Oh, what a lovely time to start putting fingers to keyboard again…
Yes, SW19 is back with a mercifully brief update, as quite simply I don’t want to ruin your week ahead.
Two god-awful performances in Burton and Gateshead has soured the mood somewhat over in SW17, and it’s the first proper sticky patch of the season.
We were due to have one at some point, and we have enough credit in the bank for it not to be catastrophic. As long as it doesn’t fester for a month, we’ll be fine.
Although it hasn’t stopped one of our more, ahem, emotionally challenged fans to already start thinking it’s exactly going the same way as the Mark Robinson era.
We are nowhere – and I mean, nowhere – like that this campaign. Teams can and do have bad periods without freefalling like we did back then.
None the less, it has been poor recently. Missing Stevens has played a part in it, ditto the rest of our front line suddenly not knowing where the goal is.
Against Heed, it sounds like we turned up expecting to win, and not just supporters but players too.
What makes that worse is that we must have been the most notable scalp of the weekend. True, Brackley beat Notts County on pens, and deservedly so, but we’re a L1 side who lost to a Conference one.
That hurts.
Yet it manages not to be a surprise either. Before Saturday, people were a bit over-confident, too busy talking about who we’d get in the second round etc.
If you’ve watched us for any period of time, you’ll know we’ve had some stinkers in the FAC as well as the moments everyone brings up.
This past half-decade alone, we’ve suffered Boreham Wood, Daggers, Chesterfield and now Gateshead.
That very weird night at KM when we lost to Sutton, where we lost out on playing Leeds, wasn’t so long ago either.
And lest we forget Curzon Ashton, a game I’m still convinced we lost even though we actually won that day.
So we’ve really been quite shit in the FA Cup for a good while. It doesn’t get any easier to deal with, but perhaps Saturday wasn’t quite the shock it should be.
No, I don’t know why we’re so shite in it. We do seem to have a long-standing attitude problem against teams in lower divisions, especially non-league ones.
While cupsets are part of the allure of the FAC, and there’s always the danger of being on the wrong end of one, it’s happened too often recently.
Somebody over the weekend suggested we can’t handle being favourites, and I think there’s some truth in that.
It’s the flip side of the whole “Wimbledon spirit” thing, namely when we’re the top dogs it’s almost like we don’t know what to do.
We’ve got another season to learn.
Needless to say, it will suck when the second round draw is made tonight and we’re not in it, even though this stage of the competition is the one hardly anyone pays attention to.
In some way, it’s easier to lose in the first round, because the third round is still as far away as ever at that point so you don’t really think about it.
Losing in the second round is more hurtful, because you really were that one step from playing Wrexham away a massive draw.
Daggers last year was an absolute killer for that, and you’d handle it a bit easier if it was against sides in your own division.
Perhaps the most telling sign of modern football is that people were talking about the income we’ve now dipped out on.
Them’s the breaks, but it appears the club now does put cup run money as part of its budgeting strategy.
Under Erik Samuelson’s tenure, we avoided that, and I think that was a much better approach to it.
Granted, we need all the money we can get, but if we’re banking (boom fucking tisch) on what happens on the field then it’s a very risky strategy.
Not just because the players get a lot of the bonus money anyway, as they should – and I hope they’re really hurting this morning – but because you just can’t rely on something with so many variables.
It sounds like we’ve missed out on close to £48k in prize money, and that would have helped a bit (though not quite as much these days as it used to).
It’s not too dis-similar to relying on youngsters from the Academy coming through then selling them on for a profit.
The money is good when you get it, but “when you get it” is not guaranteed one bit. Yet we’ve acted too much in the past as though it is.
We’ve had some dry spells on those who have come through the ranks, and it shows what happens when you put too much reliance on it.
That and cup runs should only ever be a bonus – and not the bedrock for your financial strategy.
We may end up needing to sell players in January now, if we weren’t going to already, but that’s down to us and nobody else.
Although after the last couple of weekends – will anyone actually want any of them?
Anyway, we’ve got Peterborough away on Saturday, and there’s even a possibility your editor might be there.
Though after recent performances, I’m not sure if that’s going to be a good thing…