The Peterborough Evening Telegraph
Posh waste a golden chance to survive
Posh have wasted a glorious chance to establish themselves as a Championship club.
They were up against two teams with 27 points worth of deductions and failed to take advantage. They were up against teams with similarly modest budgets and they blew it.
‘We are going to thrive, not just survive,’ said chairman Darragh MacAnthony and then manager Darren Ferguson last summer after promotion. They did neither.
Of course those at the forefront of the campaign have started offering excuses including financial disadvantages, injuries and misfortune. The biggest public figure at the club – a chairman never shy of taking credit for success – even turned on the local media, although thankfully he fell short of repeating the old joke of ‘it’s the paper’s fault, they kept printing the results’.
As it happens the media were the first to see through the summer hyperbole and bluster.
I first realised Posh might be in trouble at 2pm on Saturday, August 7 at Kenilworth Road, the tatty home of Luton Town FC, the first day of the league campaign.
When the teamsheet arrived good players were conspicuous by their absence – there was no Siriki Dembele or Jack Taylor – while others didn't look fit (Jonson ClarkeHarris), and playing in an advanced midfield role was Joe Tomlinson, a left-back signed from non-league while Harrison Burrows, a midfielder, sat on the bench. Christy Pym, a goalkeeper not trusted to play in the promotion run-in the previous season, was still in situ.
Just what had gone on in the four months since promotion from League One had been secured? How long did the celebrations actually last? Stories were soon surfacing about players turning up for pre-season out of shape. Some soft pre-season matches didn’t seem ideal preparation for what was to come.
And failed recruitment, fitness issues and muddled managerial thinking became immediate concerns when the serious stuff started. Nothing in that 90 minutes at Luton (Posh got away with a 3-0 beating), or even the next six months, happened to suggest staying up was ever a serious possibility. Posh were 15th after three matches and they never managed to rise any higher before the meekest of relegations was finally accepted last Saturday.
This was a relegation created last summer. 'Trust the process,' we were told when optimism started to evaporate quickly, partially because away from home the first six matches of the season were lost.
It was a phrase that came to haunt a chairman and a club who at times seemed more active building a competitive under 23 side rather than one with a chance of competing at Championship level. The process turned out to be no more trustworthy than our brazen Prime Minister. Manchester United enjoyed more-joined-up thinking.
After ending the awayday hoodoo, rather fortunately at Hull, the chairman mocked this author for suggesting Posh were in danger of going down with a ‘whimper’. I know whose comments aged better.
Of course there is mitigation. Despite those optimistic financial forecasts champions-elect Fulham still managed to pay a striker £100k a week and to fork out £12 million for a midfielder. It's maybe an unfair comparison with a team armed with those ludicrous parachute payments, but average Championship clubs also went shopping for loan players in Harrods in January while Posh were looking for bargains in Poundland.
Even trying to sign loan players was an admission of how bad the summer recruitment had been. We were told Posh don’t like loaning players.
It wasn't a level playing field, but the clubs promot
ed with Posh last season, Hull and Blackpool, survived comfortably, while a Luton Town team who shop in the same player markets positively thrived. So why couldn’t Posh? The most common response from fans, that of poor recruitment, has clearly irked the man with the most power.
Posh at least saved money when Darren Ferguson resigned rather than wait to be sacked (if he ever would have been). Ferguson is a decent man and likely to remain the most successful manager in the club's history for some time, but Championship
success has always eluded him and it's doubtful he'll get another chance. His 700th match as a manager and his record-breaking 492 games as Posh boss were at least memorable moments to take with him when he quit on February 19.
But his race was run before then. How he survived January when events, as well as a poor team for the level, conspired against him is beyond me. His best player in Dembele appeared to down tools to engineer a move to the Bournemouth substitutes' bench, while his captain
Oliver Norburn decided a move to Posh was a mistake just four months after making it as he made a bid to escape to the calmer waters of Blackpool for personal reasons.
Remember that when players start kissing club badges again.
Ferguson also wasn’t helped when assistant manager Mark Robson quit in October and was replaced by rookie Matthew Etherington. Ferguson needed experience and wise counsel which was unlikely to arrive from a great player, one of the best in Posh history, but whose
managerial nous was limited to what he’d picked up from two seasons as U18 manager and three months running the U23s.
Ferguson belatedly dispatched his fitness coach and physio, not long after the club’s set-piece coach had disappeared in secret. Watching Posh this season you’d never have known a set-piece coach had been employed in the first place, so bad were they at either end of the pitch.
Still, February arrived with Posh still in touch and facing a run of make-orbreak games against other
struggling teams. Sadly Posh didn’t just break, they shattered, failing to score in, never mind failing to win, five vital matches.
Posh would have been relegated on April 9th after just 41 games but for Derby's points deduction even though there have been belated signs of improvement under new boss Grant McCann who, unlike Ferguson, has had the benefit of a more motivated and fitter Clarke-Harris and a Jack Marriott free of hamstring concerns, although he hasn’t had Dembele.
But shouldn't the possibility of Marriott, and also million-pound summer signing Joel Randall, falling injured have been factored into the recruitment drive? Neither have shown George Boyd-levels of availability in recent seasons. Pym was one of a handful of players, who could have been expected to struggle at the higher level, to be offered extended contracts and it was all rather baffling.
It was only fair that those who recruited brilliantly to win promotion had another shot, but this was a too clever-by-half process. Cries for experienced and physically strong players were ignored and the worst defensive record in the club’s history is a direct consequence of that.
The worst points record in the club’s history could also yet be equalled.
I suppose if a couple of gnarled professionals had arrived we might have seen less of player-of-the-season Ronnie Edwards, but we might also have stayed up. At least this relegation was far less painful than the last one nine years ago.
That's one consolation of being bad for the entire campaign.