BRISTOL ROVERS BLOG: G is for Gas - For every action there is an equal amd opposite reaction
September 15, 2015
By MARTIN BULLAlthough Gasheads generally wouldn’t wish a phoenix club any ill will, I think a lot of us wouldn’t have minded if Accrington Stanley (1968) had stayed famous for its role as the derogatory unknown club in a milk advert in the 1980s rather than for earning a new crack at the Football League in 2006 and managing to stay there ever since.
The heady days of our first encounter with them (a 4-0 trashing in December 2006) have long since gone, and since an equally overwhelming 5-1 butchery at the Mem in April 2012, Accy have become a real bogey team for us, winning all five encounters since, including three successive 1-0 wins in Horfield. We’ve also never won at the Crown Ground in four attempts, and our match there on Tuesday 22nd October 2013 was played in front of precisely 1,101 people, probably the lowest League crowd to watch Rovers since 1927.
Sadly our season is now going as some had feared. Three home losses out of four is hardly the way to keep your core support behind you and the action of losing historically prompts a reaction; the amount of Gasheads at the home leage games has steadily dropped from 8,138 at the season opener, to 6,908 and 6,405 for Barnet and Oxford United respectively, and now to 6,303 for Stanley.
If it weren’t for the lure of Portsmouth and Wycombe Wanderers for our next games at the Mem, home crowds would fall further I imagine. Whilst this situation is not unique or unexpected, it is obviously not helpful, and the tsunami of promotion positivity is now more like a sedate wave of realism. The dearth of creativity and the absence a ‘banging them in’ striker is hardly fresh news.
Although I’ve always supported Darrell Clarke, I’m not so naïve as to think there is no such scenario that could test some Gasheads’ backing of him. I used to really take pleasure in watching Nigel Pearson’s pensive and frank interviews when romping to the Championship title with Leicester City in 2013/14. The analysis crawled out of his mouth like an asthmatic snail and became almost the antidote to the usual knee-jerk, testosterone-fuelled manager interviews, blaming everyone on the planet except their own team, and certainly not themselves. But it’s easy being calm, and even self-deprecating, when regularly winning.
The real test of a man’s character is when things are going badly and last season was more like watching the meltdown of a Japanese nuclear reactor, as the slow speech and measured aloofness rapidly became passive aggression and downright bullying.
I will therefore watch with baited breath to see how DC reacts to his own mini-crisis, and I expect that he’ll respond to it capably.
Although Darrell faced a crisis during his attempts to stave off relegation in 2014, and during the first seven games of last season, he has managed the team so well since that he hasn’t had to respond to a proper mini-crisis for an entire year. Yes, there were odd events that tested our resolve later last season (losing at home to Bath City in the FA Trophy springs to mind, a March blip with only five points from 12, and even the late draw at Dover Athletic on the penultimate weekend of the season) but there certainly wasn‘t anything to get us Pirates too flustered.
With seven games now gone this season we have only one point more than last seasons’ seemingly apocalyptic start, have scored a miserly five goals (the joint fewest in the division), and most importantly are now on a three-game losing streak.
It is of course hard to judge the quality of the opposition so early in the season. At our first away game of the 2009/10 season I watched in blazing sunshine at Stockport County, actually feeling sorry for the Hatters after we went 2-0 up within eight minutes and feared a cricket score. Little did we know that a proud and decent local team like County would get relegated from League One that season with a shameful 25 points, and be in the sixth tier three years later.
Fast forward six years and it is mildly interesting to see that we have lost to four teams currently above us (the first, eighth, tenth and eleventh placed teams) and have only beaten teams far below us (those currently lying 20th, 22nd and 23rd).
We now face two of our potentially hardest games of the season, away at Plymouth Argyle and home to Portsmouth (currently second and third in the table respectively), followed by some bright spark scheduling two of our three longest away trips of the season (Hartlepool United and Morecambe) within five days of each other.
Personally I think this spell of four challenges may galvanise the squad and the manager rather than break them, but it’s only a hunch. If you want a more scientific approach I am hoping that Newton’s Third Law of Motion can be applied to football, and that this string of defeats will prompt an equal and opposite reaction from Rovers.
Come on you Blues!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Bull became a Gashead in 1989 and immediately fell in love with Twerton Park, standing near G pillar. In 2006 he wrote, photographed and published the first independent book about the artist Banksy. Having been exiled for much of his past, away games have always been special for him; so much so that with 40 other fans has published a new book about them -
www.awaythegas.org.uk
