10 March 2012: Bristol City 1 Cardiff City 2

There was general consensus around the stadium, and on the forums afterward, that we’d been ‘unlucky’ not to get at least a draw.

There’s no question we played well.  The effort was there, the application that will keep us up if anything will was on display from every player.  The game felt as though it was fading into a draw, and we’d had the better chances to nick it in a good 20-minute second half spell.  So, yes, the goal we conceded denied us anything for our endeavour and was tough to take, coming as it did from a nasty deflection.  But were we unlucky?  Do teams lose unluckily?  Or, as I’d argue, does the best team almost always win?

Let’s define terms quickly.  I’d say the best team is the one best at the game of football.  Hopefully that’s not controversial.  Football’s a game with a particular aim, though, and that aim isn’t to keep possession most, to work hardest, to put together the best attacks or the best passing moves.  It’s got one aim; scoring more than your opponent.  You do that by attacking and by defending.  If a team controls the midfield, they don’t (or shouldn’t) do it as an end in and of itself – they do it because that’s how they’ve decided they can score the most goals and concede the fewest.  Swansea City didn’t get promoted on the grounds of artistic merit last season.  They did it by outscoring people.  It was marvellous to see them beating the league leaders in a way newly promoted teams normally don’t, but it was the victory itself that made the performance marvellous.  They scored the goal.  They got the win.  That’s why they deserved it.  For no other reason.

This is a creeping trend in the game, this idea that you deserve it because you created chances (you didn’t take), you hit the woodwork a lot (without scoring), you missed a penalty (so practice penalties).  None of these things, not chances, not near-misses, not penalties, actually matter.  They show that you’re doing some of the right things, of course they do.  (That’s why I took a lot of hope from Saturday’s game. To come as close to getting a draw as we did is very encouraging given the number of hopeless defeats we’ve had of late.)  But they’re a step removed from the actual point of playing football.

You don’t get this in, for instance, board games.  Nobody will say that player X “deserved” to beat player Y in chess because although he was beaten in 30 moves, his pawn control throughout was exemplary.  You don’t walk away from tiddlywinks cursing your ill-luck.  I love the variables football gives you, but there are so many, so much to count, that we sometimes forget what the most important variable – no, the only important variable – is.  How many goals you scored.

There are perhaps one or two circumstances where it would be legitimate to curse.  A clearly offside goal conceded in the sixth minute of stoppage time, maybe, or a handball on the line in the 120^th.  It takes mental gymnastics to come up with them, though, and even examples like these aren’t infallible – see Suarez v Ghana two years back.  On one level a clearly unfair interception that denied Ghana the chance to be the first African World Cup semi-finalists.  On closer inspection, a foul caught by the referee, punished with the appropriate sanction, arising from a dodgily-awarded free-kick and allowing Ghana a good chance to win it through a normal-time penalty, and then a chance to redeem themselves in a shoot-out.  So apart from blatant cheating or an incredibly unusual officiating aberration (and no, Mark Hughes, a first-half incorrect decision building on another incorrect decision doesn’t count), I can’t find many circumstances where “unlucky” really comes into it.

Part of this is something that often irks me, the failure of football fans to realise that the goalkeeper is a legitimate member of the team. The keeper is often thought of as a sort of penalty-box roulette wheel.  How often do you hear fans say “we’d have won if their keeper hadn’t played so well?”  Compare and contrast this with less common phrases like “the only reason they won is because of their  complete dominance in midfield” or “if their left-back hadn’t been significantly superior to our right-winger, I’m sure we’d only have lost by two”.  On Saturday, Cardiff’s excellent goalkeeper David Marshall kept out both Sean Davis and Brett Pitman on potentially match-changing occasions.  That’s not luck; that’s skill and expertise on the other side.  There’s a solipsistic tendency to look only at one’s own team, so a missed chance must either be down to poor shooting or ill luck.  Sometimes we have to say that the opposition deserved not to concede – and in this case deserved to build the platform on which they later triumphed.

