Marking Time!

As a Sky Blue supporter for many long years, I have learned to be patient, but and I emphasis the word 'but', even I have only so much patience. We had almost 5 years of Kenny Shiels and all we had to show for it was, 'zilch', or 'sweet F.A.'. Knocked out in semi-finals do just not cut the mustard in my book, I am not only looking for success, I'm looking for sustained success. Our current manager Tommy Wright has been in the job 3 years now and I don't think we are in any better shape than we were under Kenny Shiels. Some people say we are in fact worse off, as at least under Kenny, we played a bit of football. Tommy would probably claim he is the 'victim' of his own success, as we reached the final of the County Antrim Shield in his first season and finished well up the league table. Since then we have not progressed and are in fact in my opinion, just 'marking time'. We seem unable to beat or get results on a consistent basis over the top 3 clubs in the league, in 8 meetings against them this season, we have won one, against Glentoran a great result, but lost the other seven. To make matters worse we still suffer from the 'old' Kenny Shiels malaise, we struggle against the lesser teams, Larne and Limavady have both beaten us, while our draws against Donegal Celtic and Institute last week were indications of just how poor we are. If we hadn't had our 12 game unbeaten run from mid October07 to mid January 08, when let's face it we rode our 'luck' on many occasions, we would probably now be in the relegation dog fight. The Irish cup has always had a 'magical' appeal to Sky Blue fans, but we were let down once again this season as we failed to beat Newry, despite outplaying them both home and away. Stuarty King missed 3 glorious chances in the first game at Newry and got caught in possession for their equaliser. This in itself was bad enough, but why our manager failed to bring on ace penalty kick taker Davitt Walsh in the replay, with penalty kicks looming, I'll never know! Surely we can gather together enough defenders to give us a reasonable chance in knock-out competitions. I doubt very much that we will ever have the consistency to win a league title and definitely not if we have to play 38 games as is rumoured for the new league next season. The best scenario for us is a good solid defence, a hard uncompromising midfield and two speedy strikers to grab any opportunities that come along. Much more of this level of 'dross' that we have been subjected to lately and our supporters will dwindle away and that, as they say, 'will be that'. Have a good close season and I'll return hopefully suitably refreshed in August and I sincerely hope it won't be too long before we bring home some trophy or other, fcuk, it has been a long wait!