Only Success!

At last United manager Tommy Wright has uttered the ‘dreaded’ words, he has a long term plan for the team. Just this week there he is ‘spouting’ in the local press, about how young the team is and how three or four years down the line we’ll be the most feared team in the country. Well Tommy I have news for you, we’ve heard it all before, your predecessor Kenny Shiels had a five year plan and after five years in Kenny’s charge, we were a mediocre team, a team who couldn’t even beat one senior team in order to get to the Irish cup final. Then you took over and after a fairly good first half of the season last year, fourth in the league table and in the final of the County Antrim Shield, I’m afraid it was all downhill. This season so far has been to say the least a blooming disaster, first we failed to qualify for the C.I.S. cup, but no surprise there, we rarely do. Then we were knocked out in the first round of the Shield and are now going backwards in the league. We had a tough start to the league admittedly, playing the four top sides, Linfield, Glentoran, Cliftonville and Portadown, in our first 6 games. From these four games we gleaned one miserly point, in a match where we showed considerable poise and determination. Alas of course one swallow doesn’t make a summer, we had only flattered to deceive and it was back to ‘dross’ for most of the remaining games. We did have a chance to redeem our selves as our last 5 games in the first half of the league were against what on paper should be inferior teams. At the time of my writing this column we have gleaned only 7 miserable points from these games (we have still one to play away to Newry on Saturday), we allowed the worst team in the league to score 3 goals past us and then to cap it all threw in the towel against the Coleraine Scum on Boxing Day. Tommy, as far as I’m personally concerned, you can take your four year plan and put it where the ‘sun don’t shine’. What I, a ‘longsuffering dyed in the wool’ Sky Blue fan want is at worst, qualification for next years Inter Toto cup, the Setanta cup is realistically beyond us for another year, so somehow you’ve got to get us into fifth place in the league which should get us into the Inter Toto cup. Do that and you may live to see your big plans come to fruition, anything else, will be looked upon as failure and I think you know where that will take you!