Another absurdity that springs from this is the concept of “not deserving” to win a league or win a cup.  I’ve even heard that Arsenal “don’t deserve” to be in the top 4, which is as artificial a criticism as the very concept of fourth place being some kind of trophy.  (Who came fourth in 1972 – and did they deserve it?  Anyone able to answer both questions without looking it up will win a wonderful prize.)  This compounds the original failing – not being able to understand that if you play 38 games you almost certainly finish where you deserve – with a misunderstanding of a league system.  They don’t just skip 4^th and move straight on to 5^th if only three teams look any good.  Maybe they should, but they don’t.

I thought City played well at the weekend, the on-form Jon Stead and holding midfielder Kalifa Cisse in particular.  I took a lot of encouragement from it.  I think we’ll stay up if we have ten more games like that.  But if we don’t, and we do go down, it won’t be due to bad luck.  We remain the masters of our own destiny and only by facing up to that responsibility will we be able to survive.

3 March 2012: Ipswich Town 3 Bristol City 0

Neil Kilkenny doesn’t strike me as much of a person.

With apologies to the Coen Brothers, I don’t like him.  I don’t like his jerk-off name.  I don’t like his jerk-off face.  I don’t like his jerk-off behaviour.  I don’t like him.  Jerk-off.

I find Louis Carey steadily less tolerable as well.  He’s grown a moustache no 36-year-old who isn’t actually a member of the Light Infantry should have.  It reaches his chin.  It looks absurd.

David James!  He’s a frustrating man, bawling at his defence then petulantly kicking the ball to nobody in particular when they don’t seem to listen.  It’s not behaviour befitting a man with the career he’s got (very firmly) behind him.

Hang on.  Where’s all this come from?  This spite, this vitriol, this, let’s face it, sarcasm.  I’m one of the nice guys, aren’t  I?  I’m all about perspective.  Understanding.  Realising that football isn’t as easy as it looks from the stands.

Problem is, it’s a mind-altering drug this game, it really is.  There aren’t many illegal substances that can make me feel as high as I did when Christian Roberts scored a 90^th-minute winner against Hartlepool in that playoff semi-final all those years ago.  But if you take the highs, you have to accept the lows, and my fragile brain chemistry has been so rocked by weeks of dreadful performances – by Peterborough, by Blackpool, and now by Ipswich – that I’ve been converted into a bile machine.

I’m not the only one.  It’s all around me on the stands.  And while the majority around me are able to express their anger in a reasoned way (or, just as acceptably, via loud, consistent swearing), some allow their venom to swamp their sense.

For the man in front, nothing is rocket science.  Scoring goals is “not rocket science”.  Pass and move is “not rocket science”.  Apprehending why a group of poor footballers are producing poor football, however, appears to be rocket science because he simply can’t.  The ineptitude of, say, Louis Carey is clearly on a level with the construction of the V2.  Perhaps this is why Swindon Town are doing so well – like NASA in the years immediately following the war, they have a charismatic fascist overseeing the work.

Ross is drawn into a confrontation with the gentleman behind who bays for Pitman’s introduction from an early stage.  For most City fans, the mathematics seem simple – one striker means you draw at best (and at worst lose 3-0), two strikers mean you win at best (and at worst lose 5-4).  It’s not rocket science.  It’s not rocket science because aeronautics tends to be based on facts, and this is fallacious nonsense – we’ve been regularly torn apart playing four in the middle against all but the weakest sides.  Problem is, we’re being torn apart with five in the middle now.  Nothing seems to work, in which case the logic becomes “we may as well play 4-4-2 if we’re going to lose anyway, just to shut the more voluble fans up for a week or two”.  I have my own opinion about how much a striker who appears to struggle for fitness, and lopes gracefully over ground at speed in much the same way as a small residential property does, will contribute to a fight at Portman Road, but there’s merit in having him on the pitch at Ashton Gate.  He can at least score the occasional goal, and for the lowest scorers in the entire football league that facility is probably a useful one.

Benching the fans’ favourite is happening for a perfectly good tactical reason and all other things being equal I’d have him on the bench against Leicester (crikey) tomorrow, as well as Cardiff (crumbs) on Saturday.  But there’s a bit of me that thinks, you know what?  If doing something the fans want will pour a little water on the flames, I wouldn’t be averse.  Watching football surrounded by so much anger is horrible.  It’s infectious, too (this is about right).  It gets under the skin, cuts out the higher brain functions, and as I’ve previously noted, it ruins weekends.

