SEASON REVIEW 2007-2008: RESTORATION?

By
Mickey Blue Eyes.

This opinion will not contain many statistics or figures since they bore me to tears as much as any other fan. Show me an accountant or a quantity surveyor and I’ll show you tedium in extremis or a crook. The figures that matter most to me are goals for and against when the referee blows his final whistle at the end of each match, and our ensuing place in the league table. In football everything else follows therefrom. In professional sport wishful thinking lasts as long as a fart in a perfect storm. You start with what you have and work from there. All the rest is fanciful nonsense or the gossip of old women.

In the final analysis it was a splendid season that started unevenly, developed well – sometimes brilliantly – and ended with our customary stutter caused by relatively small playing and financial resources. In the hard existential world of professional football it was a tribute to everyone at the club, on and off the pitch, though it could easily have been even better than fifth place. It’s impossible to achieve a restoration of club fortunes without unity from top to bottom. In the end circumstances forced the issue. At one stage fourth was in our grasp but slipped away as surely as an eel when injuries cost us the two players who constitute our main creative source, Mikel Arteta and Tim Cahill. Cahill in particular finally proved to this fan just how essential he is to team chemistry and effectiveness. There was obviously something physically wrong with Mikky all season but oh how we missed his crosses and set-piece deliveries even when half-fitness reduced his effectiveness. Our outstanding concern for next season is whether they can both shake off recurring injuries and, in Mikky’s case, whether the muttering of his agent has influenced the player to seek pastures new. Without them or their equivalent the existing squad is just about capable of the top half of the table. Reinforcements are required once again. It is a constant process dependent on financial resources and we cannot increase those until we are in a new stadium with greater capacity and larger turnover/profit. Thus, Catch-22. Even to get this far has been a sports miracle, given the mess inherited from the Moore's family and the unlamented tenure of Peter Johnson.

This is not to say there haven’t been mistakes along the way. Which human being ever born can say they never made a mistake? Which manager can say he never bought a player who failed to succeed? Which owner can say he got every policy right? Which CEO can claim every administrative decision was correct? The answer is in an old American saying: “There ain’t no setch animal,” just as there is no such thing as a Loch Ness Monster. This is an inconvenient truth which baffles your average ale-house paranoid nutter bent on discovering a conspiracy under every pint of lager and a hate figure in every club office.

Meantime, David Moyes has carved a remarkable niche for himself despite his errors in signing Per Kroldrup, Andy Van Der Meyde and James Beattie. Against those “failures” he can quote the successes of Joleon Lescott, Mikel Arteta, Tim Howard, Joseph Yobo, Andrew Johnson, Ayegbeni Yakubu and Steven Pienaar, to say nothing of the chance he has given to the youth of Victor Anichebe and James Vaughan. He can also say truthfully he has applied the lessons he learned along the way. Whether this now propels him toward football management greatness depends on many things, some of which are out of his control. The only thing we can say with certainty is that his era has been the best thing to happen to the club for a couple of decades. To lose him now would be catastrophic. Vital momentum would be lost. The biggest threat to his and our hopes is a possible loss of hunger for success, the appetite you can still see in Ferguson and Wenger. If he loses that he will simply become a journeyman manager like many others and that would be a career tragedy for him and our club.

The highlight of the season was undoubtedly our remarkable run in the UEFA Cup. The run of wins came very close to creating a British club record. Along the way we had a lot of fun, morale-boosting wins, played some really good stuff and scored some superb goals. Even then it balanced on a knife edge in the first round until the final twenty minutes in Ukraine. We could easily have gone out at the first hurdle. Instead, a long-awaited Kevin Brock Moment came when substitutions were made and Jimmy McFadden scored an important goal. Metalist collapsed. We won handily. The manager and players were vindicated in emphatic fashion despite earlier horrors against the Ukrainians. Then the team went off on a winning run that looked like it might even take us all the way to the final. Looking at who DID get to the final makes you wistful. Losing on penalties – no way to win, no way to lose any game – to Fiorentina turned out to be a seminal adverse moment in the season despite utterly destroying the Italians in the home leg. The steam went out of everybody, fans included. Moyesy can learn a useful lesson from that reaction. It is his job to help avoid a repeat in similar circumstances.

