City Fans: Confused

April 3, 2009 in City, General Football Posts
Tags: Barry Conlon, Stuart McCall, Substitutions, Tactics

Reading the letters in the T&A sports section yesterday, I spotted a couple that criticised Stuart McCall for not playing a settled team every week. One of the letter writers went on to call on the manager to try using the players currently on the bench or in the reserves. He seemed not to realise that if McCall took his advice on starting with the players currently out of the first eleven he would have to ignore his advice about keeping a settled line-up. The advice McCall gets in the letters pages of the T&A or in online forums is on the whole muddled, contradictory and, frankly, worthless. This is a problem not just with City fans, but with football fans everywhere.

When our team loses, we feel powerless to do anything about it (probably because we are). This feeling of powerlessness seems to lead us to make wild, sometimes contradictory suggestions – on a Saturday afternoon you can often hear shouts from the crowd to “do something McCall”, but they rarely seem to specify what should be done (probably because they don’t know what should be done). We are fans, not experts and we make this obvious with our suggested tactical changes and team selections. For one thing, we don’t (most of us) watch City train and we are therefore unaware not just of which players are training well and looking confident, but also of any niggling injuries that players may be carrying. For another, we just don’t have the tactical nous. Which of us has been on the UEFA coaching courses? How many of us have got our ‘B’ license? How many of us have played the game at professional level? Very few of the 11-12,000 fans there week after week, I reckon.

Still, when Saturday comes and we start to struggle at some point (this is inevitable – games tend to ebb and flow whichever division you are in), we will all turn into experts and start opining that player X should come on for player Y or that we should go 4-3-3. My favourite substitution this season was that of Barry Conlon for Michael Boulding against Luton Town (BBC report). As I wrote* several days later, Conlon was booed by a small but significant minority and one fan shouted “that’s shit McCall! Shit!” – try and remember who scored our equaliser that day. That’s right – Barry the Bastard, Bazinho, Super Barry Conlon (or whatever you want to call him). Those geniuses who booed that substitution and shouted abuse at McCall were dead wrong, as it turned out. But they won’t remember their mistakes – they’ll remember only those errors that others are perceived to have made.

* That post is here.