Sometimes it’s worth doing the popular thing. If it fails, and we lose anyway, the point doesn’t need to be made again.  And if the people are right (and everyone knows he can score) then that’s clearly marvellous.

One way or another I don’t want to hate the players any more.  I’ve had enough of being infected with anger.  I’d like to walk out of Ashton Gate a bit happier, and take a seat the following week next to people who aren’t already an interesting shade of purple.

Maybe this week?

25 February 2012: Bristol City 1 Blackpool 3

I’m aware, of course, that This Is Spinal Tap is one of those movies so over-quoted that you really shouldn’t use it as a source any more.  It’s like Withnail and I or The Big Lebowski in that regard.  But I’m going to anyway, and maybe next week you’ll get something a bit more original from me.

One of the many, many wonderful scenes in that film takes place at Elvis’ grave in Graceland.  The band’s silent contemplation is broken by Nigel Tufnel’s observation that it “puts everything in perspective”.  “Yeah,” responds his acerbic bandmate David St. Hubbins, “too much fucking perspective”.

What’s the right amount of perspective, and do we ever have it? I suspect not; I spent the weekend wallowing in the aftermath of this gutless surrender of three points, but it’s immensely preferable to the only way “perspective” is ever said to be gained; ie, a death, tragedy or some other “real life” incident.  “Perspective” tends to mean an unfortunate double-whammy of something unpleasant happening in an ultimately trivial realm, such as football, and something far worse happening away from the pitch.

Well this is my appeal for perspective without the unpleasant trigger of tragedy.  It’s targeted at my fellow fans and it’s targeted at myself.  I’m normally quite good at dealing with defeats, but a solo train back to London can be a lonely place after a game that felt like the harbinger of relegation, and I struggled to get over this one.  Chris Wood’s saved header at 1-1 and the profound injustice of the free-kick which lead to their equaliser...

...see.  I’m doing it right now.  It’s not, I hope , the most significant thing that’s happened to me this month and yet I’ve lingered on it more than any other event.  I’m sure that’s true for a lot of fans, as well. We all need some perspective.

Failing to see the bigger picture is something of an occupational hazard for the standard football fan.  I used to live with a Spurs fan and an Arsenal fan.  Yeah.  For some reason, the North London derby tended to fall around my birthday every single year, so the prospect of having an entirely undisturbed birthday weekend was pretty minimal.  The 90 minute football game becomes all-consuming, takes over the entire weekend.  With unfortunate effects for anyone who happened to be celebrating another year of life around that time.

City fans have recently distinguished themselves in this category with an impressive lack of perspective in relation to the legal process.  We’re trying to build a new stadium.  We own the land, we’ve agreed to sell the old stadium, we’re doing everything right.  But some residents near the prospective site aren’t convinced they want a football club on their doorstep and are challenging, by Judicial Review, the legality of the decision to allow us to build.

Now frankly I think it’s a shame things have been allowed to get this far.  The club have worked hard to accommodate local residents, giving concessions on green space, on landscaping and on design.  The residents are using “village green” legislation which I suspect was designed for another purpose to try and stop the club.  There doesn’t seem to be an effective compromise to reach – the club have made every possible effort but when the disagreement is as binary as one side wanting a stadium and the other not, it’s tough to reach an agreed position.

So I don’t think we’ve done a great deal wrong.  But you know what?  It’s possible for a group of people to challenge a large piece of public works which will affect their lives.  And following due legal process takes a long time – I think there should be ways to shorten the process, and I think it’s frustrating, but I’m glad there’s recourse to it.  Sure, there are probably more people who want the stadium than don’t (I’m one of them) but bowing to the tyranny of the majority every time such an issue emerges isn’t democracy.  Democracy is the rule of law; democracy is checks and balances on what is, after all, a question of our rich chairman wanting to build something  across someone else’s view.

But of course, with each successful legal step the residents take – not to getting the stadium stopped but to getting the decision legally examined – perspective vanished from our fans as a body politic.  “The law is an ass”, we hear, and my favourite: “this could only happen in this country”.  Well if that’s true it’s a fantastic advert for England.  Dictatorships get things done overnight – the truism that Mussolini “made the trains run on time” may not be completely accurate but it’s a useful shorthand nonetheless.  In a democracy we check that we’re not trampling on the little guy. We’re good at remembering that when City are the little guys, raging quite rightly at the latest rule change to benefit sides in the top flight.  We’re not great when our near-£1bn rated chairman is the big guy and the little people are challenging us.