A word here about our fans on the European away trips: They were absolutely magnificent and a credit to themselves and the club. It was plain they were relaxed and out to enjoy themselves whatever happened. I never once heard the whingeing claptrap you get from your ale house paranoid or the xenophobic racist poison you get from North Liverpool’s miniscule BNP loonies. I witnessed only two spoiling episodes, one with a couple of drunks on the plane to Ukraine and the other when sniffer dogs snared some cannabis junkies at Bergen Airport. Apart from that I saw nothing but enjoyment and good humour from thousands of Blues out to relish the occasions for all they were worth. The hosts were warm and friendly everywhere except in Florence, and even then there was a discreet welcome in some of the city trattoria. In my case I still remember with great fondness the best away trip I have ever been on, the match in Bergen; we even found a fjord-side venue named Kipper Café where we toasted the memory of much-missed Ray Jones. He would have loved it at least as much as the rest of us.

Crashing out of the FA Cup to Oldham early on was partially compensated for by an excellent run in the League Cup. Had Joleon and Tim not gone to sleep in the closing minute of the first leg of the semi final it would have given us a better chance in the home leg. Alas.

Our league form surprised me after it had gathered momentum. The new signings bedded in much quicker than any of us had a right to expect. Some of the footy played was a great credit to Moyesy and his team. For the first time we could rightly say it was HIS team and not the contractual remnants of Walter Smith. His substitutions tactics improved beyond all recognition as, for an all too brief period measured in weeks, he had a good bench to choose from. Then injuries did their work and did for our midfield, most of which tended to disappear in the last twenty minutes of games. Mysteriously and maddeningly, we also lost an abnormal amount of goals just before and after half time. But few fans need telling how much we are in almost desperate straits looking for two good, strong centre mids. If we can secure them during the close season (though gawd knows where the money’s going to come from – Yakubu was only secured after Robert Earl underwrote the breach of the overdraft, and that won’t be repeated too often) and lose nobody to agents’ dealings, then Moyesy will have a good chance of breaking into the top three. He has his defence, he has his strikers, all he needs short term is a midfield capable of lasting for ninety minutes without being brushed aside like leaves in Autumn.

The only one of the teams above us to deal us a large league defeat was Arsenal, 4-1 at the Old Lady. Even then, unusually for them, they only did it through up-and-unders and a couple of slips by Phil Jagielka. We ran the rest of them desperately close in every game. In fact we lost a lot of games by a single goal, a bit of a blow to the whingers who once told us we WON too many games 1-0. It’s a safe bet you won’t find the same knobheads willing to reverse the “logic.” I even heard one nincompoop claim Arsenal “…were there for the taking…” when we lost 1-0 at their stadium. You just can’t make these people up.

But, as we all know, every footy club has its contingent of tiny minority crackpots, big mouth know-it-all nutters, paranoid as Mohammed Al Fayed, serial misery-arses with seemingly nothing else in their “lives” except an “ability” to sound like a used car crashing through the gears. You’ll find one in every pub, drunk, boring the pants off everybody unfortunate enough to be in hearing distance. Which is why, for example, great and good Pastor Boenhoffer once said, “I stopped arguing with the nazis when they became too stupid to argue with.” It is sound advice. Ignore them, except to take the piss. There are more important things to do with ones time. Hopefully the club’s fortunes will continue to improve without them.

Next season holds a lot of promise if we can strengthen the team in its playing backbone. That might enable us to push on and make a serious challenge at the very top. If not, we might find it hard to hold our present place. As I said, the game is existential. Last season just finished, next season beckons. But let’s relish the one just gone for the progress it signalled. The challenge now is to keep it going. That will never change.

So get ready for Europe again. You’ve earned it as much as anybody. (12/05/08)