City burst Blackpool’s bubble. Is that it?

 

At two nil I’d more or less given up on the season. Who though, apart from the most misty eyed optimist, fantasist more like, or maybe one of our newer fans, brought up on success all the way, would deny that this has been a successful season?

Our board of directors had taken the long term view and slashed the budget in preparation for what? A season of unremitting hardship. The aim, surely, was to try to ensure there was a team to support next season.

It’s tempting to say Michael Appleton had other ideas, I don’t know what ideas he had but somehow he fashioned a team, from the slim pickings he’d been given, which for a long time looked as if it would finish in the top two in league one and deliver for his employers and us, the lifeblood of the club, the fans the promised land of the Championship. A destination so distant that only old codgers like me can remember what it is like to operate at that level.

So then, it’s over, for another season. Or is it? Michael Appleton certainly does have other ideas, maybe you are not as pessimistic as me but somehow, from the wreckage of yet another defeat something began to stir, there’s life in the old dog yet. Appleton said it would be like a pre season game and so it was as the manager, what did he do, shuffled the pack seems too weak for whatever it was. Like some mad professor he pounded the computer keyboard, applied the electrodes, it lives!  It lives! I tweeted, I’d settle for a goal. A GOAL. Several others replied, you got what you wanted. Alright, let’s have another. We got it.

As we know the winner didn’t come, that was maybe too much to hope for but it wasn’t a loss. That I would suggest really would signal the end, for now but City gained another point. It’s a terrible cliché I know but we go on. The walking wounded at least can jog a bit now, every day that goes by and were still in it gives us a bit of hope that we can hang on in there, like Mister Micawber (look him up) hoping that something will turn up.

I don’t think we can underestimate the devastation that this dreadful pandemic has wrought. Players recover from covid and rejoin the team. Are they the same player they were? Lewis Montsma certainly isn’t. Harry Anderson?

City’s season depended on more or less all the squad remaining fit and available. Had that happened, we’d be laughing. If we’d been in the stadium would our home form be as poor? Who knows?

What we do know is the manager hasn’t given up. The players haven’t given up. We know, from bitter experience, there’s little point in getting into the playoffs on a poor run of form. I wouldn’t like to be the one to explain that to the big Apple though.