bradley headstone
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Posted: April 3rd 2008
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I’ll be honest with you; the Premier League means little to me. I know, I know, the greatest league in the world it may be but every year of its existence finds me paying less attention.
It wasn’t always like this, my chosen team are one of the b******s that sold football’s soul, rolled over and let the then ‘big’ clubs, a slightly different from today’s ‘big four’, tickle our bellies.
I won’t retread the whys and wherefores of who did what to whom and for what motive. For the detail I’d recommend to anybody who considers themselves interested in Football, David Conn’s The Beautiful Game.
My world is (currently) the Championship, sorry the Coca-Cola Championship as we never call it. A largely irrelevant collection of twenty four clubs who despite being not much better than the twenty four below them have to engineer a situation where three of them end up in the promised land of the Premier League.
Every season three teams rejoin the Championship from the Premier League; this is usually a seamless process, as they tend to be the teams that went up the year before.
Currently Derby County are locked in a desperate struggle not to be automatic favourites for the drop next season in the Championship. Their run of results is now beyond the realms of football gallows humour. The thousands who trudge to the unfortunately named Pride Park are trapped in some kind of morbid self-harming obsession. The concept of ‘having fun in our year in the Prem’ utterly blown.
Nobody would be surprised to see Sunderland or Birmingham, who went up with Derby, disappear too! It’s just that watching the Derby car crash feeds into our worst footballing nightmares.
The Championship is insidious; it encourages average football teams to believe that progress is being made. The phrase ‘anyone can beat anyone’ is trotted out as if it’s some kind of recommendation, but all it does is encourage debt, short termism and inflated expectation.
I visited Pride Park at the end of last season, early April. Derby was top of a tight group of four or five clubs fighting for the automatic promotion places. My team were struggling; an abject season had got to the point where you were relying on the paucity of others to stay in the league. In all expectation this was a home banker.
I expected to see a confident team, well organised and intent on taking apart their hapless opponents. I wasn’t disappointed, the struggling away team having entered the lottery of the Byzantine loan system for the thirty fifth time that season had found a player who could stand in the middle of the park, control the ball and pass to a team mate…not earth shattering I’ll agree, but it was a long time since I’d seen it.
Derby too by the look of it, twenty minutes in a goal up, half an hour a perfectly good goal ruled out. Twenty thousand Derby fans were stony-faced and silent.
So it went on, Derby huffed and puffed, eventually blundering an equaliser in the final moments. I left delirious, disappointed by the scarcely deserved equaliser but buoyed by the hope that suddenly we had a team who could eek out points, salvation seemed attainable again.
I then began the silent anonymous walk through the home fans to my car. This is when you find out how blinded by hope and expectation a set of fans is. You are tolerant of the one-eyed tendencies of the football fan. Losing ground in a tight finish is disappointing, but that night I was genuinely shocked to hear about a game I’d obviously missed. Deluded beyond reason I feared for Derby should they find a way up.
Derby were a very limited team, it’s remarkable that the meagre amount they spent before the start of this season made them a bit worse. The day following my trip to Pride Park I met a Derby fan that’d seen the game. He had enough about him to admit they’d been poor, but felt that they generally played like that and got results. We agreed that many millions would be needed if Derby were to be in touch by Christmas. They didn’t spend enough and they were gone by the turn of the year.
There is the Championship encapsulated, you don’t have to be very good or consistent or particularly well run to achieve success. Can anyone imagine Bristol City, Hull, Plymouth or Burnley surviving in the rarefied atmosphere of the Emirates, Old Trafford or even Villa Park? Even Watford and Charlton with their recent experience of the Premiership seem lightweight. Stoke you’d think would have a chance, their policy of building an identikit jackbooted legion of six foot plus, shaven headed hoofers might surprise the delicate haircuts in the upper echelons…they’d only get two years though.
Only West Brom, for all their inconsistency, appear to have the depth of squad, quality of football and ability to pick up the right kind of player that might establish them at a higher level. But as I write they are out of the top two, enjoying a distracting cup run and dropping points to teams of indeterminate quality.
The complicated array of parachute payments makes the yo-yo between the Premier League and the Championship a financially appealing model. But it’s no way to exist as a Football Club. Equally as flawed is Paul Jewell’s preparing Derby for life next season. Losing is a habit and theirs appears terminal.
Frankly I don’t believe that the Championship is currently capable of producing a competitive Premier League team, not one without multi-billionaire backing anyway. Taken in isolation it’s unpredictable, occasionally very entertaining and the repository of some very good British players. As a stepping-stone to the vast riches above, it appears in that great New Labour phrase, Not Fit for Purpose!
Such is the Football administrators’ need for reform and ‘tinker’, I fully expect the Championship to be abolished soon, League One sending three middling teams for a fruitless spell in the Premier League.