In a democracy, too, people who share different ideas can exchange them freely.  Ideas like who’s better out of Tottenham and Arsenal.  Smarting from Saturday’s result, I joined my friends having an evening’s drink, two generals meeting under a flag of parlay the night before the battle.  I’m not suggesting football shouldn’t matter, shouldn’t hurt when you lose, shouldn’t pump you full of adrenalin when you win.  I’m sure they didn’t spend Sunday night together but I’m glad that they were able to see each other on Saturday.  I think it did me good to see some sane support.

I want the stadium and I think we’ll get it.  But proper assessment and legal challenge are no bad thing.  I hope that, if somehow given the choice, I’d choose enfranchisement and a proper legal system over having neither of those things but a top-flight side.  I’d hope we all would. It just takes that little bit of perspective.

18 February 2012: Peterborough United 3 Bristol City 0

On the back of what felt like the worst performance of the McInnes era (20 decent minutes out of 90 makes a 3-0 reverse feel about right), I was reflecting on what made it anything other than a painful, awful day; why it wasn’t a weekend I look back on with the venom it probably deserves.  Had it been a home match I’d have been deeply depressed  come the evening, and while it’s true I did later opine that “I can’t wait for this bloody season to be over, one way or another” I’m not sad I went to the game.  It’s something about away games, isn’t it?  They’re great, aren’t they; great like home games aren’t.  So at the risk of being the only person being positive about something involving City, let me present:

Ten Reasons Why Away Games Are Great (Whatever The Result)

1. Atmosphere

Fairly straightforward, this one.  Just for once, it was nice to be part of the 250 under a low metal roof making the most of the acoustics to generate a fantastic noise; as opposed to being one of 12,000 listening to that happen.  Away fans always sound better, which is why “shall we sing a song for you” is so popular (and why “you’re supposed to be at home” feels a mite unfair, not that chants are really about fairness).  OK, we went pretty quiet at 2-0 down, but that’s preferable to the bile that would have rolled from the stands had the same happened at Ashton Gate.

2. Socialising

This isn’t as true for me as for some; every game at Ashton Gate is an away coming from London, so I get this advantage either way.  But generally, away games are an opportunity to spend more time than usual with people, not just meet at the turnstile and part at the same spot.  It’s an excuse for a few hours in the company of friends, one which comes complete with a ready-made conversation piece.  I see different people away, too; while I do quite often go with Ross, I’ve taken a number of different friends to City games this season.  The football’s been mixed but I’ve enjoyed the company every time.

3. Discovery

There is quite simply no way on Earth I’d ever have been to Peterborough if it hadn’t been for this match.  But do you know what?  It’s got a lovely cathedral, a very odd Sam Smiths pub with a resident Leeds-supporting oddball, a river (the Nene, fact fans, as in Rushden’s Nene Park I assume) and a couple of barges serving booze which’d be lovely before an August or May game. That’s a little bit of knowledge I wouldn’t otherwise have, and I can say the same with regard to places like Crawley, Watford and Southampton too.  Not a who’s who (or where’s where?) of tourist destinations perhaps, but I enjoy these peeps into sleepy provincial Saturday afternoons very much.  One day I might even decide on the best way to get to Watford from central London.

4. A different view

As a season ticket holder, I get the same view of City game after game at Ashton Gate.  We tried changing seats for an FA Cup tie last year and got done 3-0 by lower league opposition; won’t be doing that again.  Away, you’re generally at one end and either quite high or quite low.  Either way you get not only the novelty  of a new angle on the game, but a genuine addition to your tactical appreciation, being able to see either the tactics laid out before you or a defenders-eye view of your side’s attacks.  I do feel like a better informed fan for seeing our away football.

