BRISTOL ROVERS BLOG: G is for Gas - He who sups with the Devil needs a long spoonBy The Bristol Post | Posted: May 27, 2014
By MARTIN BULL
Herewegoagain2
Here we go again! An all too familiar sight over the last decade
THE old story goes that the blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads on a dusty road.
This Faustian pact gave him a masterly ability with the guitar, but in return the Devil got his soul and an early death, establishing him as the first well known member of the ‘27 Club’ (talented musicians who died aged just 27).
I’m not sure where the club we support sold its soul, and what they got for it (it certainly wasn’t success on the pitch), but I wonder if the club made an injudicious pact with the Devil, or has upset some mighty powerful Gods in its time.
Let’s be honest, Rovers have flirted with relegation too many times, as this new century has been riddled with disasters. Several times Rovers drew away from a potential drop, but the club never seemed to deeply meditate on how close demotion had truly been and how to make lasting changes that would prevent it actually happening one season.
Like Icarus, the club ignored fatherly advice and flew too close to the sun. Both realised too late that they had little more than wax and old feathers to hold their flights of fancy together. Does anyone remember the five-year plan to get into the Championship? We’d be lucky now to be able to formulate a workable plan to make an emergency rain hat out of an old newspaper.
In nine seasons of bottom-tier football the Gas were consistently no-where near the top half of the table by mid-season, and thus had little chance of a getting out of that division (the right way at least). In fact our average position on New Year's Eve was a lowly 17th. That should have rung alarm bells at board level more thunderous than Big Ben itself. How can you have a successful team if you constantly run the first half of a marathon struggling along in a fancy dress clown outfit three sizes too big for you?
Rovers’ first ever season in the fourth Tier (2001/02) was the start of a brace of disastrous years, the severity of which took most of us by surprise after a riotously enjoyable decade in 1990s. Gerry Francis’s return proved the old adage to ’never go back’ and the expectation of an immediate return to the third tier was far too optimistic. Looking back, we (the fans) can’t really be blamed for our optimism, or our slight narcissism. BRFC had never been in the bottom tier before and we all felt there was no obvious impediment to a return to familiar territory soon. The club were still getting higher crowds than nearly everyone in the bottom tier, and were still raising money from selling talent.
We infamously finished 23rd that season on a paltry 45 points, but those were the days (the last year to be exact) when only one team was relegated, and as Halifax Town were a basket case that year, being relegated as early as April Fools Day, there was no real pressure to improve or spend money to get us out of the mire. In fact the opposite was happening, as the only jewel left in the decaying casket, Nathan Ellington, was sold on transfer deadline day for £1.2m to Wigan, a team Gasheads had been watching only a season earlier and who were still just a mid-table third tier team at that point. They however now had a rich backer. We had Bradshaw’s Snack Box.
Uncle Ray Graydon’s first season, in 2002/03, was barely healthier. The team were constantly in the bottom five from early November onwards and were only ‘rescued’ by the most dramatic Easter resurrection since that performed by a certain fellow two Millennia previously. Andy Rammell may have only played seven games for us and scored only in those crucial three wins, but he’ll never need to pay for a drink again in our beautiful city. We finished merely three points off relegation, and would have been goners without even half of those 10 points from the last 4 games of the season.
We were at our lowest ebb. I don’t feel the club, or us fans, have ever properly recovered from those three seasons from 2000 to 2003, despite the temporary improvement thereafter.
2003/04 was a minor miracle as we only flirted with relegation for a few weeks in March, before finishing 15th. The bore fests of Ian Atkins in 2004/05 (rising from 17th to 12th on the final game of the season) and 2005/06 (another 12th place finish), were essentially the stability we needed and he put in place the building blocks of what was to become the most unlikely promotion in our history, especially considering that we were still slumbering in 16th place in mid-March 2007.
Since the heart warming sojourn in the third tier from 2007 to 2011, the club has blindly tumbled down more stairs than a South African prisoner in an Apartheid-era detention centre.
Those final three league seasons are of course still fresh in the memory. Managerial changes provided the impetus for scrambles away from serious trouble two seasons in a row, but that third season caught us. No [proper] managerial change, and the most embarrassing relegation in our long history.
BRFC has to learn from this disastrous 21st Century. Like Robert Johnson, we are at a life-changing crossroads. I just hope the Board of Directors are finally going to pick the right direction.
Martin Bull became a Gashead in 1989 and immediately fell in love with Twerton Park. In 2006 he wrote, photographed and published the first independent book about the artist Banksy. Having been exiled for much of his life, away games have always been special for him; so much so that he is asking for contributions from fellow Rovers fans to a new book he is compiling. To contribute go to:
www.awaythegas.org.ukRead more at
www.bristolpost.co.uk/BRISTOL-ROVERS-BLOG-G-Gas-sups-Devil-needs-long/story-21143557-detail/story.html
