blades blog The aromancer's naked truth will out

Posted: December 18th 2008
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There comes a point in every season when naked ambition propositions fully-clothed reality at the football office Christmas party and gets slapped across the chops – a bit like David Van Day in the Jungle.

Self-deluded naked ambition is forced into realising that all is not well, that its expanding girth and follicley-challenged pate are signs that gift-wrapped promotion will once again be missing from this year’s football Christmas stocking. That first flush of youth – a 100% home record and hatful of pre-season signings – last seen in the halcyon days of summer, has met its middle-aged match in the festive season. The traditional boxing day fixture, which should have been a yuletide celebration – all cigars and hip flasks – turns out to be a nightmare neighbour’s bash full of agadoo and advacat. (Does anyone still drink Snowballs? And whatever happened to those little bottles of Cherry B and Pony?)

Oh stoppit I hear you shout, stop moaning. You’re lurking on the edge of the play-off places, your crowds are healthy, that nipper Kyle Naughton looks like a future England star and you strangely own clubs in several other countries from which you seem to gain no discernible benefit. You should be chuffed to mintballs going into the Christmas holidays in such a healthy position, my lad, you say.

Humbug! I retort.

So far we’ve garnered enough points to be in what might laughingly be called The Leadership Pack. We’re all bravado, pretending that we’re the Lord God Almighty in charge of everything we survey, like it’s where we rightfully belong. But we’ve succumbed at the Lane to the likes of our pack contemporaries Reading, Wolves and Burnley. And worst of all defeat to the Wendies is, as always, as Paul Weller quite rightly penned, The Bitterest Pill. So what does all that boil down to? What does the liquid of our season so far reduce down to? It tastes ‘good but not quite good enough’. It says well done boys, that Kaizen continuous improvement thing you’re doing would knock the socks off the Toyota conveyor belt, but it’s not going to get you into the Premiership next season.

I’ve watched the Blades long enough to know the tell-tale signs of Championship promotion credentials. In fact, I know the signs so well I can smell them better than a sniffer dog in Chris Lewis’s hand luggage . . . allegedly, and believe me, the signs are as rare as a hot Irish pork sausage sarnie at Beautiful Downtown Bramall Lane at the moment.

When it’s going to happen you can sense promotion, you can almost feel and touch it but you can definitely smell it. Promotion is the whiff of a sweet-scented woman in a festering fug of terrace booze, stale breath and suppressed testosterone. It’s the collier’s first gulp of fresh clean air when the cage doors open at the pithead and, in your own mind, it’s the acknowledgement of your club’s birthright. Those who’ve never had it ache for it and those who’ve experienced its mind altering qualities, at whatever age, however long ago, will sell any of their extended family to get it again.

So at this time of the season we all play I-Spy Promotion (did you realise by now I’m a child of the Seventies?), ticking off the tell-tale signs of impending success, always presuming of course, your team is in any fit state to launch a push.

There truly are things you can look out for. I know because I’ve seen it before. Don’t forget I’ve risen from the old Div 4 to regain credibility. I’ve been up and down more times than petrol prices.

You know the kind of thing I mean; the players’ spirit; the squad’s camaraderie, the sweeping aside of lower Championship opposition destined for the drop; the successful cup run including one or two Prem scalps and demolition of lower league opposition, the sell-out crowds swelled by the casual occasionals who’ve caught a faint whiff of The Big Time; the lucky last-minute, never-say-die goals securing a point or three; the days you play badly and still relentlessly rack up the points; the January recruitment of the last pieces of the jigsaw and the wholesale asset-stripping of the best strikers from clubs lower in your division. Most of all there’s a murmur among the fans, a heady mix of expectation coupled with blind passion. Chants are sung relentlessly because voices inspire and the fans want to turn their audibility into some sort of physical strength – it’s a way of telling the players that we may be 1-0 down with half an hour to go but we’ll get a win even if it takes us to 90+4 to achieve it.

I can even spot it in other teams. But this season I can’t tick all the boxes, I can’t see these signs, I know it’s not all happening correctly, it all fits together but the overall picture’s not right and I’m having a mardy. I truly believe we’re promotion pretenders and not the real deal this year. I may be wrong and have a visage des ouefs a la season’s end, but I think not.

But why so smug a delivery of your argument, I hear you annoyingly interrupt again. Why sit in the corner self-harming when in actual fact you’re realistically optimistic of a play-off place in the great Championship Lottery, which is actually a thinly-veiled way of milking the footy cashcow and yet is still frustratingly compulsive.

Well, I reply, beginning to sound like a munificent grandparent doling out the down-memory-lane stories and the Worther’s Originals, come and sit on my lap and I’ll tell you about the campaign of 2003 . . .(cue flashback music and wobbly fade out . . .)

“ . . .I’d missed a few vital games over the Christmas period for a variety of reasons we really shouldn’t delve too deeply in during a football blog. When I returned to the fray it was to see us take on the old enemy at the Lane, a midweek fixture, floodlights bright, a packed house and we ran them over, reversed and went back to finish the job. Players high-fived and hugged when they were subbed, Warnock howled from the touchlines like a screaming banshee, players supported each other and constantly saluted the crowd. Promotion couldn’t have been more obvious if it had taken all its clothes off, streaked across the pitch, knocked a copper’s helmet off and unfurled a 20mx50m banner saying “Hello, I’m promotion!” Things got even better that season, we flirted with silverware, we reached the semi-final of the Worthington and FA Cups and then we fought an epic play-off battle against Forest in an atmosphere reminiscent of the heady 70s. Then we fell meekly before the might of the West Midlands Wanderers missing out on promotion by losing at the Millennium Stadium and the rest, as they say . . .”

Though it didn’t actually happen that year I smelt promotion all that glorious season and was able to recognise its pungent and seducing aroma two years later when it actually happened. So let me fast forward to 2006 . . .

“Apart from a brief spell in the spring we were in the top two all season long. Even the match-day announcer sounded like he knew it was going to happen, it was just a case of keeping our nerves. And you know what else happened – Warnock cynically gave up on both the Carling and FA Cups, learning a bitter lesson from the falling-at-the-last-hurdle campaign of 2003, which I’ve just told you about if you were listening. In 2006 we exited both cups in round 3, throwing away a possible FA Cup run by losing at home to Colchester in January, despite having lost only once at home that season before that defeat. If that isn’t the nasal-pleasing vapour of promotion then tell me what is. It was a sure sign that all the focus was on one thing and it worked . . .”

So fellow supporters you must look hard at your fat-faced reflection in the Chrissy tree baubles around this time and ask of yourself the hardest question of all – can I really smell it this year? Can I really see those tell-tale signs that my team is destined for great things? And remember to give a truthful answer because, like the school teachers are fond of saying, there’s only one person you’re really fooling.

Of course if I’m wrong, and I’m happy to be reminded of this blog at the end of the season, then my point is even more significant because I won’t give a damn because we’ve been promoted. But, and this is a much more serious consideration, if, by some fluke we’ve sneaked through the closing door of the Premiership party palace by claiming we know that fat bloke Dave at the kitchen door, then we’ll have done so falsely and without the credentials to keep us there and we come hurtling back down faster than you can say Roy Keane.

Whatever your faith, wherever you get your kicks, have a mad but loving Christmas and let’s hope 2009 brings your team everything it deserves, and for some of us that means staying right where we are.