5. The warm-up

At home, I tend to arrive a few minutes before kick-off.  Away, travelling to an unfamiliar destination, I allow plenty of time and inevitably find myself watching the strikers test their (usually pitiful) striking prowess, while David James does his visualisation exercises and the rest of the squad do strange tappy-tap warmups amongst cones.  I’m sure this does wonders for their hamstrings.  It’s sports science, sure, but it’s also ritual, a mystical pre-match procedure equivalent to the haka or the sacrifice of a goat.  There’s something of the open day about being allowed to witness it and I like it a lot.

7. Kudos

All of this greater knowledge and greater access than the home-only fan should mean your opinions get more weight in an argument, and they do up to a point but not for the logical reasons one would suppose.  When you hear about some chap who’s done 7,000 miles in a season to support his beloved Torquay United, you don’t assume he knows a lot about them because he’s seen them play so much (although he clearly has), you respect what he has to say simply because he’s done the distance, because he’s invested the time.  As if the act itself imbues him with esoteric Torquay-knowledge you couldn’t get simply from 23 games at Plainmoor.  I’m nowhere near being a member of that group, I never make it north of Ipswich, but going to unusual away games does make me feel more like the tribal elder we all secretly want to be.

8. Actual, proper support

But this sort of masculine who’s-got-the-biggest measurement is a slightly shameful reason for going to away matches.  The best reason surely is to be there; to be offering genuine support, particularly when the team needs it as much as City do at the moment.  Peterborough is a long, long way from home, and it must feel like it when you concede within eight minutes to a man who, as I’ve noted before, bears a passing resemblance to Nick Frost.  There’s a lot more going on between players and fans at away matches.  I’m not stupid, I know that’s partly because we’re all in one place and thus easier to salute en masse – but I do think away supporters have a really significant role lifting their side.  I’d connect our strong start to the second half with the seven or eight solid minutes of Red Army at the end of the first.

9. A bit of purpose

It’s a something more valuable to do with your Saturday than clean the house or get drunk over lunch at a pub and then become unable to do everything you were planning with your evening.  It’s up there with a trip to Whipsnade or a healthy walk up Box Hill – it’s spiritually nourishing, it’s entertaining (up to a point) and you feel like God when you win.   It’s a hobby.  It’s what you do.  But it’s a hobby with a wonderful kick to it at its best.  And like all hobbies with a big endorphin-fuelled ending it’s dangerously addictive.

10. An opportunity to eat badly

Which can’t be underestimated when you reach the waistline-watching age I've reached.  It was spinach pancakes last night.  It certainly won’t be on the way to Ipswich a week on Saturday.

4th February 2012: Bristol City 0 Leeds United 3

Sometimes you do things even though you know they’re wrong, just because the time is right.  Whether that’s eating one of those late-night pizzas that are essentially savoury fat-cakes; whether that’s dancing to Never Gonna Give You Up because, come on, it’s your best friend’s wedding; whether that’s watching one more hung-over Flight of the Conchords on a Saturday in your pyjamas rather than getting out to enjoy the lovely day.  It’s not what you should do but the context makes it permissible.

Those are all examples of nice things, of course, but there’s a flipside.  As Leeds’ perhaps inevitable second goal went in against nine-man Bristol City from the boot of Ross McCormack, in the snow, on a bitterly cold day, ensuring that a thoroughly miserable afternoon would, indeed, end in the defeat that had looked likely since James Wilson’s dismissal (let alone Yannick Bolasie’s later on) as I watched on feeling the after-effects of the previous night’s drinking endeavours I thought for almost the first time about leaving early.

I know.  It’s wrong, it’s wrong – and yet it felt eminently sensible as the game (in which so much had gone wrong it became some kind of caricature of a bad time at the football) finally got away from us for good, despite the best efforts of nine fairly valiant players.  What was the point in staying?  The result was certain and I really was very cold.  A lot of people around me started to leave that point and there was a great deal of logic in it – I was there to watch Luciano Becchio smash home the irrelevant third, they were in a warm car or public house with the results starting to come in.

But if there’s one theme that’s coming through these blogs of mine, it’s that football support is deeply, deeply irrational.  There’s no quantifiable reason for staying but I did anyway.  Why?

