Empty stadiums cannot hide the consequences of miserable failure
SOMETHING weird happened this week. I started to feel a bit of empathy with Liverpool. While six straight Anfield defeats have turned their Premier League title defence into a subject of morbid fascination, this club have spent the past two seasons winning domestic football’s two biggest prizes so fans of practically any other side would still swap places with them.
And yet, if success is relative then so must be failure and, by their own recent lofty standards, Liverpool are failing miserably. As are my own beloved, bedevilled Swindon Town so I sort of know how they feel.
We also enjoyed heady times just last summer, finishing top of our own little League Two tree.
The progressive Richie Wellens was at the helm and the future looked promising, for about six weeks. Then, with budgets and ambition trimmed by the pandemic, Wellens jumped ship for Salford and a toothless, inadequate squad was left in the hands of John Sheridan – hands which have spent the past four months metaphorically upturned as if to say ‘not my fault, blame the players. Yes, them, many of whom I myself signed and all of whom I spend every day “nurturing” on the training ground’.
When success is followed by sudden disaster it can be tempting to pretend it isn’t happening. That seems to be the approach at the County Ground with Swindon sleepwalking towards, relegation under an uninspiring manager. Even the groundsman appears to have given up judging by the barren state of the usually excellent pitch. If officials really do want to bury their heads in the sand they need merely walk down the tunnel. At Football League level, the sense all this is not quite real and might just go away is enhanced by the wider state of the game. A derby defeat to Oxford is still painful but a derby defeat played out on a badly buffering stream from a stadium shorn of people baying for blood can never be quite as raw. On iFollow, no one can hear you scream. For Liverpool, the stadiums may also be empty but the airwaves, column inches and screen time make up for it. The horror unfolds in real time with a captive audience, some reaching for
the excuses, others for the popcorn. Further down the pyramid, exposure is not so strong and measures can be taken to mitigate the effects.
Swindon have embraced this new reality like few others, with Sheridan regularly avoiding post-match media duties, the local paper’s correspondent banned from asking questions anyway and the club’s own website appearing not to carry a match report within 12 hours of Tuesday’s defeat. If we don’t talk about it, did it really happen?
Well, yes. No one can be completely shielded from misery. Social media abuse (the acceptable and at this time justified variety) cannot be ignored,
season-ticket sales have been delayed by the club and purchases will now be delayed by the supporters. And above all else, when the dust settles on May 8 there will be no avoidance of fate for the four clubs sitting below the bottom line in League One.
The pandemic meant there were no open-top bus parades last summer and there are no fans in the stadiums even today. But in football there are no mulligans either. So however much we might wish it wasn’t happening, the consequences of this disastrous season will still be waiting for all involved when the turnstiles eventually reopen.