Fantastic article Clive.
Defeats can ruin weekends for me, they get me down and I want to blow off steam, but not anything like they did when I was a teenager and ounched a hole in my bedroom door when we lost in the Cup to Stockport. But having lived through the absolute wilderness years follwoing our 90s Prem relegation, I became a lot more pragmatic. There'll be people on here, old adversaries I have sworn to try and be nicer to, who will say 'it's all about winning', that managers need to go at the first sign of trouble, that systems need to be junked, everything needs to be overhauled etc. But I have come to a sort of acceptance that realistically the best we can hope for is a sustainable club, that plays good football, that produces good young players once in a while and that is active in the community. And then that should bring seasons of happiness like this one. Every single club outside the top 6 in the Prem and down to about a third or even half of League One is in the same boat. None of us will ever be able to sustain a safe Premier League decades long existence like the Manchesters, Liverpool, Chelsea or the North Londoners (at least not without prolonged City-level investment). So we have to accept that our future will look like our past: we'll go up, we'll go down. We'll have great seasons, a lot of mediocre seasons, and some terrible seasons. As much as people might say you can't have that attitude, maybe you can't as owners or managers or players, but as fans i's probably healthy to accept it, even if we don't like it. BUT if we have a sustainable club that is, fantastically, strong enough to go so far and no further on signings like Cook and Paterson, and stoutly ignore the Twitter ravings to buy buy buy, then the chances are we will be happy more often than not. Because just missing out on promotion for not spending £5m on a soon to be out of contract Nahki Wells is better than being Derby. |  |
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