Not much is likelier to start an argument amongst fans on forums than the issue of early leavers.  Those who resolutely stay until the end chuck the usual invective at those who have the temerity to miss a few minutes of football.  They’re “part-timers”, they’re “not proper fans”.  And of course that’s part of what keeps you in your seat.  It’s that shared masochism; that bit of you that says that you only count as a fan if you’ve been there for every second of the most painful games.  It’s building up credit for those scab-removal pleasant conversations you’ll have in the future about the worst times following City.  It’s where the gallows humour comes from, the bond formed by staring at adversity and coming out the other side.  It’s the same thing that caused Ross to ring me from Ashton Gate when we were 4-0 down to Cardiff at half time a couple of years ago. (I was in London watching Slumdog Millionaire, and I couldn’t really concentrate after that point – I think he wins the million quid but I’m not really sure how.)

There’s a sense that if you’ve made the laudable decision to follow the local team as opposed to one of the title-winning giants from the North-West or London, you’ve signed up for a fair old chunk of misery anyway, together with a huge pile of boredom and the odd good afternoon.  Why, then, leave when another iteration of the misery rolls into town?  If you don’t like this stuff then frankly you’re in the wrong place.  I think most fans understand this at our level, which is why the sod-this effect is more pronounced when the larger clubs get done at home.  Witness the banks and banks of empty seats at Old Trafford this season after Man City went 4-1 up.

That’s why the comparison with other forms of entertainment doesn’t quite hold true.  People ask sometimes whether you’d miss as much of a gig or a film.  Well, no, because one assumes you’d enjoy the film or the gig – and if you don’t you’d probably leave well before the end.  When I went to see Pulp several times last summer, I was pretty sure that they’d play songs I like, and that Jarvis would still have his charisma.  I wasn’t disappointed.  The equivalent would be expecting City to win 3-0 every week, Albert Adomah nutmegging every opposition defender repeatedly, and only leaving if that didn’t happen.  Only a few fans get that every week and that’s probably why they deal with defeat so spectacularly badly.

There aren’t many gigs so bad that they physically hurt you though – and that’s what you do get at football.  When it’s just staggeringly awful, upsettingly, distressingly so, it would take a harder heart than mine to blame those streaming out.  Sometimes you just can’t bear to watch any more.

I didn’t think Leeds was that bad because you could almost write it off.  We didn’t lose 3-0 because we were awful, we lost 3-0 because one defensive lapse was followed by two moments of naiveté.  Given that two of the three goals came after we were reduced to nine men, given the way we played 11v11, it wasn’t a game that could really hurt because the result didn’t mean anything bigger.  It wasn’t a sign that we’re an awful side.  It wasn’t relegation.  It was just a stupidly bad game of football.  So while it’s hard to blame the guys around me who left early, I didn’t ever feel like joining them.  I was happy watching 20 men, lost in the snow.

21 January 2012: Bristol City 2 Doncaster Rovers 1 / 28 January 2012: Reading 1 Bristol City 0

Jay Emmanuel-Thomas is currently doing not a great deal in a desperately struggling Ipswich side.  But I remember when he had the world at his feet.  I was there the day he put in what may well have been his greatest ever performance.

It was a couple of years ago now, a cold March afternoon, a mid-table match without much on it.  Bristol City v Doncaster Rovers.  Donnie boasted Emmanuel-Thomas, young, raw, on loan from Arsenal.  Word had it that Wenger himself had been sufficiently impressed by the football played by Sean O’Driscoll’s side that he’d decided to send players there as a sort of finishing school in ‘proper’ football.  O’Driscoll was being trusted by the great French tetch with one of his neverending procession of promising youngsters.

And my God he was good that day.  He and Billy Sharp got two of the five Doncaster put past us and he controlled the game from a position just off the strikers.  “This boy”, I said to Ross, “this boy is going on to bigger things”.

What happened to him next surprised me. And what’s happened to Doncaster since then has surprised me, too.

When Doncaster came to the Gate that day they looked  a team on the up.  In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, you might have expected them, not Swansea , to hit the Premier League with vigour, passing, attractive football and goals. They felt like a team on the rise, starting to flirt with the playoffs, hard-workers not superstars, and the unassuming but idealistic O’Driscoll at the helm.  They were an exciting team and they were a likeable one.  It was hard not to wish them well.

