johnstone.  I’m delighted to have him here.

But the work Derek McInnes did for us, while not enough on the pitch, might well set us up rather healthily long-term.  I suspect we’ll have lots to thank Del for, one day.

 

Whatever everyone says we are, that's what we're not quite

1 January 2012 - Millwall 2 Bristol City 1

What happens is that things can’t exist in their own right.  Everything gets drowned, swamped, by context.  And if the context is that everybody is very, very angry – and we all know that’s the context right now – then everybody has to be angry about everything.  And if there’s nothing specific to be angry about, something will be found, won’t be questioned, and will spread mimetically until it feels like a real reason.

I’m not saying that what happened at this game was satisfying, pleasing or enjoyable (although large parts of the second half could be described using just those adjectives).  And what happened subsequently in the Cup was also disappointing, although scarcely unexpected.  But what seems to be happening now is that because we’ve lost games, far too many games, some pretty appallingly, every single defeat is appalling and everyone involved is a hack.

City have played pretty badly on several occasions this season.  At home against Wolves, and against Charlton, we produced some of the worst football I can remember seeing at Ashton Gate.  It was hopeless, pathetic.  The players came out of those games badly, the manager worse.  And the first half at the Den was up there with those performances.  The second half, however, far less so.  We drew the second half and could easily have won it, could easily have won the game, had chances for Sam Baldock, Neil Danns and Albert Adomah been taken.   There aren’t three City players you’d have wanted to see those chances fall to more, but on the day none of them could finish.

But because we’d been playing poorly, that defeat – away to a team well above us in the league and on a good run of form, by a single goal – is hissed and spat at by the fans.  Defeat in the Cup, to team above us in the league and, since Henning Berg’s departure, on their own good run of form, is even worse.  In a way it wasn’t when Cardiff and Boro were knocking us out in nearly identical circumstances, except for our league form being better.  The individual results don’t get reacted to.  Because our recent form is bad, the argument goes, each individual defeat must be bad.  McInnes out.

Except that our recent form isn’t that bad –perhaps it would best be described as indifferent.  In the league (and you’ll forgive me for not caring remotely about the Cup) we’re on W3 D2 L4 since we finally emerged from that bleak seven-game losing run.  11 points from 10 games isn’t much to get excited about, but it’s 50 points over the course of a season, enough to keep us up in any of the past four years, and contains good results at Ipswich and Boro as well as that six-pointer victory against Peterborough.  Not great, and nothing to write home about, but not, surely, a catalyst for the sort of rage infecting the fanbase at the moment.

We need to keep picking up points, of course, but the signs are that we will do.  Another drop-off could be lethal, yes – but this isn’t another drop-off.  It’s defeats in two tough games.  It’s not a catastrophe and it’s not the worst we’ve ever played.  It’s a disappointing week, no more, no less.

To me, the next month or so looks huge.  Games against teams who look tough on paper – Leicester, Leeds, Ipswich, Blackburn, Forest – but who the league table tells us are inconsistent outfits ranging from 5^th to five places from bottom. It’s a pick-and-mix run, perfectly illustrative of the rank and file of the Championship.  Carry on picking up points in that run and we’ll be looking OK, even if we do lose a couple of them.  Improve our form – and would fans of Peterborough or Sheffield Wednesday have expected their form to improve so dramatically until the very second it happened? – better yet.  Slump back into the bad old ways of autumn, though, and there’ll be no case for the defence any more.

I’ve had the same tough old season as everyone else.   I can’t say that the name Derek McInnes occupies a soft, warm space in my heart.  I’ve not, frankly, had a great deal of fun.  But I’m going to work on the assumption that bad days and blips don’t get managers sacked, certainly not at Bristol City.  If he was the right man after the Charlton defeat – and we’ll all have our own opinions about that – then I can’t see how his stock has fallen further in the interim.  That’s the context I’m looking at.  And it’s because I think the next month is so pivotal that I’ll be there for those home fixtures, heart in my mouth, larynx at full blast, doing what I think is the right thing: supporting the manager as long as he’s there and the team as long as I am.