It wasn’t pretty…….
By: Jim | May 29th, 2008Few people have commented directly on the contrasting fortunes this season on the last two managers to leave Plymouth Argyle. Both Tony Pulis and Ian Holloway left under controversial circumstances: Pulis in the summer of 2006 after having been to all intents and purposes tapped up by his former employers Stoke City, now under the control of his old friend Peter Coates; Holloway last November after some fairly unsubtle approaches made by Milan Mandaric and an as-yet unresolved spat with Argyle chairman Paul Stapleton. After a season of consolidation for the Potters in 06-07, Pulis led them to second place in this season’s Championship and automatic promotion to the Prem. Holloway’s Leicester ended up, to the delight of Pilgrims everywhere, relegated and the man himself unceremoniously sacked by the chairman who had assiduously courted him (just as soon as Joe Royle had ruled himself out of the running, on the grounds that they simply weren’t a big enough club). Both these sets of circumstances have led to a fair degree of revisionism on the part of Argyle fans. Whilst acknowledging Pulis’s sides, and especially his Argyle side, were never pretty to watch, he is by and large now given credit for having a) kept the club up when relegation under Bobby Williamson looked a nailed on certainty at the end of August; b) cleared out a lot of dead wood; and c) never pretended life as a Pilgrim would be anything other than a struggle. Holloway on the other hand continues to be both mocked and vilified for having, as it were, led the Green Army on, only to chuck them the minute a better-looking bird raised her skirt. I think both these attitudes are deeply flawed, and if anything, Holloway deserves more sympathy than abuse.
First Pulis. I hold my hand up. I don’t like the guy. I don’t like his philosophy. I don’t like his football. I don’t like the way he conducts himself. I don’t like the way he treats other people. I’m doing my best to be as objective as I can, but the honest truth is, some of it is personal. Nonetheless. People point to the fact that he steered Argyle to 14th place, and 56 points, in 05-06, when staying up looked a distant dream even at Christmas. And the stats don’t lie. What further inspection of the stats show, however, is that 2006 was a freak year in the Championship. 50 points is normally regarded as the benchmark for staying up in the CCC; in actual fact, you need an *average of 51 since the inception of the League in this format, and an average of 52 if you leave 2006 out, to stay up. Leicester went down this season with 52, just as an example. In 2006, 42 points (and a better goal difference than -29) would have been enough to secure survival. In other words, even if Williamson had stayed in charge we would almost certainly have stayed up. Stuff it, I’d have fancied my chances that season. Crewe, Millwall and Brighton were three of the poorest teams ever to have played in the second tier and there was almost no chance, in hindsight, of Argyle replacing any one of them in the relegation places.
That didn’t stop Pulis playing some of the most god-forsaken football known to mankind in order to achieve it. Millwall. Brighton. Wednesday. The Millwall home game must be, must surely be the worst game ever to have been shown live – and I was there in the flesh. The Brighton game was if anything worse – so bad that I turned and apologised to the BHA fan sat quietly alongside us in the Lyndhurst. Danny Blanchflower famously said “The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It is nothing of the kind. The game is about glory, it is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom”. Somebody should draw Tony Pulis’s attention to that.
It is certainly true that Pulis got rid of a number of players he deemed surplus to requirements and left us with a major rebuilding job, which remains, IMO, unfinished. He has never yet, however, explained how his son managed to make the bench with such stunning regularity, while Matt Derbyshire (that’s the same Matt Derbyshire who now plays for England U21s, btw) was sent back to Blackburn as being not good enough. Nor has he explained his utter refusal to play *any of our youth players (except, be it noted, his son) even when CCC status was assured. Youth players who, under Holloway flourished and matured into key members of the squad and in at least one case earned a million pound-plus move to the Prem – yet Pulis considered them so far beyond the first team he wrote a long, ill-informed and vicious article in the matchday programme criticising the entire youth set-up and costing the youth team coach his job. Stripping out the deadwood – or unable to spot a prospect if it smacked him round the back of the head? Meanwhile, his constant whinging about how hard it was to attract players down here ultimately became self-fulfilling prophecies. Not living here himself possibly contributed to that.
Holloway by contrast was a breath of fresh air. OK, so he ultimately couldn’t deliver. Dammit, he tried, though. And if the stories are true about what was and what was not promised by way of investment, then he had, I think, a right to feel aggrieved. Compare the quality of players he brought to the club – Ebay, Halmosi, Timar, Easter – with *any others since we’ve been in this division, Buzsaky excepted. He deserves a great deal of credit for selling the club and the area, and for raising much needed capital from the development of Gosling. It’s thanks to Holloway that we are in the strong position we now are – and it will largely be the fault of the Board if that strong position is blown away. He knew that this season was our best chance – the League is immeasurably stronger now Scunny, Leicester and Col U have been replaced by Donny, Forest and Swansea – and our disappointing end to the season represented a collective failure of nerve by the Board. Glenn Whelan was ready to sign for 8 grand a week – and we turned him down. He subsequently took Stoke up. That’s an investment of 500K plus, what, 12 x 8k = 96,000 – 600 grand for 60 million. I’m no gambler, but that looks like 100-1 return to me on significantly less than that. To hear Luggy, and Stapes talk, his demands were out of this world – but we must have paid close to that in the past. What was Hayles on, for example? Whelan would have been a direct replacement for Buzz and moreover a player Sturrock knew. Whoever pulled that deal for the money needs taking out and kicking around the circumference of Central Park.
I’ll put my neck on the line (easy in hindsight) and say, had Ollie had the backing he’d been led to expect from the Board he’d have stayed – and we’d have made the play-offs. He made a disastrous call in November – disastrous for him personally and, I believe, disastrous for us. I sit here, looking at all the gloating Hull fans and I feel like the ex-boyfriend at the wedding. That should have been us. That should have been us.
Category: Team News
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