Another season to be cheerful...
BLUE-EYED BOY
LET’S start the season with a little quiz. No googling. Go on the Beeb website and look at the League One table, all currently listed neatly in alphabetical order.
When you get over the thrill of seeing us in an automatic promotion spot, try this little exercise.
Write down every club’s manager.
Then try writing down round about where they finished last season.
Next maybe have a stab at who was their best player last season and is he still there?
Finally, and this is where you can really stack points up at a mark each; write down any players each club has signed in the summer window.
I must admit had I not started monitoring the transfers daily from mid-June onwards, I wouldn’t have scored heavily.
Neither, I imagine, would many of the people currently proclaiming that Blackburn Rovers are about to sweep all before them triumphantly as they parade untroubled to the League One title.
You can maybe multiply your final answers by approximately how much you knew about Rovers’ summer signings before they landed here and a lot would still struggle to top the 100-point mark the more extreme optimists are predicting.
Leonard Cohen used to deliver an onstage rap about how: “I’ve tried Prozac, Ritalin, I’ve plunged into studying the great philosophies and mystic religions...but cheerfulness kept breaking through.” It amused me every time I saw him (a lot) over 30-odd years and it always reminded me of the indomitable human spirit of the football fan.
Although I will take some convincing about the nine month title parade, I find myself enjoying and if not falling in with the (possibly insanely) positive attitude of those expecting the 100-point stroll, preferring the outlook to the utterly miserabilist doommongering Jeremiahs who foresaw administration, another relegation and reforming as a Phoenix club ground-sharing with Mill Hill St Peters as an inevitable consequence of relegation in May.
That’s not to say that the prophets of Stygian gloom won’t turn out to be right. I just reserve the right not to subscribe to their fear-laden rhetoric for a bit along the way as I continue to enjoy going more than I’d enjoy not going.
On the plus side for the first time in a long while we have a manager who’s popular with the fans, has some pedigree, is respected by most in football and seemingly able, unlike the chip-onboth-shoulders Lambert and the inane Coyle, to manipulate our absentee owners into enough support to ensure he doesn’t, like most of his predecessors, guarantee making an utter buffoon of himself.
It’s as well that Rovers have almost certainly been the biggest spenders in the Third Tier this season. I rather expect there WILL be a couple of departures and a possible net profit but that doesn’t alter the fact that no-one, absolutely none of our competitors, has acquired players costing what, say, Dack and Samuel have cost.
Practically everyone else is operating on frees and loans – which to me refutes the argument that Mowbray and Mark Venus could not be held responsible for leaving Coventry bottom of the pile as they had no funds to work with.
Let’s hope the truism that all managers get better when they have