Magpies, Dons, Managers and Imminent Matches

My latest article for the Bristol Post is now on-line, and pasted below.
www.bristolpost.co.uk/Bristol-Rovers-BLOG-Good-morning-Mr-Magpie-play/story-28906058-detail/story.html

It should have been out on Friday, so the reference to 'three comfortable wins' was because it was before beating Mansfield.


Good morning Mr. Magpie, can we play you every week?

I must admit that even my (almost) unshakeable faith in Darrell Clarke was slightly unsettled during our recent run of five points in five games, with only four goals scored, and most importantly grave defeats to play-off rivals Accrington Stanley, Portsmouth and Wycombe Wanderers. That poor sequence may still come back to haunt us, but at least DC stopped the rot, as he always seems to manage, with three comfortable wins, eight goals, and teams like Notts County suggesting there are some dire bottom feeders left to play.

Tuesday’s win against a Wimbledon team with pace, power and passing, especially upfront, and without an away loss since October, was particularly pleasing, and reclaimed some faith that we can maybe mix it with the better teams in the division. It has also topped off a quite remarkable turn around in home League results, with 22 points from the last eight games at the Mem replacing the dismal seven points from our first nine games.

We do still have a ‘problem’ though, in that our record against the best teams in the league is poor, with just nine points in 11 games against the current top seven sides, and the stat can’t get that much better as we only have one team in the top nine left to play, and they are the Cobblers, in their own backyard.

I’m not sure if the statistics bear me out but it would be fair to expect that teams who reach the play-offs with poor records against their fellow play-off contenders could struggle. Of course we’ll just have to cross that bridge if we come to it, and remind ourselves that last season our play-off success was built on current form and gelling as a team rather than a good record against our play-off rivals (only six points from six clashes).

At this time of the season the real judge of the forthcoming opposition is often more about their form than their position in the table. The bad news is therefore that forthcoming clashes with Newport County and Yeovil Town may be far harder than the table suggests, but the good news is that we have four others down there yet to play and Notts County clearly showed us that there are some truly pitiful teams in the depths who are in bad form and who won‘t be surfacing for air anytime soon. Our comfortable victory against Hartlepool United doesn’t really fit either category as although their defence looked shambolic against us, they held runaway leaders Northampton Town in their previous game, and last Saturday became only the fifth team of the season to take three points away from the Hive, and the only one from the bottom half of the table.

The added wild card is that from Easter onwards we will start seeing some really desperate clubs scrabbling around at the bottom of the table getting genuinely concerned. Sometimes these teams hit remarkable form; other times they wilt like petrol station flowers.

Nott County could well be one of the rabble, shamelessly trading on their status as a founder member of the Football League in 1888, as if their history won’t let them go down. Well, we certainly know all about that sort of attitude don’t we? Excuse me if I have little sympathy for their puffed up club after the dirty battles of the late 80’s / early 90’s and the legendary ‘ungentlemanly conduct’ episode in September 2000, which although early in the season, could be seen as the stolen brace of points that eight months later saw us relegated, by a solitary point, to the Fourth Division for the first time in our history.

Karma has helped us to four wins out of five at Meadow Lane since that unsavoury episode, and last Saturday’s win sounded like a pretty comfortable experience, which can hardly be said about Jamie Fullerton’s managerial chair at the moment. There are times in life when unchecked ‘ambition’ fosters bad decision making, and given that Fullerton has had five football jobs in less than five years since joining Rovers in the summer of 2011 as Youth Team Coach (and leaving a year after), and has made some rather vocal critics in his playing and coaching career, this could well be one of those times.

Football fans apportion great credence to loyalty, and neither jumping from club to club, nor crossing the Trent from Forest to County, is much of a vote winner. Every manager in Britain knows there are certain poisonous jobs and boardroom dungeons that probably aren’t worth striving for, at any salary, and the County hot seat must surely be up there alongside the rotten ducking stools at Villa Park, and that other tiding of self-important magpies in the North East.

It seems like the old superstition that a magpie is bad luck could be true, so instead of meeting a pica pica with the traditional greeting, “Good morning Mr. Magpie. How is your lady wife today?”, healthier advice may be to run a country mile if ‘Mike Ashley‘ or ‘Ray Trew’ ever pops up on a list of missed callers.

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Martin Bull became a Gashead in 1989 and immediately fell in love with Twerton Park, standing near G pillar. Two of his six books have been about Bristol Rovers. ‘Away The Gas’ is packed full of over 50 years of ‘I was there’ away game moments, all written by fans, and ‘Print That Season! - One man’s weekly meanderings throughout Bristol Rovers’ promotion campaign of 2014-15’ is the antidote to obedient season reviews, with none of the hindsight that most writers rely on. Full details of both are available at www.awaythegas.org.uk