When Doncaster came to the Gate last week, by contrast, the players still there from two years ago kept company with the likes of 34-year-old Aston Villa reject Habib Beye, sent off before the second goal for a phenomenally dangerous challenge on Skuse, and of course professional charmer El-Hadji Diouf.  They were brought to the club by somewhat shady agent Willie McKay, managed by Dean Saunders (who later complained bitterly about the referee’s decision to send Beye off, doubly absurd and stupid given very recent precedent) and played under the Chairmanship of John Ryan, who discussed possible legal action against the referee for Beye’s dismissal.

The affection isn’t really there any more.

It’s hard to be neutral about football teams; so extensive is the cast of this silly sporting soap opera, so varied the sub-plots and so personal one’s own feelings that inevitably one likes a side more or less due to a combination of interrelated factors.  Sometimes the change is personal and overnight (a friend of mine is convinced that Spurs have David Moyes lined up to replace Redknapp, which would make them pretty well my Premier League second team in an instant), sometime it’s widespread but gradual (Manchester United’s 1990s infamy, or more recently Liverpool’s transition from dramatic European Champions to embittered, backs-against-the-wall defenders of the indefensible).

Manchester City are going the way of their neighbours, too – that’s what half a billion pounds of oil money will do to other people’s perceptions.  I doubt it keeps Khaldoon Al-Mubarak awake at night but they’re not the lovably unlucky scamps they once were.  It will be very interesting to see what happens to Reading, who I remember liking a lot in the Premier League, who have a good squad and whose manager seems a good chap, now that they too are backed by Russian financial reserves.  Of course the two are unconnected, but losing to one of two penalties, both of which felt soft, fired home by an ex-Bristol Rovers hero did feel as if Reading were beginning their journey to ‘unlikeable rich football club’ with a single ‘diving in the penalty box’ step.

Question is, does any of this really matter?  Surely fans are happy when they’re winning, unhappy when they’re not, and blithely unconcerned about how the rest of the football world sees them.  Why should it matter to fans of Donnie or Reading how I feel about them?

On one level, it shouldn’t.  But on another, I think it’s normal to take pride in one’s team and by extension one’s club.  We’ve all forwarded YouTube clips of our striker’s best goal to our mates, read passages from reports of our best matches to our bored nearest and dearest.  It may not feel like it sometimes, but how the club is run is actually much more important than any given spectacular piece of skill or fine team performance – this is the long-term stuff that will determine whether our football-supporting life will be a more or less pleasant experience.  I worry about City’s debt and I wish we hadn’t been allowed to accrue it, for all that I understand why it’s there.  I dislike the clubs that create an environment in which City have to lose all this money to stay competitive even more, and I hope Reading don’t become one of them.  But I like that our last two managerial appointments were of young managers with something to prove, managers who deserved a chance rather than people from the same old conveyor belt.  OK, one seems to be working, the other didn’t, but at least we didn’t make a tedious appointment like, I dunno, Mark McGhee or something.

I’m not saying that Manchester City fans are dreadful human beings if they enjoy being top of the league without worrying about the effect their spending has on the European game.  Although I’d be better inclined to one who gave it a passing thought.  But I am saying that there’s a reason to keep half an eye on the way your club behaves, and to put what pressure you can to bear and ensure they don’t irritate too many fellow travellers.

I think most were sympathetic to Darlington fans when they were picked up a criminal who bought them a shiny new stadium they could never hope to fill.  That’s why the Save Darlo campaign is getting so much purchase across the football community right now.  Portsmouth are in trouble too – not so serious, but definitely in trouble – and the response is notably different.  If they do come close to going bust I’m sure the banners, appeals and hashtags would kick in, but I don’t think there would be the same unanimity of purpose, not by a long distance.  The club that won the FA Cup but left behind a trail of small business insolvencies and never-paid debts has already mortgaged a lot of their sympathy, and they may find that to be another commodity that will never be returned in full.  I’ve never met a Portsmouth fan I didn’t like (although I’ve never met John Portsmouth FC Westwood, it must be said) but they’re not a club I find myself worrying too much about.

If McKay leaves Doncaster with few contracted players, no team spirit and another relegation battle a tier below, I might not be the first to sign a petition.  And I wouldn’t have expected to draw such an ungenerous conclusion watching Jay Emmanuel-Thomas mesmerise Ashton Gate two years ago.