Little Joy!

A big crowd, well relatively big, officially set at 1800 I think, just enough to fill one stand. Gone are the days when a visit from the league leaders (Linfield), would have filled the away stand and more standing on the terrace in front of it. Its the dwindling crowds that'll be the death knell for senior football if the fans stopped coming regularly. I can see it in the United travelling support, where we used to have about 250 or 300 dedicated fans at most away matches, now in fact we struggle to get 150 fans. I think personally its the brand of football we are being served up, this win at all costs policy leaves a bad taste in the mouth, there's very little excitement, in fact it seems that managers and coaches don't want any excitement.

Take United for example, our tactics seem to entail us letting the other team dictate the pace of the game and hitting them on the counter-attack. We went on a ten match unbeaten run on the strength of these tactics and subjected ourselves to at least 2 games, Scum and Welders, where were second best, under pressure for most of the game and how we got a result, a win and a draw, I'll never know. In truth we didn't deserve the results we got, but that's football as they say. Fans are always saying if the team is winning, the crowds will come, I know this to be a fallacy, I only have to look at our own situation, we are in fact as this moment in time just ahead of  the average. Our stats show we have played 33 games in total, we have won 16 of them, drawn 4 and lost 13, I make that a winning season so far.

But has this record prompted any more supporters to attend games at the Showgrounds? I honestly don't see any evidence of this, in fact I think the opposite is true. I think we play boring football, its all about getting results but I have to admit we are doing that very nicely and I will always be there, but its not entertaining. Maybe we can't be entertaining, we haven't got the resources that other teams have and we need to get a high finish in the league in order to generate more cash and maybe then Glenn will  make us into an entertaining team. A few years ago sheep farmers were claiming subsidies from the EEC for sheep they didn't own. I think Irish league clubs have taken a leaf out of their book and are claiming to have more fans in their grounds than they actually have, this could be classed as creative accounting.

I don't know whether massaging these figures, sometimes by as much as 25%, allows clubs to have a bigger budget and therefore more cash to spend on players, but where this money is actually coming from is beyond me. That in itself is not the problem as I see it, but massing the figures gives a false impression on the state of the game here, which is in crisis and needs to be fixed sooner rather than later. Enough gloom and doom for one week at least, I was privileged to have lunch on Saturday with two United legends of the sixties, my good friend Norman Clarke (The Ballymena Boy) and John 'Smudger' Smith. They accompanied me to the match but like me, they got little joy as the match unfolded. Alas Smudger had to go early (a family engagement) and didn't witness our fightback, fruitless, as it turned out. But Sammy Patterson and me were enthralled hearing the two legends recall  games they played in together in the early sixties, over lunch in the Thatch Inn in Broughshane.

They sat with us in Block A of the Slemish stand and Norman recalled that Ballymena rugby club used to play at the Showgrounds before moving to Eaton Park, a fact that I was unaware of. In fact they used to play where the 4g pitch is located now and football fans would come down at the interval and watch the idiot game, a 'crowd of gulpins mugging each other' is the best description I have heard in relation to rugby. We were parked behind the Slemish Stand and although he was going after the match to the boardroom, Norman insisted on leaving us to our car, before shaking hands and telling me to stay in touch. Its a much hackneyed saying, but I'll say it anyway, Norman is a 'true gentleman' and I feel I'm privileged to know him and more than that, he's Sky Blue through and through!