Now we must hold our nerve
BLUE-EYED BOY’S BLACKBURN VIEW
FOOTBALL, like life, has an infinite capacity for taking a different twist or turn to the ones we have plotted out in our heads or have attempted to chart with a piece of paper and pen, be that sat with your diary in an armchair at home or scribbling on a shelf in the premises of a turf accountant.
Nobody with Blackburn Rovers’ interests at heart failed to make that calculation last weekend that if we won at Gillingham, and if Shrewsbury lost or failed to win at Bradford, etc, etc....
As you read this you may know the result of that Valley Parade game and it could be that Rovers are two, four or five points clear of Paul Hurst’s team with five apiece left to play.
Whatever the margin is, I think that most fans would have shook hands on that at the beginning of the season whether you were, as some most assuredly were, expecting another season of struggles or cautiously optimistic we’d do okay.
Even the “we should walk the league with our budget” brigade couldn’t have really anticipated having that many more points – we can get to 101 if we win all five remaining games – than the 86 we have at this stage.
Three teams have actually topped 100 points in the last 10 seasons but all have won the title by a comfortable margin.
The highest points total during that time by a side which hasn’t been automatically promoted was 90 by Sheffield United in 2012 – enough to have secured the title in a couple of seasons.
Brentford’s 94 was the highest runners-up tally.
But the most remarkable statistic, one that tells me that this season has found three formidably resilient sides competing for two berths, is the defeats column.
Between us (5), Wigan (6) and Shrewsbury (7) the top trio have just 18 defeats between the League One holy trinity.
That, even allowing for an odd collapse between now and the end, is incredible. The defeats suffered by the top three in the previous ten seasons number: 29, 28, 21, 23, 32, 24, 26, 28, 24, 28 and 29.
Only Leicester, with four losses in 2008-09 (96 points their title-winning tally) have lost less than five. Teams have finished third with 12 defeats. Doncaster won the league with twelve. Only once in 2015 have all the top three suffered single-figure defeats.
Six times a team with 10 or more defeats has been automatically promoted as runners-up.
So whatever your theory – and there are many – as to how we have squandered points or failed to capitalise on situations, there has never been a season like it at this level in recent memory.
That’s why if we did stumble and Shrewsbury passed us at the death – I still in my heart of hearts don’t think they will – I’d be happy to congratulate them and to say that not a lot went wrong with our planning and execution of said plans other than another very good team did even better than us.
Oh, I’ve heard all the stuff about how Venkys would cut the budget and it would be austerity measures all round. How does anybody know that? “Going on past experi- ence,” they tell me. If you were able to predict what happens in football going on the portents of the past, recent or ancient, I’d be a billionaire.
Nobody knows what the future holds, my friend, as Paulie Walnuts once menacingly told the denizens of the Bada Bing.
You can point to a draw here, an equaliser given away there, a plodding start which allowed opponents to nose ahead or a fading second half showing which saw a lead given away.
But very few teams over the course of a decade at this level have had a much better season by this stage than we’re having so I personally think a few of the groans about a couple of hard-fought narrow wins and a generally off-colour away performance which still garnered a point and a clean sheet are unnecessarily uber-critical, particularly when Tony Mowbray’s selections and tactics are still being questioned after a solitary reverse in 30 games.
The stuff about the budget means nothing now. Shrewsbury have shown that whatever they cost to put together and pay, they are in it to the final stretch. If Wigan cost a little less to assemble and receive a few bob less in total salaries than us, it’s demonstrably irrelevant.
Nobody is going to knock a winner in for us or clear one off the line because they’re on a few quid more than the bloke playing directly opposite them. They’ll do it because they have got this far through esprit de corps and unity of purpose and because they desperately want to grab the prize their eyes now alight upon.
We’ve seen this week that the best teams in the world mess up, squander leads, fail to start on the front foot and that their fans look questioningly at players and managers they came to regard as infallible.
This is the Third Division we’re in, for goodness sake, and there are no supermen playing in it.
With staggered fixtures up to late April we’ll be looking to take every advantage we can, starting on Saturday at Bristol Rovers.
Just like the players, we fans need to hold our nerve and avoid hysterical over-reaction