OK, take a deep breath……
I might feel better in the morning, but in truth I feel like the image above.
AFCW 0 Grays 2. That’s Grays who are bottom of the Conference. That’s Grays who have already been relegated, who don’t even know what division they’re in next season and who have won as many games all season as we have this year.
Embarrassed? Actually I’m not, because that’s too mild a word. Humiliated is how I feel right now. This should have been a 3 or 4 goal victory for us, but if anything the opposition were more likely to put a couple more past us.
We are a weak team. We are completely spineless at home. But worse than that, tonight proved we are con merchants – we have conned our own support into believing that we are a top six side. Tonight proved we are at the wrong end of the table.
Tonight, half our own players revealed themselves as con-merchants. They are not capable of playing Conference football next season. If they were, they wouldn’t have been beaten by a side already relegated. I want them to be honest and just admit they want to fuck off, like James Pullen does. If you want out, please, go. Now. Let’s put Rapson and Ryan Jackson and Matt Harmsworth in. No, they might not be so good, but on tonight’s performance they can’t do any worse.
And as for Nathan Elder………
For the first time, Terry Brown himself is under pressure. He has the luxury of seeing this season out, but we can’t afford to fizzle out like we have done this year. I’ve looked at the fixtures since New Years Day : we were awful at Handy. We were awful at Wrexham. We were OK enough for the first ten minutes at FGR. We were apparently awful against Workington. We were lucky at Cambridge and Luton, and we were outclassed at Oxford.
Our first team barely got away with it at Chipstead. Fucking Chipstead. We were poor against Alty, ditto Crawley. Didn’t see Eastbourne, but apparently we just did enough. Barrow was absolutely dreadful, and we weren’t much better against Rushden.
And York and Stevenage handed our arses on a plate.
In fact, only the Mansfield games and Wrexham at KM have been anywhere near good enough. TB has a real problem now – he effectively has one chance to get it right during the summer. We cannot afford the first four months of next season to be like the last four of this, because we will go down. We are relegation material right now.
The loanees haven’t helped at all, nor have the injuries. But our “blips” have become routine, and I’ve got to say, at times tonight I thought I was reliving the worst moments of the Ryman Prem. Dig out your old Football Hurts, and relive the memories of Horsham at KM, of Heybridge away, of some of the other utter shite that was presented to us.
As far as I’m concerned, TB has a very important job this summer. If we go full time, we get rid of half this lot, get some young players from L2 in who want to be there, who are prepared to take their second chance. And keep them there, no fucking about with 14 million loan signings during the summer – it hasn’t worked. And it will never work.
If we remain part time, then get the most experienced lot you can get in. Don’t do it on the cheap, make sure they too give a fuck. Do you think that Danny Kedwell wants to stick around at the moment? No matter how much money our sugar daddies benefactors are greasing his palm with, he must be looking around right now and wondering why the fuck he’s bothering. Because nobody else is.
But if this lot are playing for contracts, they’ve all failed to earn them. Not just for tonight but for half the “performances” we’ve had to endure. Keep this lot together, and we’ll be Grays next season – we certainly won’t finish in a false position like 6th, in fact we’ll be lucky to reach 16th.
We either make radical improvements in the close season or we might as well withdraw from the BSP and go back into the Ryman (which I expect some of our fans would secretly want, even though it would massively damage the club in the process). Forget sentimentality, forget whether the current lot only play because we made mistakes in paying them too much money and are therefore obliged to start them. We live and learn, and now is the time for the club to grow some balls and make some enemies.
Play this side again on Thursday. If they don’t win by at least 3 goals then drop them for the last two games of the season. They’ve done nothing to justify starting. Or finishing. If they moan about being tired, tell them they’ve got Saturday off. If truth be told, I think a lot of them have mentally approached the games like they won’t be here next season.
Is the club in crisis? No, because it’s the end of the season, and we have a fantastic opportunity to do something about it. In fact, collapsing like we have will make identifying our real problems much easier, rather than it being hidden because we happened to win a couple of games.
But it is a club under real pressure, perhaps for the first time in this incarnation’s history. Unlike Eamesgate in the CCL, unlike Darlogate, unlike TB’s first season, we were the big fish in some pretty small ponds, and we were always going to get out of it eventually. Now, we’re just AN Ordinary FC, without the spending power and without the standout kudos that we used to have. This time, there is no guarantee that we will get out of this slump.
Welcome to proper football, AFC Wimbledon. Welcome to when it goes wrong and you have to do something proper about it. Do you know what to do?